Walk by a bakery, and you’ll smell fresh-baked bread. But would you smell it, if you’d never learned what bread was? “Not necessarily,” says Thomas A. Cleland, associate professor of psychology.
“The very concept of having odors that you recognize and identify, even being able to pick them out of the messy olfactory world out there, absolutely depends on learning,” says Cleland in a Cornell Research story. “I argue that learning is fundamental to even being able to smell at all.”
Adam T. Smith/Provided
Open through Dec. 31, 'Sacred Ground' highlights findings from a four-year archaeological excavation of Ithaca’s St. James A.M.E. Zion Church conducted by Cornell faculty, students and Ithaca school children from 2021–2024.
LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)
An artist's conception of a precessing binary black hole. The black holes, which will ultimately spiral together into one larger black hole, are shown here orbiting one another in a plane. The black holes are spinning in a non-aligned fashion, which means they are tilted relative to the overall orbital motion of the pair. This causes the orbit to precess like a top spinning along a tilted axis.
