The enzyme sirtuin 6, or SIRT6, serves many key biological functions in regulating genome stability, DNA repair, metabolism and longevity, but how its multiple enzyme activities relate to its various functions is poorly understood.
America has been talking about racial segregation and its effects for decades. Now another kind of separation is grinding away at America’s neighborhoods: income segregation, where people are separated by their wealth, or lack of it.
Professor Emerita of English Carol V. Kaske, who taught at Cornell for 40 years, died June 15 at Cayuga Medical Center. She was 83.A respected and influential scholar, she specialized in English literature of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. She first taught at Cornell in 1963, was named a full professor in 1992 and retired in 2003.
If you’re expecting to hear from aliens from across the universe, it could be a while.Deconstructing the Fermi paradox and pairing it with the mediocrity principle into a fresh equation, Cornell astronomers say extraterrestrials likely won’t phone home – or Earth – for 1,500 years.
Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future(ACSF) has given $1.5 million from its Academic Venture Fund to a record 14 new university projects. This marks the third consecutive year ACSF has granted more than $1 million.
"This is an exciting moment for Jewish studies,” said Gretchen Ritter, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences, in her introduction to a Reunion Weekend panel on “Jewish Studies at Cornell, Today and Tomorrow,” held June 10 in the Physical Sciences Building.The panel included Jonathan Boyarin, Jewish Studies Program director, and Kim Haines-Eitzen, incoming director of the Religious Studies Program.
By tweaking just one or two genes, Cornell researchers have altered the patterns on a butterfly’s wings. It’s not just a new art form, but a major clue to understanding how the butterflies have evolved, and perhaps to how color patterns – and other patterns and shapes – have evolved in other species.The genes in question are especially interesting because they have been “co-opted” – they previously did some other job at a different place in the development process.
The Atlantic Philanthropies, created by Charles F. Feeney ’56, made its very first grant in 1982 to Cornell University. By the end of this year, the foundation will conclude its grant-making, realizing the full impact of the foundation’s largesse within its founder’s lifetime and fulfilling Feeney’s commitment to “Giving While Living.”
"Barbarians Rising,” a new History Channel series, dramatizes the stories of nine of history’s greatest warriors as they fight for freedom – and to ensure accuracy the filmmakers turned to Barry Strauss, Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies.
College of Arts and Sciences faculty member Sarah Murray received the Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists, and Linda Nicholson received the Robert A. and Donna B. Paul Academic Advising Award in the College of Arts and Sciences at a May 28 trustee-faculty dinner which recognized universitywide teaching and advising and newly tenured faculty.
Two of the country’s foremost constitutional scholars – Michael Klarman and Michael Dorf – offered their thoughts on the history of the U.S. Constitution at a panel during the May 26 Klarman Hall dedication.Interim President Hunter Rawlings, Cornell president emeritus and professor emeritus of classics, opened the panel he moderated with reflections on James Madison, America’s “greatest scholar-president.”
In recent years, Cornell has amassed an impressive stable of experts in an emerging field for modern times: The ecology and evolution of infectious disease.
“Me, my partner and [Flaubert’s] ‘Sentimental Education’ were on vacation in the south of France. And it wasn’t pretty,” said literary theorist Paul Fleming during the May 26 “Transformative Humanities: Faculty Reflections on Life-Changing Creative Works” panel celebrating the dedication of Klarman Hall.
Deputy Provost John Siliciano presented Cornell faculty members Sahara Byrne, (Kit-Yee) Daisy Fan, María Cristina García and James P. Lassoie with 2016 Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Awards May 28 at a trustee-faculty dinner.
In the face of scientific dogma that faults the population decline of monarch butterflies on a lack of milkweed, herbicides and genetically modified crops, a new Cornell study casts wider blame: sparse autumnal nectar sources, weather and habitat fragmentation.
Jason Lefkovitz invited his high school history teacher, David Miles, to join him at the 28th annual Merrill Presidential Scholars Convocation luncheon.He also invited Ronald Ehrenberg, the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics, as each of the 33 Merrill scholars was asked to bring to the event two teachers who have made a great impact on their lives, academic and otherwise. Nine of the scholars are Arts & Sciences students.
A 10-day journey to cities in the Brazilian rainforest gave students a firsthand look at the complex conditions of urbanization in the Amazon. The field trip in March, part of the spring seminar Forest Cartographies, focused on issues of community, housing, resettlement, deforestation, political ecology, anthropology and archaeology.
In the early 1970s, in the basement of Clark Hall, the Cornell team of professors David Lee and Robert Richardson, along with then-graduate student Douglas Osheroff, first observed superfluid helium-3. For that breakthrough, the catalyst for further research into low-temperature physics, the trio was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics.
Kendra Bischoff, assistant professor of sociology and the Richard and Jacqueline Emmet Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been chosen as a 2016 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.The $70,000 fellowships are the oldest source of support for education research, nationally and internationally, for those who have recently earned doctoral degrees.
The geologic shape of what were once shorelines through Mars’ northern plains convinces scientists that two large meteorites – hitting the planet millions of years apart – triggered a pair of mega-tsunamis. These gigantic waves forever scarred the Martian landscape and yielded evidence of cold, salty oceans conducive to sustaining life.
The real estate maxim about the importance of location is true for teenagers too. Their intellectual and physical health depends on location, location, location.Teens living in disadvantaged neighborhoods face a higher risk of obesity and reduced cognitive ability, according to new research by a Cornell sociologist. In addition, adolescent girls in the most disadvantaged environments are more likely than boys to become obese, he found.
Searching vast cosmic communities like real estate agents rifling through listings, Cornell astronomers now hunt through time and space for habitable exoplanets – planets beyond our own solar system – looking at planets flourishing in old star, red giant neighborhoods.Astronomers search for these promising worlds by looking for the “habitable zone,” the region around a star in which water on a planet’s surface is liquid and signs of life can be remotely detected by telescopes.
Hirokazu Miyazaki, professor of anthropology and director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, is the program chair for this year’s Society for Cultural Anthropology biennial meeting at Cornell May 13-14.
When she was growing up in Harlem, Ginger So ’79 walked 10 blocks each way once a week to borrow books from the public library.In those books, she saw photographs of an America she did not know – an America of houses with white picket fences – and images of other countries. Her reading made her want to travel, so she followed the advice of her mother and studied hard, gained entrance to a good high school and later was admitted to Cornell.
At a May 2 reception and award presentation, the first cohort of Ewing Family Service Award recipients presented updates on their projects to 40 students, faculty, staff and members of the Ewing Family.Established in fall 2015 to support Cornell’s commitment to innovation in community engagement, the Ewing Family Service Award provides up to $2,000 per project to foster student, faculty or staff leadership and social responsibility in the Cornell campus community.
Professor of performing and media arts Bruce Levitt is the inaugural recipient of Cornell’s Engaged Scholar Prize, Vice Provost Judith Appleton announced May 11.
The Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future (ACSF) has announced 10 faculty-in-residence fellows in the social sciences, humanities and arts for 2016-17.
Cornell astrophysicists Saul Teukolsky and Lawrence Kidder have earned a share in the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics – a $3 million award – that recognizes those who helped create the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and its ability to find gravitational waves. The discovery announced in February provided strong confirmation of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
Katja C. Nowack, assistant professor of physics in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, has been selected by the Department of Energy (DOE) to receive $750,000 for research over five years as part of DOE’s Early Career Research Program for her research project, “Magnetic Imaging of Topological Phases of Matter.”
Once a popular pastime, bee hunting involves capturing and feeding wild bees, then releasing and following them back to their hive.The practice is little-known today, but bee expert Thomas D. Seeley – the Horace White Professor in Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences and author of several books on honeybees – has just published a book that offers insights into the history and science of bee hunting.
A conspicuous miniature wagon is parked in Willard Straight Hall’s browsing library. In the vintage Straight interior surrounded by sculptures, paintings and scale-model ships, the antique-looking wooden wagon might seem like a part of an exposition on rural life in 18th-century Britain. But the wagon is no exhibition piece; it’s the home of a student-founded, self-funded independent community book exchange.
Following the April 2015 Nepal earthquake that killed more than 8,000 people, Maya Devi Neupane, president of the United Women’s Savings and Credit Cooperative, said her Kaule community on the Phyukhri Ridge “felt orphaned, abandoned.”She continued, “The earthquake destroyed our homes and our [Women’s Cooperative] building. We had to take shelter in the plastic greenhouse ‘tunnels’ where we had begun a tomato-growing project.”
Noliwe Rooks, associate professor of Africana studies and feminist, gender and sexuality studies, and director of graduate studies at theAfricana Studies and Research Center, and Bryan Duff, senior lecturer in education, received the
Jim can feel the eyes of his classmates. He stays up nights reading his law books. He knows the information. None of that matters now. What matters is he’s the only black man in a classroom of white eyes and it consumes him. He feels branded.He starts to talk. His voice trembles. He stutters. His mind goes blank. He fails, again. He can’t exactly explain why.
At the Central New York THAT (The Humanities and Technology) Camp held in Olin Library, there were no official presenters, while participants voted on workshop topics and met in collaborative sessions.The informal structure suited the subject matter, since digital humanities is a relatively new and rapidly evolving field.
Four Cornell faculty members. including two from the College of Arts & Sciences, are among 213 national and international scholars, artists, philanthropists and business leaders elected new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
