This story in National Geographic tells of researchers at Cornell and other universities who recently published a guide to help astronomers detect alien apocalypses — whether it’s the chemical signature of a world filled with rotting corpses, the radioactive aftermath of nuclear warfare, or the debris left over from a Death Star scenario where an entire planet gets blown to bits.
Gabriela Walters '15 Majors: Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies & EconomicsHometown: Acton, MAWhy did you choose Cornell?As a high school senior I knew I needed to be in large and diverse school with a lot of different opportunities, academic and extra-curricular. Cornell University, with its many, many departments and student groups, was the place to find that.
Like many good mysteries, it began with innocent curiosity. Michael Fontaine was on paternity leave and, wanting “a small project” to occupy him between baby duties, thought he’d write about “Mater-Virgo,” a 17th-century play by Lutheran pastor Joannes Burmeister, based on a work by the Roman playwright Plautus.
Some hidden Cornell treasures soon will be available to scholars around the world, thanks to the Cornell University Library and the College of Arts and Sciences’ Grants Program for Digital Collections, which this year awarded four grants.
Following last year’s successful 150 Events series, the Department of Performing and Media Arts (PMA) will continue its new tradition of student-led theater, film and dance performances in its 2015-16 season.
To understand the past – and, often, the present – we group people together, attributing the same characteristics to individuals in a group as we do to the group as a whole, especially when it comes to religion.Éric Rebillard challenges this approach in a new book, co-edited with Jörg Rüpke, titled “Group Identity and Religious Individuality in Late Antiquity.”
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Cornell government professors commented on the market volatility in China and the Chinese government’s response.Jeremy Wallace, associate professor of government and faculty member of Cornell’s China and Asia Pacific Studies Program, is the author of “Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China.”Wallace says:“Don’t worry about the Chinese stock market collapse, worry about government incompetence.
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.
Ruby Rhoden ’17 expected her arrival at Cornell would be like landing on a new planet, with everything from the social environment to the academics substantially different from where she came from.
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.
Margaret Zientek, one of nine PhD students from Cornell working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, is featured in this story about women making their way in this male-dominated environment.“I am working on a search for dark matter particles,” she says
Malaysia is once again in the midst of a serious political scandal, with the allegation that the government-run investment company 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) has been used to funnel approximately US$ 700 million to a personal account of Prime Minister Najb Razak, writes Tom Pepinsky, associate professor of government, in this piece.
As Ellen Abrams considered math-related topics for her doctoral thesis, she knew the summer after her first year would be a good time to explore the options.So the doctoral student in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) chose a two-pronged approach. For the latter part of the summer, she plans to hole up in a library studying the history of mathematics. But before that, she headed to Turkey to do an ethnographic study of a class at Nesin Mathematics Village.
If you happen to watch Nicolas Cage's new movie "The Runner" and stay for the credits, you'll see the name Andrea Fiorentini '16.Working on the film's postproduction has been just one of the benefits of Fiorentini's internship the past two summers through the alumni-run Cornell in Hollywood program, which helps Cornell students learn about careers in the entertainment industry, find internships and network with Cornellians.
LONDON — Alumni recalled snow-packed days when they transformed cookie trays into sleds and sun-filled days sailing on Cayuga Lake, while high school seniors listened carefully, during a recent admitted students reception hosted by the UK’s Cornell Alumni and Admissions Ambassador Network (CCAAAN) in London’s Soho district.
Google “Ivy league admissions” and up will pop thousands of sites that list the GPA requirements, SAT scores and stellar list of activities a high school student needs to make their application stand out to admissions counselors. As admissions deadlines loom, these sites are getting more traffic than ever.
As education reporters note each year, March and April are frenzied months for the parents of high school seniors.“I hear you,” is all I say when I’m with parents waiting out March. With some, I hold back, unsure about adding to the conversation.They are the tightly wound, and their talk is oddly anxious and hubristic: “Of course, they will accept her, how could they not?”
People who consider themselves experts in a given topic are more likely to claim knowledge of made-up “facts” about that topic, a new study shows.Researchers conducted a series of experiments to assess how likely people were to believe fictions presented as fact. In one of the experiments, for example, the researchers had 100 people rate their level of knowledge for personal finance by describing their familiarity with 15 different financial terms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Among them was Naomi Gendler, a senior at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In a few minutes, Gendler summarized her project, “Analysis of Methods to Excite Head-Tail Motion of Bunches within the Cornell Electron Storage Ring.” Her research could help improve the stability of electron beams in particle accelerators.
While most Cornell students headed home for the summer – off to internships, work or play – a group of entrepreneurial undergrads and graduate students are staying in Ithaca for intensive business development as part of the new Life Changing Labs (LCL) summer incubator.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
The Brock Turner rape case at Stanford triggered a firestorm of criticism; an op-ed by assistant professor of philosophy Kate Manne in the Huffington Post helps to explain why.The case, she wrote, “vividly illustrates…all of the ways we collectively ignore, deny, minimize, forgive, and forget the wrongdoing of men who conform to the norms of toxic masculinity, and behave in domineering ways towards their historical subordinates: women.”
Simultaneously critical and creative, timeless and timely, global and individual, the humanities embrace the complexity of a rapidly changing world and inspire us to seek to understand it.
These 16 new A&S faculty members will contribute to the nexus of big ideas, foundational methods, and colliding and intertwining disciplines found at the center of Cornell.
For many teenagers, math is just a necessary component of earning a high school diploma. For others, though, math is a passion, a destination in itself.
Lori Khatchadourian teaches the Exploring Archaeology mini-course at the Elizabeth Anne Clune Montessori School of Ithaca.The week of June 15-19, professors Adam T. Smith, anthropology, and Lori Khatchadourian, Near Eastern studies, led a mini-course on archaeology at the Elizabeth Anne Clune Montessori School of Ithaca. Nine children ages 5-8 spent five mornings exploring aspects of archaeological research.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The hand game “rock-paper-scissors” is a classic way to settle playground disputes, with rock smashing scissors, scissors cutting paper, and paper covering rock. But it turns out that nature plays its own versions of the game, and mathematicians and biologists have used it to study everything from human societies to bacteria in a petri dish.
Chinelo Onyilofor ’15 has found that her studies in chemistry and art history have taught her the art of looking for small details, whether she’s finding the hidden meaning in a painting or an answer to solve a chemical synthesis.After she graduates this weekend, Onyilofor, a double major in the College of Arts and Sciences from Annapolis, Maryland, plans to travel for a year before going to graduate school to pursue a doctorate in organic chemistry.
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES TEACHING AND ADVISING AWARDSThe Deanne Gebell Gitner ’66 Family Annual Prize for Teaching Assistants went to graduate students Sarah Maxey, government, Allison Tracy, ecology and evolutionary biology, Danielle Morgan, English, and Laura Manella, neurobiology and behavior.
When Irene Li ’15 isn’t hunkered down surveying the latest research on the local food movement and social change, she’s in a Boston kitchen, meeting growers or dreaming up new items for her food truck and restaurant.Li, one of three sibling owners of Mei Mei Kitchen in Boston, is a College Scholar in the College of Arts and Sciences, who will return to her family business after graduating.This year’s class of College Scholars presented their final projects April 17.
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.
The course of Carol Rattray's '78 career has veered from finance to philanthropy to entrepreneurship, so she's a popular person when she volunteers her time for the Arts and Sciences Career Services office.
Jandy Nelson '87 decided at a very young age that she wanted to be a poet. "I was probably about 13," she says. "I don't know where it came from -- I still don't. My parents always thought I would grow out of it, and I didn't."
