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.
Graduate student Tonia Ko’s career as a young composer and artist has hit a new level, with several recent international honors, concert commissions and performance premieres, including a piece performed on bubble wrap.
Ko, 26, was one of nine recipients of the 63rd annual BMI Student Composer Awards, held May 18 in New York City. The winners ranged in age from 14 to 26.
Growing up in Ethiopia in the early 1980s and coming to the United States as a young teenager in 1989, Dagmawi Woubshet witnessed unprecedented expressions of mourning and loss in both countries in response to the AIDS crisis.
To sort out the biological intricacies of Earth-like planets, astronomers have developed computer models that examine how ultraviolet radiation from other planets’ nearby suns may affect those worlds, according to new research published June 10 in Astrophysical Journal.
What does it take to reverse a first impression? Cornell researchers were especially interested in implicit impressions – rapidly and uncontrollably activated positive and negative evaluations of others. Implicit impressions are assumed to be very difficult to revise.
Editors and other language mavens have long recognized that sentences containing subject relative clauses – as in, “The man who called the woman is friendly” – are easier to understand than those containing object relative clauses, such as, “The man who the woman called is friendly.” And indeed, this observation is borne out in laboratory experiments with French, English, German and many other European languages.
Cornell chemists William Dichtel and Jiwoong Park have received Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) awards. The highly competitive program supports research teams working in more than one traditional science or engineering discipline to accelerate breakthroughs in basic research.
This year, the DOD awarded 22 MURI grants totaling $149 million over the next five years.
Next time you’re in a cocktail party discussion about science fiction, you’ll have a lot to brag about. The university has produced more than its share of notables in the field, including several mainstream names.
While looking for life on planets beyond our own solar system, a group of international scientists has created a colorful catalog containing reflection signatures of Earth life forms that might be found on planet surfaces throughout the cosmic hinterlands. The new database and research, published in the March 16 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), gives humans a better chance to learn if we are not alone.
During an inspiring, humorous and highly candid talk to more than 420 people Sept. 18, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg shared how Cornell shaped her journey to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Saul Teukolsky and other physicists at Cornell, MIT and elsewhere have confirmed Hawking's area theorem for the first time, using observations of gravitational waves.
Grobe, a PhD student in English language and literatures, takes an interdisciplinary approach to teaching spurred by his research focusing on documentary poetry and film.
