“The history of the Negro is the history of America, and it is not a pretty story,” says the late writer James Baldwin in director Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.”
Kurt Gottfried, emeritus professor of physics and a recognized expert on nuclear arms control, has been awarded the 2016 Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
The books tell the stories of teens who meet on the public courts of Oakland, Calif. and come together to form an improbably competitive basketball team.
“Say it with chocolate,” goes the ad – but what are you really saying? We imbue objects with all sorts of meanings, especially around the holidays. A new study by Cornell psychology researchers finds that the closer to Valentine’s Day we get, the more chocolates – and red roses – spell out “l-o-v-e.”
Robert D. Guber ’15 studied alcoholic liver, diabetes, and obesity. Lipi Gupta ’15 worked on reducing beam emittance in the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR), a 768-meter ring that is part of the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), to produce brighter s-rays. Sang Min Han ’15 examined toadfish to create a mathematical model for vertebrate vocalization. Swati Sureka ’15 engineered nucleic acid to develop DNA materials. Teresa O.
In response to the recent Executive Order barring U.S. entry to citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries, Cornell’s Department of Near Eastern Studies will hold a teach-in Feb. 17 in the Groos Family Atrium in Klarman Hall from 10 a.m. to noon. The event is free and the public is welcome.
Researchers found that the share of men receiving their degrees from the most prestigious doctoral programs is about 6 percent higher than the share receiving their degrees from all other programs.
Winners of the Heermans-McCalmon Playwriting Contest will be showcased Friday during an event at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.Staged readings of first-place winner Molly Karr’s ‘18 screenplay “Whole Hearted” and Aleksej Aarsaether’s ‘17 play, “The Diary of an American Girl” will be presented at 4:30 p.m. in the Class of ‘56 Dance Theatre. Aarsaether also won an honorable mention in the screenwriting category.
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of real socialism and the Cold War, but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since.
The language requirement in the College of Arts & Sciences helped ShawnaKim Lowey-Ball ’05 discover a culture that’s become her life’s work.Lowey-Ball, who came to Cornell with interests in physics and cognitive science, was already fluent in French, so she decided to venture in a completely different direction to fulfill her language requirement — Indonesian.
In reaction to the current immigration ban, Hirokazu Miyazaki, professor of anthropology, writes this opinion piece in the Japan Times, telling the story of Sidney Gulick, who, frustrated with the immigration ban of 1924, decided to turn his attention to the next generation.
Two Arts & Sciences alumni were honored with reviews of their debut novels in the Jan. 29 New York Times Book Review.The novels of Sana Krasikov ’01, winner of the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and Lydia Peelle ’00, author of the short story collection “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing,” were both reviewed in the recent issue.
In discussions about climate change, many people seem to think the only real problem is replacing fossil fuels, and once that’s done nothing much really needs to change. “That’s not only false, it’s a really dangerous way of thinking,” said Karen Pinkus, professor of Romance studies and comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Atop a cabinet, leaning against a wall of Dagmawi Woubshet’s office, is an enlarged framed cover of the May 17, 1963, issue of TIME magazine. Its portrait of writer James Baldwin stares into the room. Woubshet, associate professor of English, gestures to it several times as he talks about his research.
Like all researchers, Itai Cohen, Physics, has a lot of questions. But unlike many, his questions make big, topical leaps. From fruit flies to mosh pits, from origami to cartilage—Cohen dreams of preventing stampedes in Mecca, understanding the complex neuromechanics of fruit fly flight, and making self-folding robots from a single sheet of atoms. How can all this happen in one lab? Well, the answer is: it doesn’t.
“My name’s Ishmael, what’s yours?” -- or would “Call me Ishmael” better open a narrative about whaling? Tone, diction, style: these are the kinds of questions Cornell’s Historians Are Writers! (HAW) grapple with in their meetings.
Hundreds of seldom-seen photographs documenting the journey of African-Americans from the slavery era to the 20th century are now digitized and freely accessible to students and scholars around the world.
Many of the vintage observatory instruments were collected in the 19th century by Estevan Fuertes, founding dean of Cornell’s civil engineering department.
"We hope the suggested readings, primary sources, and multimedia sources will help educators and citizens in their teaching and public discussions," says historian Maria Cristina Garcia.
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, Psychology.
In academic fields from physics to genetics, researchers rely on computers for everything from data analysis to modeling. One area of scholarship that has gone largely untouched is the humanities, where today’s researchers are far more often hunched over stacks of books than scanning graphs and charts on a screen.
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.
Cornell in Rome will celebrate its 30th anniversary with an event featuring tours, receptions, lunches, and panels on art, architecture and the humanities.
A hallmark of human language is our ability to produce and understand an infinite number of different sentences. This unique open-ended productivity is normally explained in terms of “structural reuse”; sentences are constructed from reusable parts such as phrases. But how languages come to be composed of reusable parts in the first place is a question that has long puzzled researchers in the language sciences
Benjamin Anderson’s recently published “Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art” (Yale University Press, 2017) has won the 2018 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award of the College Art Association (CAA).
The university has created a new resource page for faculty, staff and students concerning the Jan. 27 presidential executive order on immigration. Interim President Hunter Rawlings also sent the following message to the Cornell community Jan. 29:
“We can hear the universe” declared researchers at LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) announcing the first detection of a gravitational wave last year.By capturing a sonic translation of two black holes colliding more than a billion years ago, scientists had finally achieved what ancient scholars had long dreamed of: translating the “music of the spheres” into sound humans can hear.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
“The curriculum belongs to the faculty, 100 percent,” declared Interim President Hunter Rawlings at a faculty forum Jan. 23 in the Rhodes Rawlings Auditorium in Klarman Hall.
Using a novel chemical procedure developed in her lab, Yimon Aye and her group are helping to blaze a trail in the emerging field of precision medicine by targeting and modulating single proteins to achieve desired responses.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has approved $1.1 million to extend the Mellon Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities (AUH) interdisciplinary seminar series at Cornell for four years.
Kyle Shen, associate professor of physics, creates and investigates artificial and unconventional materials with unusual electronic and magnetic properties. His research into these new materials and their potential applications is explored in this Cornell Resarch story.
Sarah Kreps, associate professor of government, and co-author Debak Das, a graduate student in government, write in this Washington Post piece about their research into Americans' thoughts about the need for retaliation against Russia for alleged cyberattacks.
This Cornell Research story explores the many avenues that graduate students pursue in their research projects and the multitide of Cornell supports available to them.More than 5,000 graduate students work at Cornell, studying in more than 80 fields.