As large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 are further developed, they will naturally become better at using available information to generate useful text on virtually any topic – not only by the phrase or sentence, but by the whole document.
Employing AI to write entire messages in an arena where personal correspondence is both crucial and nearly impossible – representative government …
Darren McGee/NYS Governor’s Office
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, right, and artist Meredith Bergmann discuss the Ruth Bader Ginsburg portrait that will be installed at the Great Western Staircase in the state capitol.
For the first time in 125 years, the face of a celebrated New Yorker will join the pantheon of historic people commemorated at the New York State Capitol’s Great Western Staircase: Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’54, the late associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
“When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked when there would be enough women on the U.S. Supreme Court, she famously replied, ‘When there are…
Anahma Shannon of Kawerak, Inc./Provided
Thomas Urban, research scientist in the College of Arts and Sciences, uses ground-penetrating radar to search for communal graves at Pilgrim Hot Springs in Alaska, in collaboration with employees of the National Park Service and Kawerak, Inc.
A Cornell research scientist, working in partnership with an organization representing a consortium of 20 Native Alaska groups, used ground-penetrating radar and AI modeling to locate the communal graves of approximately 93 victims of the Spanish influenza at Pilgrim Hot Springs on the Seward Peninsula – a finding that helps clarify the historical record for the Indigenous communities…
Female giant African pouched rats, used for sniffing out landmines and detecting tuberculosis, can undergo astounding reproductive organ transformations, according to a new study.
Unlike most female mammals whose vaginal entrance opens before or during puberty and remains that way for the rest of their lives, this rodent’s vaginal entrance remains sealed well into adulthood. It also…
NASA/JPL-Caltech
A ‘hot Jupiter’ called HD 149026b, is about 3 times hotter than the rocky surface of Venus, the hottest planet in our solar system.
Gas giants orbiting our sun show a clear pattern; the more massive the planet, the lower the percentage of “heavy” elements (anything other than hydrogen and helium) in the planet’s atmosphere. But out in the galaxy, the atmospheric compositions of giant planets do not fit the solar system trend, an international team of astronomers has found.
Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST),…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Margaret Rossiter, the Marie Underhill Noll Emerita Professor of the History of Science in the College of Arts and Sciences.
As a graduate student at Yale in 1969, Margaret Rossiter was told by her professors that, up until then, there had been no women involved in scientific research. Disappointed, Rossiter temporarily gave up on the topic and decided to find a man to write about.
“Everything we read about was mostly 19th century and these white men,” said Rossiter, the Marie Underhill Noll Emerita Professor of…
Ryan Young/Cornell University
Darryl Seligman, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, and a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow.
Detected in 2017 and observable for only a few weeks, the first known interstellar object to pass through the solar system confounded astronomers, sparking speculation it could be a giant snowflake, hydrogen iceberg or piece of a Pluto-like planet – even an alien probe, an idea promoted in a best-selling book.
Each theory attempted to resolve an apparent contradiction: How could the…
Natural language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 open new opportunities for malicious actors to influence representative democracy, new Cornell research suggests.
A field experiment investigating how the natural language model GPT-3, the predecessor to the most recently released model, might be used to generate constituent email messages showed that legislators were only slightly less…
Yu-Tsun Shao and David Muller/Provided
A transmission electron microscope image shows the moiré lattice of molybdenum ditelluride and tungsten diselenide.
A model system created by stacking a pair of monolayer semiconductors is giving physicists a simpler way to study confounding quantum behavior, from heavy fermions to exotic quantum phase transitions.
The group’s paper, “Gate-Tunable Heavy Fermions in a Moiré Kondo Lattice,” published March 15 in Nature. The lead author is postdoctoral fellow Wenjin Zhao in the Kavli Institute at Cornell.
…
Urine scent marks are the original social media, allowing animals to advertise their location, status and identity. Now Cornell research is shining a new light – via thermal imaging of mice – on how this behavior changes depending on shifting social conditions.
The thermal recordings show that mice that recently lost a fight become “pee shy,” while the victors increase their frequency of…
Faculty members exploring topics ranging from isolation-induced aggression in female mice to the group dynamics of improvisational comedy troupes to the policy decisions that shape homelessness have been named 2023-24 fellows by the Cornell Center for Social Sciences (CCSS).
The 14 faculty members, representing 13 departments and eight colleges and schools, were nominated by their deans…
Defense Visual Information Distribution Service
An MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle parked on a taxiway at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada
Armed drones are neither a “magic bullet” that wins wars nor an inconsequential tool with little impact on the battlefield, according to two Cornell University scholars.
In a March 15 article in the journal Defense & Security Analysis, Sarah Kreps and Paul Lushenko dissect an ongoing debate among military and technology experts about the importance of drones on the modern battlefield…
ABC/Eric McCandless
American Idol's superstar judges all agreed that Amara Valerio '24 is headed for Hollywood.
In 2019, Amara Valerio ’24, then a high school junior, was tapped to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” at her school’s graduation. But the honor turned to horror when a senior stepped to the podium, grabbed the microphone out of Valerio’s hand and sang the national anthem herself.
Three years later, Valerio posted video of the incident on TikTok, where it drew more than 10 million views –…
Myk Miravalles/Unsplash
Philippines National Museum complex, Manila
In May 2022, Bongbong Marcos won the presidential election in the Philippines with a commanding 59% of the vote, stunning many political scholars.
“How, some asked, could the son of the former autocrat, Ferdinand Marcos, a man who suspended elections, eroded checks and balances, curtailed media freedom, violated human rights and engaged in rampant corruption, win office so convincingly?”…
Sreang Hok/Cornell University
A student takes a shot at Bartels Hall.
A physics theory that’s proven useful to predict the crowd behavior of molecules and fruit flies also seems to work in a very different context – a basketball court.
A model based on density functional theory can suggest the best positioning for each player on the basketball court in a given scenario if they want to raise their probability of either scoring or defending successfully.
…
Cornell University file photo
Cornellians gathered to listen to the Cornell Chimes play Grateful Dead songs on 2017 Grateful Dead Day, the 40th Anniversary of the famous 1977 Grateful Dead concert at Barton Hall.
The Dead are coming back to Barton Hall.
Exactly 46 years since they trucked into Cornell and delivered one of the most iconic and beloved performances of their long, strange career, remaining members of the Grateful Dead will return, as Dead & Company, to play a benefit concert in Barton Hall on May 8 as part of the band’s final tour.
“Cornell 1977 holds a special place in Grateful…
Provided
Participants in the Peace Games consider a nonviolent response to a simulated international crisis. Congressional staff members were invited to the event, sponsored by Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and by the U.S. Institute of Peace.
A unique Cornell University-sponsored event in Washington, D.C. brought together congressional staff to search for nonviolent solutions to a simulated clash between superpowers.
The Peace Games were organized by the Cornell Institute of Politics and Global Affairs (IOPGA) in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the United States Institute of Peace, with support from the…
Cornell’s Summer and Winter Sessions are great times for students to learn American Sign Language outside the busy fall and spring semesters.
Brenda Schertz, a senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the College of Arts and Sciences, said interest in ASL has grown significantly over the last few years. To meet the demand, Cornell has increased opportunities for students to…
Matt Fern/Phase 7
Jamila Michener, associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, senior associate dean of public engagement in the Brooks School and co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity, speaking Feb. 22 at the White House
Drawing on personal experience, a Cornell faculty member urged policymakers at a White House event to consult extensively with beneficiaries of government programs and services and learn from their experiences.
Jamila Michener, associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, senior associate dean of public engagement in the…
Icefin/NASA PSTAR RISE UP/Schmidt/Quartini
The remotely operated underwater vehicle Icefin, developed by a team led by Britney Schmidt, is visible as it is lowered via a 4.3-mm fiber-optic tether through a borehole to start one of three dives beneath the Ross Ice Shelf near Kamb Ice Stream in Dedcember 2019. A tent shelter’s color is reflected in the ice.
High in a narrow, seawater-filled crevasse in the base of Antarctica’s largest ice shelf, cameras on the remotely operated Icefin underwater vehicle relayed a sudden change in scenery.
Walls of smooth, cloudy meteoric ice abruptly turned green and rougher in texture, transitioning to salty marine ice.
Nearly 1,900 feet above, near where the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf meets Kamb Ice…
Provided
“Heading into Night,” featuring Cirque du Soleil clown Daniel Passer, explores the unexpected humor and discoveries to be found in the loss of memory.
In the new performance work “Heading into Night: a Clown Ode on…(forgetting),” director Beth Frances Milles ’88, associate professor of performing and media arts in the College of Arts and Sciences, investigates the poignancies of memory.
“This is a piece about joy, loss and searching – for meaning or for your car keys,” Milles said.
The solo clown performance featuring Cirque du Soleil…
Provided
A new museum exhibit showcases the Alpha CubeSat project, in which a small, low-cost satellite and light sail will be adorned with holographic art as a means of interstellar communication.
A yearslong effort to launch Cornell-made satellite technology into a neighboring solar system is making a terrestrial stop at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City.
The new exhibit, “Postcards from Earth: Holograms on an Interstellar Journey,” which opened Feb. 16, showcases the project, in which a small, low-cost satellite – i.e., CubeSat – will be released into low Earth…
Soontira Sutanont/Cornell University
Kimi Gengo, a poet, literary pioneer and advocate for Japanese Americans who attended Cornell from 1924-1925 and 1928-1930 is one of the changemakers featured in Any Person, Many Stories. Her story is shared by Claire Deng, '22.
What does it mean to belong at Cornell?
This is the central question behind “Any Person, Many Stories: Histories of Exclusion and Inclusion at Cornell,” a new public history digital exhibition hosted by the Center for Teaching Innovation. The project uses storytelling methods to take a closer look at Cornell’s past, and engages students, faculty, alumni, staff and community members in a deeper…
Sreang Hok/Cornell University
Clinton Foundation Students meet at eHub in Kennedy Hall.
Alex Herazy ’25, a student in the College of Arts and Sciences, knows what the college application process is like for a first-generation student, so he’s been helping other first-gen friends from his high school with applications and scholarships. Now, he’d like to reach even more first-gen students, and has an idea to create a set of videos to explain the process.
“Videos from the…
Scanning the first images of a well-known early galaxy taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Cornell astronomers were intrigued to see a blob of light near its outer edge.
Their initial focus, and the infrared observatory’s target, was SPT0418-47, one of the brightest dusty, star-forming galaxies in the early universe, its distant light bent and magnified by a foreground…
Researchers studying statistics applications in systems biology, next-generation wireless technology and the methods by which vines climb are among the nine Cornell faculty members who recently received National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Awards.
Three College of Arts and Sciences researchers are among this year's recipients from Cornell.
Over the next three to…
Provided/Leslie Babonis
Developing stinging cells (magenta and aqua) in a larva of the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis.
When scientists disabled a single regulatory gene in a species of sea anemone, a stinging cell that shoots a venomous miniature harpoon for hunting and self-defense shifted to shoot a sticky thread that entangles prey instead, according to a new study.
The research, carried out in the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis, shows how disabling a gene, called NvSox2, enabled a transition from a…
Provided
Light-sensitive molecules arranged in metal-organic frameworks (MOF) glow different colors under UV light, showing energy diffusion differences.
To develop more efficient next-generation materials for solar energy harvesting, researchers must learn to control the way molecules interact – their “coherence” when they absorb light. And to gain this control, they need methods of evaluation.
Andrew J. Musser and Phillip J. Milner, assistant professors of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, have…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Ray Halbritter, left, representing the Oneida Indian Nation, and President Martha E. Pollack, sign documents that repatriate ancestral remains from the university to the Oneida Indian Nation.
With apologies for causing harm and in an effort to right the wrongs of the past, Cornell returned ancestral remains and possessions that had been kept in a university archive for six decades to the Oneida Indian Nation on Feb. 21 at a small campus ceremony.
The remains were unearthed in 1964 as property owners dug a ditch for a new water line on their farm near Windsor, New York. Law…
Mars photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Atacama photo: Armando Azua-Bustos/Provided
On the left is of the Jezero Crater, on the surface of Mars; the image on the right is the Red Stone Jurassic fossil delta of the Atacama Desert in northwestern Chile, a popular geological analog for Mars.
Current state-of-the-art instrumentation being sent to Mars to collect and analyze evidence of ancient life on the red planet may not be sensitive enough to make accurate assessments, according to an international research team co-led by a Cornell astrobiologist.
In a paper published Feb. 21 in Nature Communications, senior author Alberto G. Fairén, a visiting scientist in the Department…
Noël Heaney/Cornell University
Taylan Özgür Ercan ’25, left, president and founder of the Turkish Students Association and an economics major, and Majd Aldaye ’25, a computer science major
The refrigerator moved across the room in Majd Aldaye’s family home in Tartus, Syria, when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake on Feb. 6 became one of the deadliest natural disasters of the century.
“My family and friends all woke up terrified at 4 a.m. The earth was shaking strongly for over a minute, the furniture was moving,” said Aldaye ’25, a computer science major in Cornell Engineering and in…
Noël Heaney/Cornell University
Britney Schmidt, center, and research team members
First-of-their-kind observations beneath the floating shelf of a vulnerable Antarctic glacier reveal widespread cracks and crevasses where melting occurs more rapidly, contributing to the Florida-sized glacier’s retreat and potentially to sea-level rise, according to a Cornell research team and international collaborators.
Deploying the remotely operated Icefin underwater robot through a…
… Pendergrass and Andrej Singer have won 2023 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The fellowships, established in 1955, support early-career … and Canada who this year have received two-year, $75,000 fellowships to advance their work. “Sloan Research Fellows …
Sunghoon Kim
As the experimentalists changed the electric field, it is likely that different parts of the material underwent the metal-to-insulator transition at different values of the electric field because of a small number of inherent imperfections. Consequently, the flowing electrons must find a path through these “islands” of insulating regions, embedded in a “sea” of metal.
There are stark differences between metals, through which electrons flow freely, and electrical insulators, in which electrons are essentially immobile. And despite the obvious difficulties in finding a way to switch back and forth from a metal to an insulator within one material, physicists are trying to figure out how.
“Say you want to put billions of circuit elements on a tiny chip and…
Nuria Rodríguez/Provided
Fieldwork and sampling in Tirez lagoon, central Spain, when the lagoon was still active (left) and after drought and desiccation, with only salt crusts remaining (right).
The ongoing search for signs of life on Mars relies in part on terrestrial analogs – places on Earth closely resembling the past or current geology and climate of the red planet that can be readily explored.
A new study proposes to focus on another method: “time-resolved analogs,” which are dynamic analogous Earth environments where changes can be analyzed over many years. Alberto G…
White guests favor Airbnb properties with white hosts, but are more inclined to rent from Black or Asian hosts if they see featured reviews from previous white guests, new research co-authored by Cornell scholars finds.
The research suggests that sharing-economy platforms may be able to algorithmically harness racial bias in responses to recommendations to reduce racial inequality in…
John Marston
The researchers scrutinized tree ring samples recovered from the Midas Mound Tumulus at Gordion, a human-made 53-meter-tall structure located west of Ankara, Turkey.
The collapse of the Hittite Empire in the Late Bronze Age has been blamed on various factors, from war with other territories to internal strife. Now, an interdisciplinary collaboration used tree ring and isotope records to pinpoint a more likely – and prescient – culprit: three straight years of severe drought in an already dry period.
The group’s paper, “Severe Multi-Year Drought Coincident…
Vinson Cunningham, a theatre critic at The New Yorker magazine, has been named winner of the 2021-22 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.
The award committee praised Cunningham for his “lucid, lyrical, and evocative prose, through which he draws his readers into the performance moments he chronicles.” The committee said it was equally struck by his cogent remarks on art, politics,…
From antiquity through about 20 years ago, historians were invisible in their writing. Thucydides, for example, did not give his own testimony when writing about the Peloponnesian Wars in the fifth century, B.C., despite having participated as an Athenian general.
“He wanted to write as a historian and reconstruct the conflict through objective description of the facts, an approach that…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Cornell's Arts Quad
… Sciences this year as recipients of Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowships , enabling them to pursue leading-edge research … among other critical topics. “The Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowships program is exceeding our hopes, sparking … time and generous support provided by the Klarman Fellowships, together with the model of collaboration with …
The construction of the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST, pronounced “feast”) being developed by CCAT Observatory Inc. , an international consortium of universities led by Cornell, is drawing closer to an end.
Work is poised to begin on a defining feature of the telescope, the “elevation” part that supports the upper structure and will contain the telescope’s mirrors. Unlike almost any…
New Cornell research is providing a fresh view into the ways a common chemotherapy agent, etoposide, stalls and poisons the essential enzymes that allow cancer cells to flourish.
The findings, from the lab of Michelle Wang, the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor of the Physical Sciences and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in the College of Arts and Sciences, will…
A seminal fluid protein transferred from male to female fruit flies during mating changes the expression of genes related to the fly’s circadian clock, Cornell research has found.
A seminal fluid protein transferred from male to female fruit flies during mating changes the expression of genes related to the fly’s circadian clock, an innovative technique has revealed.
The finding, published Jan. 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help explain how this protein, called sex peptide, alters the female’s behavior.
Post-mating, sex peptide…
In radio broadcasts and in leaflets dropped from warplanes during World War II, U.S. and British air forces announced their status as liberators to “amici italiani” – Italian friends – on the ground.
“We do not want to bomb you, we are not fighting with you, we only want peace,” one leaflet read.
And yet, two-thirds of the 60,000 Italian civilian victims of Allied bombing were killed after…
Cornell University file photo
Famed Cornell astronomer Peter Gierasch, seen here in 1979, died Jan. 20 in Ithaca. He was 82.
Peter Gierasch, a Cornell astronomer whose mathematical models unveiled the turbulent vortices, tempestuous eddies and atmospheric tumult arising on other worlds – long before spacecraft could consistently prove it with images – died Jan. 20 in Ithaca. He was 82.
Gierasch, a professor emeritus of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, contributed to a wealth of knowledge on the…
Ryan Young/Cornell University
Doctoral student Shikhar Prakash, right, and Madhur Srivastava, assistant research professor in chemistry and chemical biology, work at a white board in the Physical Sciences Building.
Extreme weather and changing patterns of electricity use have led to blackouts and unpredictable utility bills across the nation.
To address that unpredictability, Cornell researchers are piloting a new payment plan and an app that would provide consumers with more information about their energy use and incentives to reduce use, while also allowing utility companies to respond more nimbly in…
Prominent new media executive and veteran journalist Andrew Morse ’96 has been named the Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist (DVJ) Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences for spring 2023.
A former senior leader at CNN, Bloomberg and ABC News, Morse was recently appointed president and publisher of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, to lead the digital transformation of the…
irina island images
Peter Enns, professor of government and public policy in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, speaks to a Cornell Tech audience about the Collaborative Midterm Survey.
An innovative Cornell-led survey paints a comprehensive picture of what Americans were thinking on Election Day in 2022 – and advances the science of surveys.
Key findings include that nearly half of white Americans recognize that the deck remains stacked against Black Americans. One out of four Americans think parents should decide whether their kids buckle up. And a majority of Americans…
Patrick Shanahan
As a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in chemistry and chemical biology, Richard Kong develops catalysts to guide chemical reactions toward desired outcomes, including some that could have a positive effect on the environment.
… Seth Klarman ’79 and Beth Schultz Klarman. “The Klarman Fellowships have surpassed our highest expectations, and I am … recommended its renewal and expansion. The Klarman Fellowships support a wide range of pioneering research, … by teaching or other requirements. The Klarman Fellowships have already become highly coveted postdoctoral …
