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Margaret A. Marchaterre/Provided
A male midshipman fish, left, and a female swim in shallow Northern California waters. Their midbrain plays a key role in initiating and patterning trains of sounds used in vocal communication.
Elliot Lowndes/Provided
A male ostracod, about the size of a sesame seed, will dance in harmony with other males underwater at night and secrete a glowing mucus to get attention from females.
Ryan Young/Cornell University
Reduced from polyester fiber, an array of metal-organic frameworks is shown in the Hinestroza lab. Minor changes in the chemical structure can generate a myriad of colors.
NASA/JPL/Provided
Even on future cosmic outposts like Mars, depicted in this artistic rendering, humans must consider closely replicating natural conditions found on Earth, according to a new theory called Pancosmorio.
Can humans endure long-term living in deep space?
The answer is a lukewarm maybe, according to a new theory describing the complexity of maintaining gravity and oxygen, obtaining water, developing agriculture and handling waste far from Earth, which a Cornell researcher developed after examining the long-term physical needs of humans living far from Earth.
Dubbed the Pancosmorio theory – a…
To manage atmospheric carbon dioxide and convert the gas into a useful product, Cornell scientists have dusted off an archaic – now 120 years old – electrochemical equation. The group aims to thwart the consequences of global warming and climate change by applying this long-forgotten idea in a new way.
The calculation – named the Cottrell equation for chemist Frederick Gardner Cottrell,…
Darren McGee/NYS Governor’s Office
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, right, and artist Meredith Bergmann discuss the Ruth Bader Ginsburg portrait that will be installed at the Great Western Staircase in the state capitol.
For the first time in 125 years, the face of a celebrated New Yorker will join the pantheon of historic people commemorated at the New York State Capitol’s Great Western Staircase: Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’54, the late associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
“When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked when there would be enough women on the U.S. Supreme Court, she famously replied, ‘When there are…
ABC/Eric McCandless
American Idol's superstar judges all agreed that Amara Valerio '24 is headed for Hollywood.
In 2019, Amara Valerio ’24, then a high school junior, was tapped to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” at her school’s graduation. But the honor turned to horror when a senior stepped to the podium, grabbed the microphone out of Valerio’s hand and sang the national anthem herself.
Three years later, Valerio posted video of the incident on TikTok, where it drew more than 10 million views –…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Ray Halbritter, left, representing the Oneida Indian Nation, and President Martha E. Pollack, sign documents that repatriate ancestral remains from the university to the Oneida Indian Nation.
With apologies for causing harm and in an effort to right the wrongs of the past, Cornell returned ancestral remains and possessions that had been kept in a university archive for six decades to the Oneida Indian Nation on Feb. 21 at a small campus ceremony.
The remains were unearthed in 1964 as property owners dug a ditch for a new water line on their farm near Windsor, New York. Law…
Cornell University file photo
Famed Cornell astronomer Peter Gierasch, seen here in 1979, died Jan. 20 in Ithaca. He was 82.
Peter Gierasch, a Cornell astronomer whose mathematical models unveiled the turbulent vortices, tempestuous eddies and atmospheric tumult arising on other worlds – long before spacecraft could consistently prove it with images – died Jan. 20 in Ithaca. He was 82.
Gierasch, a professor emeritus of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, contributed to a wealth of knowledge on the…
Ryan Young/Cornell University
The 11 Cornell students who will be helping delegations at COP27 in Egypt.
At the United Nations’ upcoming Conference of the Parties, 11 Cornell students, including Arts and Sciences students Arden Podpora '23 and Eva Fenningdorf '23, will help delegations from specialized agencies and small countries gain a stronger voice. Better known as COP27, the annual conference ensures that countries meet global climate targets set by the Paris Agreement.
The undergraduate…
Two Cornell icons woven indelibly into the fabric of American history – the late Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, M.A. ’55, and the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ‘54 – will each be commemorated in 2023 with a postage stamp.
On Oct. 24, the U.S. Postal Service revealed the subjects of the forthcoming 2023 postage stamps, which will feature a wide range of subjects,…
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Citizen scientists Kevin M. Gill and Fernando Garcia Navarro created this colorful, highly artistic view of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, taken from JunoCam on the Juno mission’s close flyby Sept. 29. JPL/NASA released this image on Oct. 6.
New images from NASA’s Juno spacecraft mission Sept. 29 flyby of Jupiter’s moon Europa – an icy world that may host a life-giving, salty ocean beneath its thick crust – brings an upcoming major mission into frigid focus.
In two years, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper spacecraft to survey the frozen moon looking for signs that support life. The craft – arriving in April…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Léa Bonnefoy ‘15, a post-doctoral researcher, led a team of Cornell scientists to characterize the Dragonfly mission's landing site on Saturn’s moon Titan. The rotorcraft is expected to launch in 2027 and reach that moon in 2034.
When NASA’s 990-pound Dragonfly rotorcraft reaches the Selk crater region – the mission’s target touchdown spot – on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2034, Cornell’s Léa Bonnefoy '15 will have helped to make it a smooth landing.
Bonnefoy and her colleagues assisted the future arrival by characterizing the equatorial, hummocky, knoll-like landscape by combining and analyzing all of the radar images…
European Southern Observatory / L. Calçada
In this illustration, exoplanet CoRoT-7b, which is likely five times the mass of Earth, may well be full of lava landscapes and boiling oceans.
The exploration era for the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is getting hot – volcanically hot.
A multidisciplinary group of Cornell researchers has modeled and synthesized lava in the laboratory as the kinds of rock that may form on far-away exoplanets. They developed 16 types of surface compositions as a starter catalog for finding volcanic worlds that feature fiery landscapes and…
To mitigate climate change, physicist David Specht, M.S. ’18, Ph.D. ’21, feeds electricity to microbes.
In turn, the insatiable Vibrio natriegens bacteria – the fastest duplicating organism on Earth, able to double itself in about 10 minutes – gorge on a sparky feast, but then the microbe can help scientists and farmers free up arable land, nourish livestock and feed farmed fish.
The V…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Doctoral student Abhinav Jindal, standing in front of a Rosetta mission image of Comet 67P, modeled the evolution of smooth terrain on that frozen world.
With an eye toward a possible return mission years in the future, Cornell astronomers have shown how smooth terrains – a good place to land a spacecraft and to scoop up samples – evolve on the icy world of comets.
By applying thermal models to data gathered by the Rosetta mission – which caught up to the barbell-shaped Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko almost a decade ago – they show that…
Credit: NASA/Provided
Evidence of carbon dioxide was found by the new James Webb Space Telescope on exoplanet WASP-39b, which is shown in this artistic rendering.
NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope opens a new chapter in scientific history, as a large international team – including several Cornell astronomers – found molecular evidence of carbon dioxide on the exoplanet WASP-39b, a giant gaseous world orbiting a sun-like star about 700 light-years away.
The international group’s findings, supported by hundreds of scientists across dozens of…
Shami Chatterjee/Provided
The 500-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, known as FAST, in Ghizou province, southwest China
A rare and persistent rapid-fire fast radio burst source – sending out an occasional and informative cosmic ping from more than 3.5 billion light years away – now helps to reveal the secrets of the broiling hot space between the galaxies.
What excites astronomers about the repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) – since they only burst once, generally speaking – is that these quick-fire surges…
Provided
The Soil Factory, a large, unremarkable warehouse on the southern edge of Ithaca, has become a collaboration center in 2021 for students, scientists, artists, community members and everyone in between.
Solving societal problems such as climate change could require dismantling rigid academic boundaries, so that researchers from varying disciplines could work together collaboratively – through an “undisciplinary” approach, a new Cornell study suggests.
Instead of rallying around a specific mission, it’s best to incorporate a human approach and fixate on the process to find solutions. The work…
Declaring this the “decisive decade” for climate action, Cornell launched The 2030 Project: A Climate Initiative, which will mobilize world-class faculty to develop and accelerate tangible solutions to the climate challenge. From transforming food and energy systems and reducing greenhouse emissions to advancing environmental justice and shaping policy, Cornell will use practical science to…
NASA/JPL/Provided
Scientists have suggested sending an orbiter and probe to Uranus, as their top exploration priority. The voyage would conduct flybys and examine clouds, atmospheric structure, composition, the planet’s rings and moons.
Over the next 10 years, a collection of the nation’s top planetary scientists and astrobiologists – using suggestions from panels chaired by two Cornell professors – are advocating for exploratory voyages to Earth’s cold, distant solar-system planetary companion Uranus and the icy Saturn moon Enceladus.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Planetary Science and…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Qihao Li, left, Geoff Coates, the Tisch University Professor of Chemistry and Héctor Abruña, the Émile M. Chamot Professor in the Department of Chemistry, discuss hydrogen energy.
Cornell and two Cornell research-startups have joined a consortium that aims to propose a Northeast research hub to make hydrogen a viable, clean-energy alternative to carbon-based fuels.
The New York-led multistate collaboration is guided by Gov. Kathy Hochul and organized by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).
With approximately $9.6 billion available…
Jack Madden/Provided
With a color catalog based on Earth’s microbes, astronomers can begin to decipher the tint of life on distant, frozen exoplanets, as depicted in this artistic rendering by Jack Madden Ph.D. ’20.
Aided by microbes found in the subarctic conditions of Canada’s Hudson Bay, an international team – including researchers from Portugal’s Instituto Superior de Agronomia and Técnico, Canada’s Université Laval in Quebec, and Cornell – has created the first color catalog of icy planet surface signatures to uncover the existence of life in the cosmos.
As ground-based and space telescopes get…
ESA/Rosetta/MPS
A close-up examination of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko reveals dancing gravel, whirling icy debris and transient, movable depressions on its smooth terrain, courtesy of photos from the Rosetta mission.
Comet 67P/Churyomov-Gerasimenko – arguably the most-studied comet in history – has yielded a cosmic surprise: It emits molecular oxygen drawn from its nucleus.
Comet comas – the expanding gaseous atmospheres around the solid nuclei of comets – were known to contain mostly water, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, but the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission’s ROSINA (Rosetta Orbiter…
NASA-JPL-ASU/Provided
NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance poses in a planetary selfie last September with the formation known as “Rochette.”
Both Megan Barrington and Christian Tate have a favorite rock.
Barrington’s is shaped like a bird’s head; while Tate’s takes the form of a shoebox created from lava.
Those rocks are 196 million miles away, on Mars, and the Cornell doctoral students encountered them as part of the search for signs of ancient life via the NASA Mars 2020 mission’s Perseverance rover, which landed on the red…
Around 1,450 Cornell undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students completed their studies this month. They include students across Cornell’s colleges, from humanities scholars to scientists. The December Recognition Ceremony was canceled on Dec. 14 due to COVID-19 restrictions; those who hoped to attend are invited to return for Commencement in May 2022. In the meantime, with an eye on their…
NASA/JPL
An image of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, upper right, and the planet's swirling surface, was taken by the Juno spacecraft on Dec. 30, 2020.
After gazing at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and the planet’s gaseous cloudy realm, NASA’s Juno spacecraft and its microwave radiometer have provided humanity’s first 3D, turbulent sense of what lies far below its swirling surface.
The work, reported by a dozen international scientists, including Cornell’s Jonathan Lunine, appears in the Oct. 28 journal Science.
“Jupiter’s storms…
NASA/JPL
A radar image from the Cassini spacecraft of Titan’s liquid methane and ethane rivers and tributaries.
With future space exploration in mind, a Cornell-led team of astronomers has published the final maps of Titan’s liquid methane rivers and tributaries – as seen by NASA’s late Cassini mission – so that may help provide context for Dragonfly’s upcoming 2030s expedition.
The fluvial maps and details of their accuracy were published in the Planetary Science Journal (August 2021.) In addition to…
Shami Chatterjee/Provided
The new Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, known as FAST, in Guizhou, China, where the 1,652 fast radio bursts were detected.
What seemed a cosmic trickle almost a decade ago now appears as a rapid-fire barrage from across the universe.
An international team of astronomers including Cornell researchers have detected 1,652 independent millisecond explosions – called fast radio bursts, or FRBs – over a period of only 47 days, from a source about 3 billion light-years away. The team’s findings are published Oct. 13 in…
ESO/M. Kornmesser
An artist's rendition of a "hot Jupiter."
Considered an ultra-hot Jupiter – a place where iron gets vaporized, condenses on the night side and then falls from the sky like rain – the fiery, inferno-like WASP-76b exoplanet may be even more sizzling than scientists had realized.
An international team, led by researchers at Cornell, University of Toronto and Queen’s University Belfast, reports the discovery of ionized calcium on the…
Maxwell Davis, an Air Force veteran, reviews his Warrior-Scholars Project assignments.
After years of watching movies and television shows that portrayed fiendish college professors and demonic teachers, Air Force veteran Carla Ulloa was pleasantly surprised by her Cornell educators.
“I had thought that professors are just looking to make sure you regret joining their class,” Ulloa said. “Now, I feel more comfortable in a college classroom. I don’t have to hold back on my…
ESA/Mars Express
Mars’ south pole – which looks like creamy swirls in cappuccino – is an icy cap with carbon dioxide and other geologic traits. About a mile below the cap is smectite, a hydrated version of clay.
Bright reflections observed at Mars’ south pole serve as evidence for water. But, seeing may be deceiving.
After measuring the area’s electrical properties with orbiting, ground-penetrating radar, an international group of scientists now say that reflections of the red planet’s south pole may be smectite, a form of hydrated clay, buried about a mile below the surface, according to a July 29…
Dong Lai, M.S. ’91, Ph.D. ’94, professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Risa Mish ’85, J.D. ’88, professor of the practice of management in the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, have each won Cornell’s inaugural Provost Award for Teaching Excellence in Graduate and Professional Degree Programs.
"Professor Mish and Professor Lai’s commitment to…
NASA/JPL
Maat Mons, a large volcano on Venus, is shown in this 1991 simulated-color radar image from NASA’s Magellan spacecraft mission.
Scientists last autumn revealed that the gas phosphine was found in trace amounts in Venus’ upper atmosphere. That discovery promised the slim possibility that phosphine serves as a biological signature for the hot, toxic planet.
Now Cornell scientists say the phosphine’s chemical fingerprints support a different and important scientific find: evidence of explosive volcanoes on the…
OpenSpace/American Museum of Natural History
Artistic view of the Earth and sun from thousands of miles above our planet, showing that stars can enter and exit a position to see Earth transiting the sun.
Scientists at Cornell and the American Museum of Natural History have identified 2,034 nearby star-systems – within the small cosmic distance of 326 light-years – that could find Earth merely by watching our pale blue dot cross our sun.
That’s 1,715 star-systems that could have spotted Earth since human civilization blossomed about 5,000 years ago, and 319 more star-systems that will be…
NASA/JPL/Provided
In an artist's depiction, the Voyager 1 craft continues to cruise through interstellar space.
Voyager 1 – one of two sibling NASA spacecraft launched 44 years ago and now the most distant human-made object in space – still works and zooms toward infinity.
As the craft toils, it has long since zipped past the edge of the solar system through the heliopause – the solar system’s border with interstellar space – into the interstellar medium. Now, its instruments have detected the…
When Denise Knox got an email on April 30 notifying her that she and her husband, Robert, would get two tickets to Commencement to see their son Morrison Knox ’21 graduate, she recalled, “I was ecstatic.”
The family – including their other son Ryan Knox – arrived from Bowie, Maryland on May 28. Straightaway, and despite the unseasonably cold weather, they celebrated in a tried-and-true spot:…
Ursa Space/provided
Dozens of oil tankers and commercial cargo ships line up at Great Bitter Lake to enter the Suez Canal in this early April satellite image
With several forthcoming space missions, the acceleration of the satellite industry and more STEM opportunities for women and people of diverse cultures, the business prospects and scientific visions of the cosmos are just beginning to take off.
More than a dozen space industry leaders, capital investors, startup entrepreneurs, a Jet Propulsions Lab manager and Cornell professors gathered…
An artistic rendering for how the new North Campus Residential Expansion halls will look in fall 2021.
Cornell will honor Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock (B.S. 1923, M.A. 1925, Ph.D. 1927), renowned Chinese scholar and diplomat Hu Shih (B.A. 1914) and the Cayuga Nation with names for new North Campus residence hall buildings.
For the Indigenous Cayuga Nation, who call themselves Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ (pronounced Guy-yo-KO-no), Cornell will use the word Ganędagǫ: (pronounced Gah-NEN-dah-go) –…
Using light from the Big Bang, an international team led by Cornell and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has begun to unveil the material which fuels galaxy formation.
“There is uncertainty on the formation of stars within galaxies that theoretical models are unable to predict,” said lead author Stefania Amodeo, a Cornell postdoctoral researcher in…
Catalyzed by a Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability grant and prompted by other Cornell eco-friendly research over the past decade like the Cornell Fuel Cell Institute and the university’s Energy Materials Center, the Standard Hydrogen Corporation (SHC) and National Grid announced plans March 11 to build the first hydrogen “energy station” of its kind in the nation.
The SHC Energy…
Jason Koski, Cornell University
Walter LaFeber speaking at the 2016 Dedication of the LaFeber Research Study.
Walter F. LaFeber, the Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, in the College of Arts and Sciences – who won ovations from students for classroom lectures and whose mastery of U.S. foreign relations guided historians, political scientists and politicians for decades – died March 9 in Ithaca. He was 87.
“Walter LaFeber was the most…
Cornell University File Photo
Composer Roberto Sierra, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Music.
Cornell’s J. Meejin Yoon, B.Arch. ’95, and composer Roberto Sierra have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, considered the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in the United States in their respective fields, the academy announced March 5.
Sierra, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Music, in the College of Arts and…
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Provided
Illustration of the spacecraft containing NASA’s Perseverance rover
With under a million miles yet to travel and days to go, the Mars 2020 mission’s Perseverance craft zips smoothly through space at 48,000 mph on the last leg of an eight-month, 300-million-mile journey to our neighboring red planet.
The spacecraft remains ready, healthy and raring to rove, according to NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
On Feb. 18, Perseverance will enter the top…
National Park Service
Russian Commander Iurii Lisianskii’s 1804 outline drawing of the Tlingit fort used to defend against Russia’s colonization forces. Cornell and U.S. National Park Service researchers have pinpointed the fort’s exact location in Sitka, Alaska.
For a century, archaeologists have looked for the remnants of a wooden fort in Alaska – the Tlingit people’s last physical bulwark against Russian colonization forces in 1804. Now Cornell and National Park Service researchers have pinpointed and confirmed its location by using geophysical imaging techniques and ground-penetrating radar.
The Tlingit built what they called Shiskinoow – the …
NASA/John Glenn Research Center
An artistic rendering of Kraken Mare, the large liquid methane sea on Saturn’s moon Titan.
Far below the gaseous atmospheric shroud on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, lies Kraken Mare, a sea of liquid methane. Cornell astronomers have estimated that sea to be at least 1,000 feet deep near its center – enough room for a potential robotic submarine to explore.
After sifting through data from one of the final Titan flybys of the Cassini mission, the researchers detailed their…
NASA’s Juno spacecraft – currently orbiting Jupiter, flying close approaches to the planet and then out into the realm of the Jovian moons – and the InSight lander, now perched in Mars’ equatorial region, have both received mission extensions, the space agency announced Jan. 8. Cornell astronomers serve key roles on both projects. An independent review panel composed of science,…
An international team of astronomers – including 17 Cornellians – report they have found the first faint, low-frequency whispers that may be gravitational waves from gigantic, colliding black holes in distant galaxies. The findings were obtained from more than 12.5 years of data collected from the national radio telescopes at Green Bank, West Virginia, and the recently collapsed dish at the…
