News

Guyana and a global struggle for Black solidarity

Historian Russell Rickford tells how a former British colony in South America shaped and inspired a global political and intellectual movement.

I, Judge and Jury

How do you decide if a person in a difficult situation has acted criminally or not? John Doris reveals patterns in our moral judgments.

Designed for rural living

Small communities struggle with infrastructure ill-suited to rural life. Phoebe Sengers is improving design processes for better outcomes.

Polarization research in Ecuador underscores risks to U.S. democracy

When political parties stoke partisan conflicts – often by contesting formal state institutions, like systems for managing elections – actual democratic capacity may take a hit as public opinion polarizes.

Research: Electrons in a strange metal world

Why do electrons in high-temperature superconductors behave the way they do? A quantum explanation could have planetary payoffs.

Philosophy on Main Street

Shaun Nichols, professor of philosophy and director of the cognitive science major in the College of Arts and Sciences, compares high-minded philosophical systems to the ways people approach everyday problems. Like picking wild blueberries.

Filipino Performance Culture

Christine Bacareza Balance explores the rich milieu of the arts and of sensational politics in Filipino culture and history.

Cornell celebrates bumper crop of Fulbright students

Seven 2021 graduates and recent Cornell alumni accepted Fulbright U.S. Student awards to research, study or teach English during the 2021-22 academic year, 15 were chosen for 2022-23.

Glowing Planets and Chemical Fingerprints

Nikole Lewis will be one of the first to characterize distant exoplanets using infrared data from the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope.

DNA Shredder for Gene Therapy

Ailong Ke explores the naturally occurring CRISPR-Cas3 system and its potential to treat human disease at the genetic level.

Xenophobia meter aims to track anti-immigrant hate speech

With funding from Global Cornell, the Xenophobia Meter project aims to track online anti-immigrant hate speech in real time using machine learning.

Forces That Drive the DNA Highway

Motor proteins carry out vital biological processes as they travel along our DNA strands. Michelle Wang investigates the mysteries of how they move.

Looking for love, finding TNT

African pouched rats have an extraordinary talent for finding land mines. Alexander Ophir explores why they are so good at detecting explosives.

The vast machineries of gene regulation

Scientists had a hazy picture of the machinery that turns genes on and off. Franklin Pugh developed a sharp close-up that could change medicine.

DJs, Linnaeus, and Plantation History

Professor Tao Leigh Goffe works at the intersection of environmental humanities, science, and technology. As a researcher, writer, and DJ, she is especially interested in histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization.

The biology of hunger

Nilay Yapici, Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences and assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior, investigates the mysterious brain-body connections that regulate eating behavior.

Black activism and early American media

Studying Black Americans’ use of print media in the nineteenth century, Derrick Spires finds parallels with modern social movements.

COVID Summit: Social science perspectives

A new look at early Christianity

Rich social and cultural transformations came to the classical world in Late Antiquity, roughly 250 CE to 750 CE. Moving away from the paradigm of decline and fall, historians have taken a new look at the period, including the rise to prominence of Christianity.

The Dilemma of Cybersecurity

What does cybersecurity mean when computer systems remain vulnerable to hacking? Rebecca Slayton investigates.

Can I Even Do That?

Ivan Bazarov, who uses the Cornell Electron Storage Ring to manipulate bright particle beams, pushes boundaries to make new physics discoveries.

Exploring Extragalactic Neighborhoods

Cornell Innovation Has Real-World Impact

Cornell is one of the top 10 academic innovators in the world according to Reuters News Agency.

Investigating the Lived Experience

Noliwe M. Rooks, the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature in Africana Studies and the American Studies Program, knows that the lived experience can be the spark that leads to scientific insight and award-winning scholarly writing.

An Exciting Mysterious World—Spacetime

Thomas Hartman, assistant professor of physics, studies high-energy theoretical physics. His goal, he explains in this article in Cornell Research, is to bring to light the fundamental properties of nature, which derive from the subatomic world of quantum physics.

The power of social connections

How do lobbyists influence congress, and how do we estimate the reach of social networks?

Frogs, under attack by a lethal pathogen

Goldwin Smith Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Kelly R. Zamudio studies amphibians, especially frogs, combining field work and observation of behavior with genetics and genomics to glimpse the genetic processes underlying species traits. Recently her lab has turned that expertise to studying two virulent fungi of the genus Batrachochytrium, commonly called chytrids, that affect frogs and salamanders.

Foiling cancer aggression with nontoxic metals

Justin J. Wilson, a professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, is expanding on existing chemotherapeutic treatments by investigating the biomedical application potentials of other heavy transition metals, particularly compounds of the element rhenium, in order to develop a more targeted approach to halting cancerous cell division.

Prof studies forgotten communities through literature

Helena Viramontes focuses her lens on the Latino experience in the United States.

Stars and population stats

Cornell Research's newest enstallment of academician features takes a look at Astronomy research associate Thomas Nikola, and Developmental Sociology research assistant and lecturuer Sarah C Giroux. Both faculty incorporate active research studies in evolving fields into their teaching, bringing academic excellence to their fields.

Do I know you? Where have we met?

Associate Professor of Psychology, David Smith's research aimed at understanding how the brain stores information has implications ranging from recognizing teachers in the grocery store to neurodegenerative diseases.

Deploying population genetics

The research of Charles Aquadro, professor of molecular biology and genetics and director of the Cornell Center for Comparative and Population Genomics, is featured in this Cornell Research story.A population geneticist, Aquadro looks at changes in genetic variability in populations over time and space. 

What a transparent worm can reveal

This Cornell Research story focuses on the work of Jun "Kelly" Liu, professor of molecular biology and genetics, whose lab uses c. elegans nematodes to explore questions that improve the general understanding of developmental processes, stem cell biology and cellular reprogramming, and fundamental mechanisms involved in cell-cell signaling. 

Telescopes to help decode the cosmos

As humans, we have an insatiable desire to understand the cosmos and our place in it. How did the universe begin and how did it evolve? What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy? How will it all end? “These are the most fundamental questions one can ask,” says Steve Kang Hoon Choi, Cornell Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow. “If we believe greater knowledge betters our lives, then this is what drives us to study the cosmos.”

Let the novel speak

This Cornell Research profile explores the work of Edmundo Paz-Soldán, professor of Spanish literature in the Department of Romance Studies.The story says that Paz-Soldán initially shied away from devoting his life to literature.

Permissible war

How do nations decide when to go to war? What are the rules that govern when it is permissible to resort to war under international law? This Cornell Research profile of History Professor Isabel Hull explores her research into situations when war has been deemed permissible, specifically at what history tells us—the period 1814 to 1914 and the criteria known as jus ad bellum.

Interpreting public opinion

Vivekinan L. Ashok, a Cornell Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, is working with Peter K. Enns, associate professor of government, and other Cornell researchers, including Suzanne Mettler,The John L.

Plastics, Can’t Get Away from Using Them

If plastics are a mainstay of our lives—even with the negative impact on the environment and our health—new techniques for making them are paramount.

Bacteria and Their Hosts, Good Companions

This Cornell Research story focues on the work of Chih-chun Lin, Cornell Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the in the lab of Andrew G. Clark, professor of molecular biology and genetics.

Umbutu: Interconnected, Looking Forward

“The world we have is a world created by humans,” says N’Dri T. Assié-Lumumba, professor of Africana Studies and Research. “So we have the capacity to create another world, to imagine that world, and to work toward it. That is the passion that guides my work.”

At the Heart of Humanity

For many people, theater is pure entertainment, the chance to experience some great acting or to enjoy the glitz of an extravagant production. But beneath the surface, there is another aspect to the art, one that Bruce A. Levitt and Beth F. Milles, professor and associate professor, respectively, in performing and media arts, address.

Insect Flight -- Still a Mystery

The flight capabilities of insects are nature’s solution to locomotion in air, according to Z. Jane Wang, Physics, and there are general principles of locomotion and evolution we can learn from them.

The Influence of Relationships

“Our relationships are a source of joy and comfort, but they also bring a lot of pain,” says Vivian Zayas, associate professor of Psychology.

The Cultures of Liberals and Conservatives

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NeuroNex - A Radical Collaboration

The National Science Foundation awarded Cornell $9 million over five years to establish a neurotechnology hub, dedicated to developing new technologies for imagine the brain, then disseminating them to the wider neuroscience community.

Forms: Their rhythms, shapes, designs

We don’t realize it, but forms are all around us—ordering our lives—says Caroline E.

Power in World Politics

For Peter J. Katzenstein, Government, the events that led to the financial crisis caused him to look again at important aspects in world politics.

Critical thinking – attained through physics

This Cornell Research story profiles the work of Natasha Holmes, assistant professor of physics, who studies the teaching and learning of physics, particularly in lab courses.

Migration, Forced by Climate Change

Climate change is a game changer: glaciers melt, sea levels rise, weather patterns become unpredictable. Garcia is exploring its impacts in her latest book project, "Climate Refugees: The Environmental Origins of Refugee Migrations," which looks at environmentally driven migrants.

Interwoven - coal, colors, and other stories

“I write in books, not in individual poems,” says poet Lyrae N. Van Clief-Stefanon, English. “A group of poems that make up a book will have an over-arching through line, all these threads that I’m holding together.”

Creating Language

The world is full of languages and dialects—more than 7,000. Across these languages, many possible sounds can be combined into words. While there may be similarities in words between closely related languages, for years linguists have believed that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is completely arbitrary. Recently Morten H. Christiansen, Psychology, collaborated with fellow researchers to investigate whether that belief might need to be reappraised.

How do planets form and evolve?

From our earliest history, humans have contemplated the cosmos. Before we had an inkling of the nature of our own solar system, we wondered at the composition of our sister planets. And long before we knew there were planets orbiting other stars, we wondered if we, earth-bound beings, were alone in the universe.

Where did the language of money come from?

Everywhere we turn in modern Western society, we run into the influence of economics. Our worldview, and our very language, is colored by it. We worry that politicians can be bought and sold. We give credit to those who can afford a comfortable retirement. We debate the price of a free society as police clash with protestors.