The House of Representatives voted this week to ban TikTok from government-issued devices amid concerns that the Chinese-owned social media company’s access to U.S. data poses a national security threat.
Protests continue this week in Portland, Oregon in the wake of federal law enforcement being deployed to the city. On Saturday, the protest included the participation of a nude woman who confronted officers wearing nothing but a mask and hat.
NASA is planning to launch its latest rover destined for Mars on July 30, with an anticipated arrival date on the red planet in February 2021. The rover, named Perseverance, will look for evidence of ancient life and collect soil and rock samples at a part of Mars just north of its equator known as Jezero Crater — the site of an ancient river.
The next event in the Democracy 20/20 Webinar series will examine whether the U.S. will be able to hold free and fair elections this fall and how challenges to such elections can be overcome. The webinar will take place on Tuesday, July 21 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. (ET). The event is free and the public is invited; registration is required.
From a mountain high in Chile’s Atacama Desert, astronomers with the National Science Foundation’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) have taken a fresh look at the oldest light in the universe. Their new observations plus a bit of cosmic geometry suggest that the universe is 13.77 billion years old, give or take 40 million years.
Michael Stillman, professor of mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has received the 2019 Richard D. Jenks Memorial Prize for “excellence in software engineering applied to computer algebra” for his work on the Macaulay and Macaulay2 computer algebra systems.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico (often referred to as AMLO) will join President Trump at the White House on Wednesday amid continued coronavirus concerns and celebrations of the new trade deal between Mexico, Canada and the United States.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced today that public schools will not fully reopen for the upcoming school year. New York City students will return to school on a limited basis with only one to three days a week of in-person education and remote learning the remainder of the days.
Martha Haynes, Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy, has been awarded the 2020 Karl G. Jansky Lectureship by Associated Universities, Inc. and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). The Jansky Lectureship recognizes outstanding contributions to the advancement of radio astronomy and is being awarded to Haynes “for her influential impact to our understanding of galaxies.”
China passed a law this week on national security for Hong Kong, which is expected to further limit the city’s autonomy and could be used to crack down on those engaging in “secession, subversion against the central Chinese government, terrorism, and colluding with foreign forces.”
On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration’s effort to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Program was not legal. The decision is a win for those protected by DACA, undocumented children brought to the U.S. at an early age, otherwise known as ‘Dreamers’.
Two doctoral students in the field of government recently won fellowships for their research. Angie Torres, a second-year student, won a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The five-year fellowship includes three years of financial support including an annual stipend of $34,000.
Juneteenth—June 19, 1865— marks the day when the last collective of enslaved people heard the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, TX, a full two years after Abraham Lincoln delivered it.
India and China clashed this week at the border between the two countries in the Himalayan mountains, resulting in numerous reported deaths of Indian and Chinese soldiers.
Austin Bunn, associate professor and Koenig Jacobson Sesquicentennial Fellow in the Department of Performing & Media Arts, will take over leadership of the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity July 1. The program, launched in 2017, offers a unique multidisciplinary curriculum to a cohort of 100 students, 25 in each class.
The Trump administration announced this week that its first in-person campaign rally since the coronavirus lockdown will occur in Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 19th – a day celebrated by many Americans as the day that marked the end of slavery in the United States.
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.
“Our instructors have shown extraordinary dedication and leadership this year, teaching, advising and inspiring our students despite unprecedented challenges.”
"It’s a perfect time to start this because college grads have been left with canceled jobs and high school students are trying to figure out what to do when school is out.”
Clashes between police and protesters escalated this week across the United States, as public outrage continued over police brutality and systemic racism.
Junting Huang, a doctoral candidate in the field of comparative literature, has received a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for his dissertation, “The Noise Decade: Intermedial Impulse in Chinese Sound Recording.”
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.
In this time of increasing political polarization, the participation of scientists in political advocacy has become yet another flashpoint, with some critics accusing scientists of being self-serving if they advocate for increased science funding.
Sophomores in the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity were supposed to be spending the summer of 2020 living in the House on Roosevelt Island in New York City and taking a special set of classes at Cornell Tech.
As a college senior stuck home during quarantine with an interest in infectious diseases and past experience with the World Health Organization (WHO), Dalton Price ’20 thought it was completely obvious that he would sign up to help in any way he could during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine “Xine” Yao, M.A. '13, Ph.D. '16, was named one of the 2020 BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinkers. The program, now in its 10th year, affords early career academics a platform to share their ideas via BBC Radio 3 and other outlets. “It is an amazing opportunity to work with the BBC to share my expertise and hopefully provoke different ways of understanding the world,” Yao said.
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 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.
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.
Margaret Washington, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of American History, was recently featured in the History Channel documentary “Black Patriots: Heroes of the Revolution,” and will appear in a CNN program focusing on women’s history.
The more than 200 members of Cornell’s choral groups may not be able to sing together each week, but they are still spending time listening and sharing their love of music virtually, with a host of guest visitors this semester.
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.
An Ithaca theatre company is creating a live-streamed performance of a new work from six international playwrights, including a Cornell professor. The piece will premiere May 1.
Ding Xiang Warner, professor of Chinese literature in the Department of Asian Studies, was honored April 10 with a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
