The nonprofit Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR), co-founded in 2012 by Ajay Chaudhary ’03, offers deep subject matter outside of traditional institutional walls, giving the local community access to liberal-arts education.
Klarman Hall – the College of Arts and Sciences’ light-filled humanities building that opened last semester – was certified LEED Platinum July 29.The U.S. Green Building Council, which certifies LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) structures, awarded the university 87 out of 110 points, the highest total Cornell has ever received.
Imagine serving in the military, having life-changing experiences, then re-entering civilian life only to realize that to fulfill your dreams you need to go to college.
All materials found in nature – even the most “perfect” diamond – contain defects, since the atoms inside them are never arranged in perfect order.Such structural disorder causes complex force distributions throughout the material. Measuring these forces is critical to understanding the material’s behavior, but these force measurements have been impossible to perform through conventional techniques, which only determine average responses to stress.
The explosion of social and behavioral data available in the 21st century has created huge opportunities to study human behavior and social interaction and has fueled the collaborative, interdisciplinary new field of computational social science.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
“In the last decade, political economy has moved from the margins to the mainstream of the historical conversation in the United States,” writes history postdoc Noam Maggor in his introduction to the special History of Capitalism issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, which he edited. “Galvanized under the banner of the ‘his
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
“Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry,” a book in honor of Frederick Ahl edited by two of his former students, has just been released. The volume comes out of a conference titled “Speaking to Power in Latin and Greek Literature,” which was organized in honor of Ahl at Cornell University in September 2013.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
In an op-ed in The Washington Post, anthropologist Adam Smith offers lessons from history on Donald Trump's proposed wall as a solution to border problems.
As Emma Korolik ’17 looked around at the other students taking her English classes, she wondered: do class backgrounds affect what major a student might choose in college? And if so, why? Korolik decided to focus her senior honors thesis on the questions.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
When Tracy McNulty read “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” at age ten, about a psychotic, the book had a profound impact: after college, McNulty went to France to study psychoanalysis and later trained with experts in psychosis treatment. With academic degrees in French and comparative literature and training in clinical psychoanalysis, McNulty has become known for combining these interests in her scholarship.
When it comes to the birds and the bees, frogs are remarkably diverse: They do it in water, on land and on leaves.Researchers have assumed that natural selection drove frogs to take the evolutionary step to reproduce on land as a way for parents to avoid aquatic predators who feed on the eggs and tadpoles.
Mary Beth Norton, the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, has been elected president of the American Historical Association (AHA), the principal umbrella organization for the profession. Her one-year term as president will begin in January 2018.
The Klarman Hall time capsule is now sealed and buried, awaiting its discovery by future Cornell students during Cornell’s bicentennial year in 2065.Sheldon Borden, left, and Ray Wilson, right, carpenters with Local 277, completed the project on July 19.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Adam Seth Levine, assistant professor of government, has won two awards from the American Political Science Association (APSA), the leading professional organization for the study of political science. The awards will be presented in Philadelphia at the beginning of September.
Most students head to college at the end of August, however students participating in the Prefreshmen Summer Program (PSP) at Cornell arrived June 21 and will spend seven weeks on campus.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
On July 12, a United Nations tribunal ruled on an arbitration case involving contested territory in the South China Sea. Government professors Allen Carlson and Jessica Chen Weiss, both on the faculty of the China-Asia Pacific Studies (CAPS) Program, reflected on the verdict.
The Cornell Summer School in Theory explored contemporary international debates in media studies, visual studies, literary studies, philosophy and contemporary art.
“I’ve always been really interested in astronomy, so I was curious what kinds of careers there might be in the field,” said Sophia Delpapa, a high school senior from Ontario County who attended the recent 4-H Career Explorations event on campus, sponsored by the state 4-H foundation, part of Cornell Cooperative Extension.
Researchers in the collaboration between the Colleges of Arts & Sciences and Engineering will work on technologies and new tools to reveal the inner workings of the brain.
Cornell will host the Conference in Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 15), an international meeting for researchers taking experimental approaches to the study of human speech sounds, July 13-17.The conference theme, “Speech Dynamics and Phonological Representation,” will address sounds in human language as part of a linguistic, cognitive and communicative system.
When cells die, whether through apoptosis or necrosis, the DNA and other molecules found in those cells don’t just disappear. They wind up in the blood stream, where degraded bits and pieces can be extracted.
Sofia Aumann ’19 could have felt completely overwhelmed as a high school freshman when she uncovered the complicated issues behind human sex trafficking as she worked on a research project.
NASA’s Cassini and Huygen’s missions have provided a wealth of data about chemical elements found on Saturn’s moon Titan, and Cornell scientists have uncovered a chemical trail that suggests prebiotic conditions may exist there.
Uthara Suvrathan, a visitng Hirsch Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Materials Studies, recently led her class (ARKEO/ANTHRO 2140, "Fantastic Frauds and Myths in Archaeology") in a Nazca Lines activity on the Arts Quad. The Nazca Lines are ancient, gigantic (several are over 300m long) geoglyphs drawn on a desert in Peru.
In the class Introduction to Evolutionary Biology and Biodiversity, it’s not uncommon for the professor to don colorful props as students vote electronically on which ones would make her the most attractive bird to potential mates.The point?“That got a lot of laughs, but I’m sure no one in the audience will forget about sexual selection anytime soon,” said Justin Zhu ’17, a biology major concentrating in molecular biology.
On July 4, the veil over Jupiter’s mysteries will be ripped away with the arrival of NASA’s Juno mission, and Jonathan Lunine will be there to watch it happen.Like cosmic archaeologists, astronomers will use Juno’s instruments to understand what went into the icy planetesimals that Jupiter swept up after it formed.
Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy and director of Cornell's Carl Sagan Institute, has been name the inaugural recipient of the Barrie Jones Award by The Open University (OU), United Kingdom, and the Astrobiology Society of Britain (ASB). The award will be presented in a ceremony on July 7 at the OU campus.
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.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
Forty-one years after graduating, on May 22 Charles ("Chip") Aquadro was presented with an honorary Doctor of Science degree from St. Lawrence University, his alma mater, in recognition of his achievements in science.
Although Jonathan Culler’s “Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction” has been translated into 22 languages including Tamil and Macedonian, a French version had never been available.
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.
For students who have many interests across diverse disciplines, the College Scholar Program in the College of Arts & Sciencs may fit their needs. This year’s graduating class of College Scholars recently presented their final research projects, focused on topics such the anthropology of food and China’s naval development.
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.
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.
