Wealth and income disparities present problems everywhere, but they are especially acute in Africa, where 330 million people survive on less than $1.25 a day.
Scholars are using websites, vlogs, information comics and PechaKuchas to reach wider audiences than journal articles that sometimes baffle the general public.
In an effort to settle the debate about the origin of dog domestication, a technique that uses 3-D scans of fossils is helping researchers determine the difference between dogs and wolves.
After 360 engine burns, 2.5 million executed commands, 635 gigabytes of gathered data, 162 moon flybys, 4.9 billion miles traveled and 3,948 published papers, NASA’s 20-year Cassini spacecraft ran the last lap of its historic scientific mission Sept. 15.
Slavery in West Africa has an ancient lineage dating to biblical times. Sandra Greene’s new book, “Slave Owners of West Africa: Decision Making in the Age of Abolition,” explores the lives of three prominent West African slave owners during the age of abolition in the 19th century.
Martha E. Pollack plumbed the depths of Cornell history and spoke to current times in her inaugural address Aug. 25, following her installation as the university’s 14th president.Quoting a speech written during the dark days of World War II by Cornell historian Carl Becker, Pollack said there is just as much need today for universities to “maintain and promote the humane and rational values” that preserve democratic society.
In a new opinion piece in a major publication, Morten Christiansen, professor of psychology, describes how the study of language has fragmented into many highly-specialized areas of study that tend not to talk to each other. He calls for a new era of integration in the paper, published July 31 in Nature Human Behaviour.
“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.
When Saurabh Mehta started working as a physician in India, he concentrated on treating sick patients. Now he takes a broader approach to such infectious diseases as tuberculosis and HIV.
The Department of Performing and Media Arts (PMA) celebrates the reopening of Schwartz Plaza, Aug. 26 at noon in front of the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.
Since its inception in 2010, the Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences has helped to digitize items in Cornell’s collections, from punk music flyers to historic glacial images of Alaska and Greenland to
On the eve of fall semester classes starting, Cornellians spied the sky – with special safety glasses – to view the partial solar eclipse Aug. 21 over Ithaca.
Cornell Botanic Gardens opens its annual Fall Lecture Series with award-winning poet Ishion Hutchinson on Wednesday, August 30, at 5:30 p.m. in Call Auditorium, followed by a garden party at Cornell Botanic Gardens.
Fourteen Cornell students and recent alumni are setting out this fall for destinations around the world, thanks to grants from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program.
Give your medicine a jolt. By using a technique that combines electricity and chemistry, future pharmaceuticals – including many of the top prescribed medications in the United States – soon may be easily scaled up to be manufactured in a more sustainable way. This new Cornell research appears in Science Aug. 11.
Whether they served in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps or Coast Guard, the 15 veterans and reservists of the first 2017 Warrior-Scholar Project (WSP) class agreed they gained a greater appreciation for democracy in the United States by seeing people from other countries aspire to a way of life many Americans take for granted.
One of the goals of personalized medicine is to be able to determine which treatment would work best by sequencing a patient’s genome. New research from the lab of Yimon Aye, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, could help make that approach a reality.
Cornell chemists have uncovered a fresh role for nitric oxide that could send biochemical textbooks back for revision.They have identified a critical step in the nitrification process, which is partly responsible for agricultural emissions of harmful nitrous oxide and its chemical cousins into the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change.
Thirteen students participating in federally funded TRIO programs at Cornell, including two in the College of Arts & Sciencs, went to Capitol Hill June 28-29 and met with their members of Congress and legislative staff to advocate for the programs.
Humans aren’t the only actors on the planet. To avoid being eaten, the ant-mimicking jumping spider pretends to be an ant, according to Cornell research published July 12 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
When Cornell physicists Robert Richardson, David Lee and Douglas Osheroff received the 1996 Nobel Prize for their discovery of the superfluid state of liquid helium, it was only the beginning. Now a new team of Cornell researchers, building on that work, have found new complexities in the phenomenon, with implications for the study of superconductivity and theoretical models of the origin of the universe.
Analyzing pigments in medieval illuminated manuscript pages at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source(CHESS) is opening up some new areas of research bridging the arts and sciences.
The devil on your right shoulder is telling you, “Go ahead, grab that candy bar! You know you want it!”Meanwhile, the angel on your left is gently saying, “The apple is a much healthier option, isn’t it?”
With the introduction of CBETA, the Cornell-Brookhaven ERL Test Accelerator, Cornell University and Brookhaven National Laboratory scientists are following up on the concept of energy-recovering particle accelerators first introduced by physicist Maury Tigner at Cornell more than 50 years ago.
Solitary waves – known as solitons – appear in many forms. Perhaps the most recognizable is the tsunami, which forms following a disruption on the ocean floor and can travel, unabated, at high speeds for hundreds of miles.
By taking a series of near-atomic resolution snapshots, Cornell and Harvard Medical School scientists have observed step-by-step how bacteria defend against foreign invaders such as bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria.The process they observed uses CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) sites, where the cell’s DNA can be snipped to insert additional DNA.
Cornell astronomers gathered atop Mount Pleasant at sunset June 25 to honor one of their own. The 25-inch reflecting telescope at the university’s Hartung-Boothroyd Observatory was named in memory of the late James R. Houck.
On June 16-17, the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR) held a symposium in the Physical Sciences Building to explore using origami to create machines at the micron scale using atomically thin materials.
Alexander Hayes ’03, M.Eng ‘03, assistant professor of astronomy, and Katherine Kinzler, associate professor of psychology and human development, are among 52 scientists under the age of 40 named Young Scientists 2017 by the World Economic Forum (WEF), “the most forward-thinking a
On the heels of President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, a new Cornell study finds that climate-science labels do matter.The U.S. public doubts the existence of “global warming” more than it doubts “climate change” – and Republicans are driving the effect, the research found.
Disappearing ozone, rising seas and a world of environmental strife have forced all of the globe’s citizens to great underground cities – powered by renewable energy. It’s quite the fictional vision.For Cornell’s 2017 Imagining Energy Futures: Undergraduate Science, Art and Design competition, the fictional short story “Underground: Project Gaia” by Reade Otto-Moudry ’17, Kayla Aulenbach ‘19 and Ashley Herzig ’18 won the $500 top prize.
As nations search for ways to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, the long-simmering debate over nuclear power has heated up. Nuclear advocates, opponents and governments argue over nearly every aspect of the technology, from the cost of construction to the challenge of waste storage to the industry’s relationship with nuclear weapons programs.
Clifford J. Earle, professor emeritus of mathematics, whose nearly 40-year tenure at Cornell included three years as chair of the math department, died June 12 at Hospicare in Ithaca. He was 81.Born Nov. 3, 1935, in Racine, Wisconsin, Earle earned his bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in 1957, and his master’s (1958) and doctorate (1962) from Harvard University.
Assistant professors Jeremy Baskin, from the College of Arts and Sciences, and Pamela Chang, from the College of Veterinary Medicine, are among eight assistant professors across the nation to be named a Beckman Young Investigator, a prize is given to promising young faculty members in the early stages of their academic careers in the chemical and life sciences.
Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future has named eight social sciences, humanities and arts (SSHA) fellows for the 2017-18 academic year. The fellows, who come from across the university, will add distinctive perspectives to the arena of sustainability by reshaping behaviors, imaginations and minds through their research, said David Lodge, the Atkinson Center’s Francis J. DiSalvo Director.
Faculty experts looked at current and historical migration and refugee issues from local, national and international perspectives, and the impacts for Cornell from potential immigration policy changes, at a forum June 10 in Statler Auditorium as part of Cornell Reunion 2017.
By tagging a cell’s proteins with fluorescent beacons, Cornell researchers have found out how E. coli bacteria defend themselves against antibiotics and other poisons. Probably not good news for the bacteria.When undesirable molecules show up, the bacterial cell opens a tunnel though its cell wall and “effluxes,” or pumps out, the intruders.
Mathematicians often struggle with the idea of communication – to the rest of the world, and even with each other – but a recently secured grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will help math “evangelist” Steven Strogatz and his colleagues tackle that problem.
The Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future’s Academic Venture Fund awarded $1.8 million in 2017, with a record 15 grants to seed novel approaches to some of the world’s greatest sustainability challenges.
Vernacular language scholar John Rickford and Indian architect and educator Brinda Somaya have been named Andrew Dickson White Professors-at-Large for six-year terms effective July 1.The appointments were approved by President Martha E. Pollack and the Cornell University Board of Trustees at their May meeting. Faculty members nominate candidates, and a faculty selection committee reviews and recommends the appointments.
