The “widowhood effect” – the tendency for married people to die in close succession – is accelerated when spouses don’t know each other’s friends well, new Cornell sociology research finds.
Analyzing the first longitudinal data detailing older adults’ social networks along with demographic and health measures, the researchers found that over a 10-year study period, the probability of death…
Carl Sagan Institute/R. Payne
Artist impression showing the exoplanet LP 890-9c’s potential evolution from a hot Earth to a desiccated Venus.
How close can a rocky planet be to a star, and still sustain water and life?
A recently discovered exoplanet may be key to solving that mystery, providing important insights about conditions at the inner edge of a star’s habitable zone and why Earth and Venus developed so differently, according to new research led by Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute and associate…
Richard William “Dick” Miller, the Wyn and William Y. Hutchinson Professor in Ethics and Public Life Emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences, who brought deep moral insight to philosophical theory and matters of social and political justice, died June 9. He was 77.
Miller was widely heralded for extending the traditional boundaries of philosophy to incorporate the social sciences – a far…
Zehui Chen/Chinese Academy of Science and April (Xinzhu) Wei/Cornell University
An illustration showing the continued, albeit waning, influence of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans
Recent scientific discoveries have shown that Neanderthal genes comprise some 1 to 4% of the genome of present-day humans whose ancestors migrated out of Africa, but the question remained open on how much those genes are still actively influencing human traits — until now.
A multi-institution research team including Cornell has developed a new suite of computational genetic tools to…
Heather Ainsworth/provided
Carley Robinson ’20 is directing the play “Fertile Grounds” for Ithaca’s Civic Ensemble.
On June 2, the Ithaca theater organization Civic Ensemble will premiere “Fertile Grounds,” a community-based play that invites the audience onto a fictional farming cooperative involving people of color to explore the relationship of grief, community and wellness.
The opening marks the continuation of the ensemble’s longstanding collaboration with Cornell – and the professional directing debut…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Students line up for recognition at the 2023 Ph.D. Recognition Ceremony on May 27 at Barton Hall.
Cornell’s newest doctoral graduates have completed one significant milestone, but their journey as scholars is only beginning, President Martha E. Pollack said to nearly 350 candidates waiting to cross the stage and be recognized at the 2023 Ph.D. Recognition Ceremony on May 27 at Barton Hall.
“This isn’t the first time you’ve stood in a cap and gown, with an achievement behind you and new…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Steve Strogatz brings math alive through engaged learning techniques in his class, Mathematical Explorations.
Bolstering its commitment to broader engagement, the College of Arts and Sciences has established the Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics.
Distinguished mathematician, award-winning teacher and well-known science communicator Steven Strogatz has been appointed as the inaugural holder of the chair. The professorship,…
More than 25 years ago, Professor Steven Strogatz and then-graduate student Duncan Watts, Ph.D. ’97, embarked on research so daring in its interdisciplinarity, and so broad in its reach, that at first they didn’t tell anyone about it.
The problem they were working on involved “six degrees of separation” – the idea that any one person in the world could connect to any other…
Dave Burbank for Cornell University
Abraham Sinfort ’23 speaks May 23 at the 35th Merrill Presidential Scholars ceremony.
Abraham Sinfort ’23 credits his high school humanities teacher, Louis Frederick, with giving him confidence to think critically about information that transcends subject material.
“Mr. Frederick’s amazing mentorship was not limited to our classroom learning experiences, and instead extended to our interactions with him in the hallways, during this lunch break, and even on the subway ride home,…
When a devastating heat wave hit the Pacific Ocean between 2013 and 2016, biologists documented sharp declines in many marine creatures, including the iconic humpback whale: Whale abundance near southeastern Alaska during and after the heat wave dropped by 56% and still hasn’t recovered to 2013 levels.
A team of Cornell researchers and external partners now seeks to understand how…
Savan DeSouza/Provided
Graduate student Sam Levenson, left, and CLASSE Research Associate Matt Andorf show off the HERACLES beamline in Newman Lab.
Cornell is breaking new ground in electron beam research with the HERACLES beamline, a state-of-the-art electron gun that mimics the harsh environments of the world’s largest particle colliders. Originally designed during the university's Energy Recovery Linac program, the electron gun at the heart of HERACLES has set records for photoinjector current, allowing researchers to study cathodes that…
Generative artificial intelligence – popularized in 2022 by Open AI’s ChatGPT application – threatens to undermine trust in democracies when misused, but may also be harnessed for public good, Sarah Kreps told the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) during a public meeting May 19.
Kreps, the John L. Wetherill Professor in the…
Serge Petchenyi / Cornell University
Students participate in an in-class discussion.
In 2022, the Active Learning Initiative (ALI) invited applications for the new Active Learning Postdoctoral Fellowship program from all departments within Cornell. The three-year grants support a teaching postdoc to work with a team of faculty members in departments who want to introduce active learning into their courses. Departments can apply for the new grants when the application cycle opens…
Neurons in a key area of the brain have different functions based on their exact genetic identity, and understanding this diversity could lead to better understanding of the brain’s computational flexibility and memory capacity, potentially informing disease treatment options, Cornell researchers report in a new study.
Pyramidal cells in the CA1 region of the hippocampus, once thought to…
Laura Chichisan/College of Arts and Sciences
The New Frontier Grant-funded project “The Biopolitics of Global Health After Covid” will consider health at the world-wide scale
Could tiny robots help perform surgery? How do memories form? Does a father’s touch influence a child’s social brain? What is the Covid-19 pandemic’s effect on the practice of global health? How can better scientific tools give insight into human history and conflict – and into the early universe?
Faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences will delve into these questions and more…
Orinoco14/Creative Commons license 2.0
Protein crystals
A new method for analyzing protein crystals – developed by Cornell researchers and given a funky two-part name – could open up applications for new drug discovery and other areas of biotechnology and biochemistry.
The development, outlined in a paper published March 3 in Nature Communications, provides researchers with the tools to interpret the once-discarded data from X-ray…
A. Flecker/Cornell University
Aquaculture ponds near Iquitos, Peru, July 2022
A new cycle of seed grants from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies will help faculty from six colleges across Cornell tackle issues ranging from the health of endangered wild dogs to the spread of misinformation through social media.
From the College of Arts and Sciences, Caitlín Barrett, associate professor of classics, will explore the domestic impact of Roman imperialism…
Roger Theise for Cornell University
Misha Inniss-Thompson ’16, assistant research professor of psychology, gave the keynote address at the Office of Academic Diversity Initiatives’ annual Honors Award Ceremony on May 5 in the Statler Hotel.
Samantha Huanca ’23 remembers feeling overwhelmed on North Campus on the first day of her freshman year. As the first person in her family to go to college, she said, she could not look to relatives for guidance, only comfort.
“So I completely relied on myself that year,” she said. “And on the challenging days, I would tell myself, ‘Just fake it ’til you make it.’” That approach offered only…
Eun-Ah Kim, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Google researchers report the first demonstration of two-dimensional particles, called non-Abelian anyons, that are the key ingredient for realizing topological quantum computing, a promising method of introducing fault resistance to quantum computing.
“Non-Abelian Braiding of Graph Vertices in a Superconducting…
Two Cornell faculty members are among 31 early-career academics from across the U.S. who have been named Freeman Hrabowski Scholars by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), in recognition of their potential to become leaders in their research fields and to create diverse, equitable and inclusive lab environments where everyone can thrive.
The inaugural cohort of Freeman Hrabowski…
Three students and a recent graduate have won national scholarships that will prepare them for future global leadership and careers in STEM and public service.
A fifth student received an honorable mention.
You Min (Steve) Choi ’21 and Liam Galey ’23 were elected to join the eighth cohort of Schwarzman Scholars, a program that nurtures a network of future global leaders.
Colin…
People who refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19 had low levels of social trust, weak attachments to the rule of law, and were less willing to honor collective commitments to the greater good, according to Cornell research published today.
Researchers Sarah Kreps and Douglas Kriner surveyed residents of Italy who went unvaccinated, despite strong government policies and penalties…
NASA/CXC/SAO/IXPE
This image of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, the first object observed by NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) satellite, combines some of the first X-ray data collected by IXPE, shown in magenta, with high-energy X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, in blue. The satellite later detected polarized X-rays from 4U 0142+61, a highly magnetized neutron star located in the Cassiopeia constellation.
A “beautiful effect” predicted by quantum electrodynamics (QED) can explain the puzzling first observations of polarized X-rays emitted by a magnetar – a neutron star featuring a powerful magnetic field, according to a Cornell astrophysicist.
The extremely dense and hot remnant of a massive star, boasting a magnetic field 100 trillion times stronger than Earth’s, was expected to generate…
A soil scientist, a virologist, a molecular biologist and a biophysicist are Cornell’s 2023 electees to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the academy announced May 2 at the close of its 160th annual meeting.
The newly elected members are: Johannes Lehmann, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor, School of Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Sciences Section, in the College of…
New grants from the Cornell Center for Social Sciences (CCSS) will fund research ranging from exploring why people spread polarizing content online to assessing health care access in rural New York.
CCSS recently awarded 19 grants across 15 departments and seven colleges. These awards include funding for a conference, a superdepartment grant supporting collaboration in psychology,…
Provided.
An SEM image shows an origami tetrahedra microstructure that self-folded after it was exposed to hydrogen.
A Cornell-led collaboration harnessed chemical reactions to make microscale origami machines self-fold – freeing them from the liquids in which they usually function, so they can operate in dry environments and at room temperature.
The approach could one day lead to the creation of a new fleet of tiny autonomous devices that can rapidly respond to their chemical environment.
The group’s…
Provided.
This image schematically shows the measurement principle. A flake of an atomically thin superconductor (shown in purple) on a substrate is patterned into a disk and covered by a spin-coated ionic gel. The pickup loop of the magnetic probe (shown in silver), with a concentric field coil (shown in dark gray) is approached to the sample. A current in the field coil produces a magnetic field, which results in an opposing screening current in the superconducting sample. The strength of the screening current is
Using state-of-the-art magnetic imaging, a Cornell-led collaboration has for the first time characterized a key property of the superconducting state of a class of atomically thin materials that are too difficult to measure due to their minuscule size.
The group’s paper, “Superfluid Response of an Atomically Thin Gate-Tuned van der Waals Superconductor,” published April 12 in Nature…
Increasing women’s representation in science, technology, engineering and math majors will reduce – but not nearly eliminate – gender disparities in STEM occupations, Cornell sociologists report in new research.
Overall, 36% of the gender segregation seen among college-educated workers is tied to their undergraduate degrees, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of that relationship…
The creation of slave laws throughout the antebellum South can be traced back to the legal system in Virginia. By investigating a wide range of documents and records from that era, Tamika Nunley, associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, shows how enslaved women and girls reckoned with the state’s legal system in her new book, “The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women…
Dean Ray Jayawardhana (left) moderates “Transcending Echo Chambers: Political Polarization and the Media” with panelists Andrew Morse ’96, S. E. Cupp ’00, Matthew Hiltzik ’94; and Alexandra Cirone, assistant professor of government.
While media outlets have done their part to amplify polarization across the U.S., journalists also have the resources to mend rifts and build community, alumni media professionals and faculty experts said during a lively panel discussion April 19.
The panel, “Transcending Echo Chambers: Political Polarization and the Media,” was the centerpiece of Andrew Morse’s residency as Zubrow…
New research from a multi-disciplinary team helps to illuminate the mechanisms behind circadian rhythms, offering new hope for dealing with jet lag, insomnia and other sleep disorders.
Using innovative cryo-electron microscopy techniques, the researchers have identified the structure of the circadian rhythm photosensor and its target in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), one of the…
Happiness can’t be bought, but nor does it depend mostly on one’s mindset, as many happiness surveys would suggest, according to a recent study by Cornell psychology researchers.
They find that objective circumstances and behaviors, such as wealth and health, influence happiness as much as subjective psychological traits, like an outgoing nature.
Their analysis shows that surveys…
Gallows humor has a long and useful history, helping people to cope with terrible circumstances. In his new book, “Stay Cool: Why Dark Comedy Matters in the Fight Against Climate Change,” Aaron Sachs, professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, demonstrates how laughter can give you strength to persevere even when things seem most hopeless.
Sachs uses the comedic traditions of…
People today work substantially less than they did generations ago – not just because they have more money, but because of the virtually unlimited trove of cheap entertainment increasingly at their fingertips, according to new research co-authored by a Cornell economist.
From movies streamed on high-definition TVs to games played on smart phones, the researchers find that rapidly falling…
In her new book, “Subsurface,” Karen Pinkus, professor of Romance studies and comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences, confronts the global threat of climate change by using select literary works from the 19th century to delve underneath comfortable narrative layers and complacent ecological modes.
The book, published April 2023 by University of Minnesota Press, explores key…
Provided
An exhibition focused on Pliny the Elder at Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.
“The entirety of nature is gathered together in her tiniest creations,” Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) wrote in his magnum opus, “The Natural History.”
To bring to life this epic, 37-volume text that’s been called the first encyclopedia, an exhibition at Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art gathers together art and objects from many of the university’s collections, as well as pieces from…
Provided
A scene from Austin Bunn’s new short film “Campfire.”
A trio of short films showing the pleasures – and perils – of rural life for LGBTQ+ people will show April 26 as part of the Rural Humanities Initiative in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The three works created by Austin Bunn, associate professor of performing and media arts, include “Campfire,” which premiered last month, as well as “Lavender Hill” and “In the Hollow.”
“OUT HERE: 3…
Riche Richardson
"Love Always: Timeless Toni Morrison" (2021)
Cornell University Library has launched a new exhibit that celebrates the African American tradition of quilt making as expressions of artistry, history and community.
The exhibit, “Ties that Bind: Quilting at the Clarke Africana Library,” is open through June 12, at the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library.
The first section of the exhibit, “Precious Scraps: Toni…
In recognition of outstanding work from across the university, the David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement has given Community-Engaged Practice and Innovation Awards to 13 faculty members, one from each college and school.
New this year, these awards celebrate faculty who have recently developed community-engaged learning, leadership or research activities that create curricular and…
Time Magazine has named Britney Schmidt, associate professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences and Earth and atmospheric sciences in Cornell Engineering, to the 2023 list of the world’s 100 most influential people – a list which also includes President Joe Biden, Beyonce and actors Ke Huy Quan and Pedro Pascal.
Each year, the Time100 features people who have changed the…
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…
Steve Jurvetson/Creative Commons license 2.0
Quantum computer component
Some classical computers have error correction built into their memories based on bits; quantum computers, to be workable in the future, will need error correction mechanisms, too, based on the vastly more sensitive qubits.
Cornell researchers have recently taken a step toward fault-tolerant quantum computing: they constructed a simple model containing exotic particles called non-Abelian…
Jay Potter/Cornell University
Bench honoring Hu Shih
In admiration of the contributions of Hu Shih 1914, friends and alumni of Cornell funded an outdoor seating area for quiet and contemplation on the banks of Beebe Lake. A stone bench and interpretive sign invite community members to the northwest corner of Beebe Lake, where they can learn more about Hu Shih.
After graduating from Cornell, Hu Shih led a literary movement that helped transform…
Noël Heaney/Cornell University
Ben Cosgrove, associate professor of biomedical engineering
A Cornell multidisciplinary research center that studies chronic fatigue syndrome has received a five-year, $9.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease – funding that will enable experts from disparate fields to work together on the mysterious and debilitating condition.
The Cornell Center for Enervating Neuroimmune Disease,…
Ryan Young/Cornell University
Florencia Ardón (center), founder of Neurodiversity @ Cornell and staff member in the Learning Strategies Center, with neurodiversity ambassadors Carol Anne Barsody M.A. ’23 (left), master’s student in archeology, and Becca McCabe, doctoral student in mechanical engineering, in Duffield Hall
For her master’s project in archeology at Cornell, Carol Anne Barsody M.A. ’23 assembled and led a large interdisciplinary team of researchers to investigate and solve the mystery of a mummified bird that had been kept in Cornell’s archives for decades, a project which required speaking and collaborating with dozens of specialists from across departments and from outside Cornell.
Many of those…
Mary Ann Nevins Radzinowicz, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of English Literature Emerita in the College of Arts and Sciences, died March 15 in Ballyvaughan, Ireland. She was 97.
A noted Milton scholar who also worked on modern poetry and American literature, Radzinowicz taught at Cornell starting in 1980, after a 20-year academic career in Great Britain. Colleagues and former students…
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,…
Jebulon/Creative Commons license 1.0
Statue of Cicero, Courthouse, Rome, Italy
A theory of religion considered “modern” by many scholars was actually described 1,700 years ago, according to new research by Toni Alimi, a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in classics and philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Soon after 303 A.D., the scholar Lactantius argued in “Divine Institutes” for the philosophical validity of Christianity. Alimi identifies three features of so…
Evangeline Shaw/Unsplash
Being a woman or racial minority can help someone stand out when few others look like them but they are more likely to be confused in settings where others share the same attributes.
At an academic conference some years ago, Michèle Belot remembers talking with a participant who was convinced she had authored a research paper that wasn’t hers. He’d confused her with another female scholar, an experience she said is familiar to many colleagues.
Such incidents – plus awareness of her own imperfect memory – inspired Belot, a professor in the Department of Economics, to…
Roberto Leon chose Cornell because of its reputation for interdisciplinary work.
Sumajja Denysuik connected with “any person ... any study.”
Maddox Feldbaum was impressed with the Department of Classics and its collection of statues and frescoes.
They are among the 4,994 students admitted to the Class of 2027 – 3,324 of whom were notified on March 30 of their regular decision…
