Thanks to nearly 300 solar panels installed on both buildings in mid-December, the sun’s rays hitting the roof on Cornell’s Human Ecology Building and Klarman Hall now produce energy.
Paul Mutolo ’94 harnesses the hydrogen future, bringing it to bear on the carbon present: For his TEDx Chemung River talk in November, Mutolo, director of external partnerships at Cornell’s Energy Materials Center, imagined a world where cars no longer use oil. “There would be no smog in our cities. There would be no wars over oil-rich regions.
College of Arts and Sciences faculty and graduate students have until Jan. 31 to apply for grants to digitize their hidden treasures and make them freely available around the world.
Pianist Yujin "Stacy" Joo '16 won the 12th annual Cornell Concerto Competition Dec. 13 for her performance of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, Op. 26, Mvt. 1, accompanied by Blaise Bryski. A chemistry and biology major in the College of Arts and Sciences, Joo has played piano for ensembles including the orchestra, wind symphony and a cover band.
Benedict Anderson, a Cornell professor emeritus in government who wrote “Imagined Communities,” the book that set the pace for the academic study of nationalism, died Dec. 13 in East Java, Indonesia. He was 79.
Anderson, the Aaron L. Binenkorb Emeritus Professor of International Studies, taught at Cornell from 1967 to 2002.
For scholars from underrepresented minority groups, the concept of selection in academia and professional education is inseparable from historic and contemporary realities of exclusion and marginalization.
Explaining the complexities of this selection was the main theme of the Fall Diversity in Scholarship and Engagement Symposium keynote speech, delivered by sociologist Steven E. Alvarado, Dec. 7 in Warren Hall.
Wendy Leutert, a doctoral candidate in the field of government and international relations, has won a 2015-16 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. A total of 86 fellowships were awarded this year.
From Bronze Age traditions of mortuary ritual and divination to current controversies over flag pins and Predator drones, a new book by anthropology professor Adam Smith sheds light on how material goods authorize and defend political order.
If your kids ever brought home some Oobleck from school, you had a glimpse of a long-standing scientific controversy. Next time, you can just have fun with it, knowing that the argument is over. Cornell physicists have finally explained what makes Oobleck so weird.
“Fiction can transform a particular history into art of universal significance,” author and Kappa Alpha Professor of English Robert Morgan said Nov. 19 in “History and Fiction: The Growth of an Artist – Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set A Watchman’,” a talk in Goldwin Smith Hall.
In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, neighbors killed lifelong neighbors, husbands killed wives and parents killed children. It was an intimate conflict, according to Philip Gourevitch ’86, staff writer for The New Yorker and an experienced reporter on the Rwandan genocide.
On a recent trip to Budapest, Malcolm Bilson, the Frederick J. Whiton Professor of Music Emeritus, received The Order of the Hungarian Gold Cross, an award given each year to seven or eight foreigners who are distinguished artists, scientists, writers and others for their contribution to Hungarian intellectual and cultural life.
Professor Emeritus of Music Marice Wilbur Stith, who as director of bands conducted the Cornell University Wind Ensemble and Symphonic Band over his 23-year Cornell career, died Oct. 7 at Cayuga Medical Center after a long illness. He was 89.
Three young Cornell researchers have won National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Awards. Part of the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, the awards provide up to $1.5 million over five years for innovative, high-impact projects.
The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archives is an unparalleled resource of some 53,000 individual testimonies of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Nanjing massacre and the Armenian genocide. Cornell will mark the launch of its access to the archive Tuesday, Nov. 3, with a talk by noted New Yorker columnist and Rwandan genocide expert Philip Gourevitch ’86.
American poet Robert Frost was not above toying with his friends, or his readers. And one of his best-known works may be his grandest joke of all, as detailed in a new book by David Orr, “The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong” (Penguin).
The idea of introducing a novel gene into a few individuals that then spreads through an entire population sounds like a premise for science fiction. And yet fiction can be prophetic. Cornell researchers have used mathematical models to illuminate the promises – and potential problems – of a new genome editing mechanism, called a gene drive.
Grad student Rachel Abbott and undergrads Andy Wong ‘17 and Diamond Oden ‘17 have become experts in identifying various creatures of the Adirondacks – the calanoid copepods that they’re studying, as well as myriad others that were biting them as they spent hours taking water samples in canoes.
To feed the world’s burgeoning population, producers must grow crops in more challenging terrain – where plant roots must cope with barriers. To that end, Cornell University physicists and Boyce Thompson Institute plant biologists have uncovered a valuable plant root action, in that roots – when their downward path is blocked, as often occurs in rocky soil – display a “grow and switch” behavior, now reported in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
To review current astrobiological knowledge and assess the prospects of life beyond Earth, the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology heard testimony Sept. 29 in Washington, D.C., from Cornell’s Jonathan Lunine and three other space experts on the reasons, ways and means for space exploration’s next steps.
When members from the Cornell Glee Club’s 1966 tour of Southeast Asia joined the current singers on stage Sept. 19 at Bailey Hall, passion poured through the music. The audience replied with a standing ovation, making it a Homecoming concert for the ages.
Ithaca is dotted with buried Native American sites, according to Kurt Jordan, associate professor of anthropology in the College of Arts & Sciences, who also has an appointment with theAmerican Indian Program in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Yet these sites are incredibly difficult to comprehend because centuries of residential and commercial development has altered the landscape.
The National Science Foundation has selected the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility (CNF) to be part of the newly established National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI). Cornell will receive $8 million from the federal agency over five years.
A memorial celebration Sept. 12 in Statler Auditorium brought together much of what M.H. “Mike” Abrams cherished – poetry, Elizabethan music, family, friends and colleagues.
William Provine, the Andrew H. and James L. Tisch Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Cornell, died Sept. 1 due to complications from a brain tumor at his home in Horseheads, New York. He was 73.
Provine, a professor of the history of biology in the departments of History and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, was born Feb. 19, 1942, in Nashville, Tennessee.
As a leader in research at the intersection of computer/information science and the social sciences, Cornell has helped to define and create the field of computational social science.
On Sept. 11-12, Cornell will host a conference showcasing cutting-edge research in the field and featuring alumni and other noted scholars in the discipline.
Engaged Cornell has awarded its inaugural Engaged Curriculum Grants to 18 projects initiated by faculty across the university. The grants, totaling $930,299, support work that places community-engaged learning at the heart of the Cornell student experience.
The three co-founders of Novomer, a startup company based on Cornell research, have received the 2016 Kathryn C. Hach Award for Entrepreneurial Success from the American Chemical Society (ACS), the society has announced.
Aby Warburg – whose early 20th-century emphasis on the power of recurrent images was eerily prescient of contemporary thought – died before he could finish his “Mnemosyne Atlas,” consisting of large panels of collages tracing the history of art.
First-year students arriving on campus this week are members of Cornell’s most racially diverse incoming freshman class since the university began keeping records on race in the early 1980s.
The Cornell University Department of English will hold a memorial celebration for M.H. Abrams, the Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus, in Statler Auditorium, Statler Hall at 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 12. The celebration is free and open to the public.
Abrams, a towering figure in literary and cultural studies, died at the age of 102 on April 21, 2015.
For C. Riley Snorton, assistant professor of Africana studies and of feminist, gender and sexuality studies in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, winning a coveted National Endowment for the Humanities-Schomburg Center Scholar-in-Residence fellowship is the chance of a lifetime.
He will examine a topic that has intrigued him since college, when he first self-identified as a transgender person – and write a book about it.
Sibling suns – made famous in the “Star Wars” scene where Luke Skywalker gazes toward a double sunset – and the planets around them may be more common than we’ve thought, and Cornell astronomers are presenting new ideas on how to find them.
