As protests continue across the United States and around the world in response to systemic racism in policing, activists and political leaders seek out ways to affect permanent change.
Clashes between police and protesters escalated this week across the United States, as public outrage continued over police brutality and systemic racism.
Apple released a new operating system on Wednesday, iOS 13.5, which makes adjustments meant to ease use during the current pandemic — facilitating face ID unlocking while wearing a mask and fixing glitches on Facetime. It also enables support for Exposure Notification, also known as digital contact tracing, which if adopted would alert users to exposure to positive Covid-19 cases without allowing for government-controlled location and data tracking.
On Thursday, China announced it was preparing to enact a controversial national security law for Hong Kong, bypassing the territory’s own legislative process. The announcement was made ahead of the country’s annual National People's Congress meeting, which is set to start on Friday.
Amnon Ortoll-Bloch is a doctoral candidate in chemistry and chemical biology from Colima City, Colima, Mexico. After earning his bachelor’s degree at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, Mexico, he chose to pursue further study at Cornell due to its faculty, research opportunities, and collaborative and supportive nature.
What is your area of research and why is it important?
The COVID-19 virus arrived in Latin America later than Europe and the United States, but it is currently spreading across the region, with peaks expected to come later in May. Brazil, the continent’s most populous country, has the largest numbers of cases so far. This week, the country’s Senate is expected to vote on an economic package for states and cities to compensate for economic losses.
Festival 24, the semiannual student-run theater festival from the Cornell University Department of Performing and Media Arts, is launching online under a new title, Festival 24.0. The Festival, which is normally held at the beginning of each semester, will happen on Saturday, May 9, at 8:00 p.m. EST via Zoom to provide a performance opportunity for students while in-person theater events are suspended.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held arguments by phone on Tuesday in a case pitting the Trump administration against the House of Representatives over the latter’s power to enforce a subpoena for former White House Counsel Donald McGahn’s testimony.
Faced with a devastating and unresolved pandemic, governments worldwide are grappling with how to begin re-opening their economies, while protecting the health of their citizens. And many are looking to the smartphones in our pockets as a contact tracing tool to keep tabs on the coronavirus and limit its spread.
On Monday, President Trump said in a tweet that he would sign an executive order temporarily suspending immigration to the United States in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. The executive order is anticipated to include halting new green cards and work visas.
European Union leaders are meeting on Thursday to discuss how to power the bloc’s economic recovery and help its hardest-hit members weather the current crisis. On the agenda are various proposals to raise a recovery fund, including the option of joint ‘coronabonds’ as well as a stimulus package to address the economic damage caused by the pandemic.
Aditi Sahasrabuddhe is a doctoral student in government with a focus on international relations from Goa, India. After earning her bachelor’s degree at Edinburgh University and master’s degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science, she chose to attend Cornell due to the ability to work with faculty across fields, friendliness of those in the field of government, and available resources.
In Monday’s coronavirus press briefing, President Trump said that he has “total authority” to reopen the economy, in contrast to plans being made by governors and local officials across the country to lift restrictions.
With the coronavirus pandemic challenging the wellbeing of people and countries around the world, global financial institutions face the tremendous task of coordinating economic policies and offering relief for the most vulnerable countries. Such effort will be on display this week, as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank hold their annual spring meetings.
On Monday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was moved into an intensive care unit after his coronavirus symptoms worsened. Johnson, who secured his premiership last December with a landslide victory for the Conservative Party, ran on a populist and pro-Brexit platform. As coronavirus started to spread in the country, Johnson initially opposed lockdown-type measures suggesting that a speedy spread of the virus would create “herd immunity.”
Earlier this week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared a state of emergency in major cities across the country in an effort to limit the spread of COVID-19. Abe asked people to refrain from going outside in Tokyo and six other prefectures worst hit by coronavirus.
On April 8, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announced that he is ending his presidential campaign, all but ensuring that former Vice President Joe Biden will face President Donald Trump in November.
As part of the nation’s record $2 trillion relief bill, Congress has set aside $500 million for the CDC to develop a “public health surveillance and data collection system” meant to track the spread of coronavirus. While it’s not clear what this system will look like or how it will function, it puts Americans on a historic path towards giving up certain privacies for the benefit of public health.
Victoria Pihl Sorensen is a doctoral student in performing and media arts with a concentration on media and feminist studies. After earning her bachelor’s degree from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and her master’s degree from the City University of New York Graduate Center, she chose to pursue a doctoral degree at Cornell due to its faculty and welcoming community.
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has awarded the 2020 Karl Taylor Compton Medal for Leadership in Physics to Paul Ginsparg, professor of physics and information science and founder of arXiv. The medal and $10,000 prize is presented by AIP every four years to “highly distinguished physicists who have made outstanding contributions through exceptional statesmanship in physics.”
Eun-Ah Kim, professor of physics, has received a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to create new data science approaches to meet the data-driven challenges of strongly correlated quantum matter (SCQM), Cornell Research reports. This project, undertaken with Kilian Q.
In a review of thousands of peer-reviewed studies, the What We Know Project (WWKP), an initiative of Cornell University’s Center for the Study of Inequality, has found a strong link between anti-LGBT discrimination and harms to the health and well-being of LGBT people.
How do you trick a disciplined opponent with state-of-the-art equipment into entering a killing field? How do you turn an enemy’s strengths into his weaknesses? How do you get inside an enemy’s head?
The rich cultural history of Korea – including powerful percussion and traditional dance – will be featured at the Korean Language Program’s (KLP) 30th anniversary celebration on Friday, Sept. 20, at 6:30 pm. The event will also feature Korean foods, and will conclude with musical performances by Shimtah, E.Motion, LOKO, and Hanchum. The celebration, which will take place in the Rhodes-Rawling Auditorium in Klarman Hall, is free and all are welcome.
Sex workers play a key role in mobilizing social activism in Asia, as Lily Wong will discuss in her lecture on Sept. 10, “Sex Work, Movement Politics, and Affect Labor in the Sinophone World.” Wong will also discuss LGBT activism in Taiwan and cultural belonging in the Sinophone world. The lecture will draw on Wong’s book, Transpacific Attachments, and the entwined histories of Taiwan’s queer activism, sex-work rights movement, and labor justice movements.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed magnesium and iron gas streaming from a strange, football-shaped world outside our solar system known as WASP-121b. The Hubble observations represent the first time that so-called "heavy metals"—elements heavier than hydrogen and helium—have been spotted escaping from a hot Jupiter, a large, gaseous exoplanet very close to it star.
A common approach to problem-solving is to split a problem into smaller sub-problems, solve each of the smaller problems, and assemble the answers into a solution to the original problem. This last step is often very difficult, as there are multiple ways of gluing the pieces of the solution together. The mathematical area of K-theory studies the different ways of putting such solutions back together, as well as the relations behind differently-assembled pieces.
Cornell Performing and Media Arts PhD candidate Caitlin Kane directs performances of “SPILL” April 26–May 4 in the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts’ Flex Theatre.
Cornell Cinema welcomes back the electronic/ambient musical group Coupler to perform their new score for Yasujiro Ozu’s "Dragnet Girl "(1933) on April 10 at 7:30 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. The screening will be introduced by Andrew Campana, who will be joining the Department of Asian Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences in the Fall to teach courses on Japanese cinema and popular culture.
Electronegativity is one of the most well-known models for explaining why chemical reactions occur. Used daily by chemists and materials researchers all over the world, the theory of electronegativity is used to describe how strongly different atoms attract electrons. In a new paper, researchers have redefined the concept with a more comprehensive electronegativity scale.
Vikram Gadagkar, MS ‘ 10, PhD ‘13, has received the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award from the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), along with Harvard postdoctoral fellow Johannes Kohl. Gadagkar is a postdoctoral fellow in Assistant Professor Jesse Goldberg's lab in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior.
Cornell's Jewish Studies Program, the Center for Jewish History and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research present "Monish: A Musical Tale of Talmud and Temptation," set to rhyming English verse.
Building on the strong tradition of intellectual history in Cornell’s Japanese studies, the East Asia Program (EAP) is developing a new initiative on contemporary Japanese thought led by Pedro Erber, associate professor of Romance studies and new director of EAP. The initiative intends to return attention to the place of Japan in our contemporary world.
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University has partnered with Tompkins County Public Library (TCPL) to provide TCPL card-holders access to America’s Voice Project, a database of polling research dating back to the 1930s
When White House reporter April Ryan openly asked President Trump about his racism in 2017, she abruptly became the story. Ryan will discuss her experiences in the White House and her new book, “Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House,” at the Daniel W. Kops Freedom of the Press Lecture on Thurs., Sept. 20.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gregory Pardlo kicks off the Fall 2018 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series, sponsored by Cornell’s Creative Writing Program.
“The Missing Chapter,” by Katie Marks & Aoise Stratford, visiting assistant professor of performing and media arts, is The Cherry Art’s new, immersive headphone walking play based on Ithaca's silent film past.
The baroque organ was an artifact of global culture produced by international networks of artists, artisans, traders, and adventurers. “The Organ in the Global Baroque” conference and concert festival will celebrate these organs Sept. 6-8 on the Cornell campus.
A celebration of the life and legacy of civil rights icon Dorothy Cotton will be held Aug. 11 from 2 to 4:30 p.m. in Bailey Hall on the Cornell campus. The event is free and open to the public, but tickets are required.
Glenn C. Altschuler, Dean of Cornell University’s School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions and the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences, presents, "The Election of 2018: What's at Stake and What to Look For" at Call Auditorium in Kennedy Hall on Wednesday, July 25 at 7 p.m. Free and open to the public, the lecture is part of the summer events series sponsored by Cornell’s School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions.
The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies has selected new leaders for its South Asian, East Asian, Latin American, and peace and conflict studies programs, as well as in its international relations minor.
Photosynthesis is one of the most crucial life processes on Earth. It’s how plants get their food, using energy from sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide from the air into sugars. But scientists have long believed that more than 30 percent of the energy produced during photosynthesis is wasted in a process called photorespiration.
The scholarships created early last year as part of the recently completed endowed scholarship challenge are already benefiting several students. For two of them, in particular, the scholarships came at crucial times.
On May 12th, The Psychology Department hosted its first Cornell Undergraduate Psychology (CUP) Conference at the Cornell Botanic Gardens. The conference brought together undergraduates from a multitude of backgrounds to showcase the research they’ve been conducting on psychological and brain science.
