Reducing antibiotic resistance in animals and developing a lubricating formula in joints for people suffering from arthritis are two of seven projects that received Center for Advanced Technology (CAT) annual grants.
What began as a Twitter joke between two researchers has turned into a four-year, $2.5 million National Science Foundation grant to take 3-D digital scans of 20,000 museum vertebrate specimens and make them available to everyone online.Cornell’s Museum of Vertebrates, with 1.3 million fish specimens, 27,000 reptiles and amphibians (called herps), and 57,000 bird and 23,000 mammal specimens, is one of 16 institutions involved and promises to feature prominently in the project.
“How do we reconcile stable truth with multiple understandings of truth?” Bruce Lewenstein, professor of science communication, posed that question during an academic symposium, “Universities and the Search for Truth,” held Aug. 24 in Bailey Hall. The event was part of the celebration of Martha E. Pollack’s inauguration as Cornell’s 14th president.
The spread of mosquito-borne viruses, including dengue, chikungunya and Zika, has created a public health crisis that poses risks to nearly 4 billion people living in 120 countries.
Very little is known about the wiring of nerve cells in the brain that allow a fish, or any animal, to make fundamental choices to move to the left or to the right. A study of zebrafish larvae published Aug. 9 in the journal eLife for the first time reveals a circuit that determines the direction of a lightning-quick turn to escape a predator.
When it comes to the birds and the bees, frogs are remarkably diverse: They do it in water, on land and on leaves.Researchers have assumed that natural selection drove frogs to take the evolutionary step to reproduce on land as a way for parents to avoid aquatic predators who feed on the eggs and tadpoles.
In recent years, Cornell has amassed an impressive stable of experts in an emerging field for modern times: The ecology and evolution of infectious disease.
Four Cornell faculty members. including two from the College of Arts & Sciences, are among 213 national and international scholars, artists, philanthropists and business leaders elected new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Some populations of frogs are rapidly adapting to a fungal pathogen calledBatrachochrytrium dendrobatridis (Bd) that has decimated many populations for close to half a century and causes the disease chytridiomycosis, according to a new study.
Over the past decades, millions of managed colonies of honeybees have died from varroa mites that transmit deadly viruses, yet wild colonies survive.Cornell researchers describe – in the March 11 issue of the journal PLoS One –experiments that help reveal how wild colonies endure mites and pathogens.
Three young Cornell researchers have won National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Awards. Part of the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, the awards provide up to $1.5 million over five years for innovative, high-impact projects.
The idea of introducing a novel gene into a few individuals that then spreads through an entire population sounds like a premise for science fiction. And yet fiction can be prophetic.Cornell researchers have used mathematical models to illuminate the promises – and potential problems – of a new genome editing mechanism, called a gene drive.
William Provine, the Andrew H. and James L. Tisch Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Cornell, died Sept. 1 due to complications from a brain tumor at his home in Horseheads, New York. He was 73.Provine, a professor of the history of biology in the departments of History and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, was born Feb. 19, 1942, in Nashville, Tennessee.
