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…
The research of Geoffry Coates (center) is recognized to be at the forefront of innovation in the development high-performance sustainable materials.
Chemist Geoffrey W. Coates will receive the 2023 National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science. The award, which includes a $25,000 prize, will be presented during the NAS 160th Annual Meeting on April 30.
“Coates’ research is recognized globally to be at the forefront of innovation in the development high-performance sustainable materials. It embodies how…
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
This image, taken in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility's High Bay 1 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on July 23, 2019, shows a close-up of the head of Mars 2020's remote sensing mast. The mast head contains the SuperCam instrument (its lens is in the large circular opening).
The eerie sound of an extraterrestrial whirlwind has reached the Earth from more than 50 million miles away, thanks to the first working microphone to traverse the surface of Mars. The audio records the movements of a dust devil, a tiny tornado of dust and grit – similar to the feeling on your ankles on a windy day on a sandy beach.
On Mars, this “saltation,” the movement of dust grains…
Riccardo Giovanelli, professor emeritus of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, died Dec. 14 at his home in Ithaca after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 76.
“Riccardo will be missed by all of us who treasured his gracious collegiality and kindness in working with colleagues and students and his passion for the science of astronomy,” said Jonathan Lunine, the David C…
Kristin Marconi and Christine Snivley
A Freedom on the Move-inspired image Project by an eighth grade student at Olentangy Orange Middle School in Lewis Center, Ohio
“Freedom on the Move” (FOTM), a Cornell-based database of “runaway ads” placed by enslavers in 18th- and 19th-century U.S. newspapers, was the starting point for a new song cycle, “Songs in Flight,” that will premiere Jan. 12 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
“Songs in Flight” will also be performed on Jan. 15 at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, hosted by the…
Ivan Bazarov, professor of physics, has received a $410,000 grant from the Office of Nuclear Physics at the Department of Energy for research on long lifetime spin-polarized electron sources in particle accelerators.
“Particle accelerators have a remarkable track record of yielding measurements that enable an increase in the understanding of the fundamental laws of nuclear physics,” Bazarov…
Anthropologist Noah Tamarkin's book "Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa" (Duke University Press, 2020) has received the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies in the category of social science, anthropology, and folklore. His book also received a Diana Forsythe Prize honorable mention.
“Genetic Afterlives” ethnographically examines the…
The mysterious changes in phases of matter – from solid to liquid and back again – have fascinated Eun-Ah Kim since she was in lower elementary school in South Korea. Without cold drinking water readily available, on hot days the children would bring bottles of frozen water to school.
Kim noticed that when the water melted, the volume changed.
“That revealed to me there is something in…
Provided
Model for how inducible genes are regulated and distinct from constitutive (housekeeping) genes. Environmental signals induce transcription factors and cofactors to provide a helping hand in loading the transcription machinery. Otherwise they remain poised and ready, awaiting the signal. Most genes are constitutive and lack this helping hand, so they can only be transcribed infrequently.
Yeast – that simple organism essential to making beer and bread – has revealed for Cornell researchers a key mechanism in how genes are controlled.
Gene transcription – the elaborate process that our cells use to read genetic information stored in DNA – was long thought to be turned on only when certain regulatory factors traveled to specific DNA sequences. In new research, published Oct. 27…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Gustavo Quintero, PhD student in Romance Studies (ROMS), teaches Spanish (SPAN) 3020.
Angelika Kraemer, director of the Language Resource Center (LRC) and Emma Britton, LRC Coordinator of Language Learning Initiatives, both in the College of Arts and Sciences, have received a grant from ACTFL for their project “Languages Across the Curriculum: Assessing Reflexivity and Critical Language Awareness.”
“Research is a pillar critical to ACTFL’s strategic plan and essential to the…
J.C. Séamus Davis has been awarded the 2023 Oliver E. Buckley Prize from the American Physical Society. The award, which includes a prize of $20,000, recognizes outstanding theoretical or experimental contributions to condensed matter physics.
In a statement, the award committee said that Davis received the prize for his “innovative applications of scanning tunneling microscopy and…
“I find infinity beautiful and thrilling,” says mathematician Steven Strogatz in the trailer for the new Netflix program in which he is featured, “A Trip to Infinity,” being released Sept. 26.
“The main idea of the film involves an exploration of infinity from several perspectives: mathematical, physical, philosophical, theological,” says Strogatz. “I think the big question is whether infinity…
The pandemic put a pause on group singing, but with the easing of Covid restrictions, the Cornell University Chorale “is most emphatically back,” says Michael Henry Poll de Bien, Chorale music director and Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences.
“We welcome singers from any department of the university and from the community,” Poll says. “We…
Robert Barker, Cornell University
Frank Drake speaks at the 2017 40 Years of Cosmic Discovery: Celebrating the Voyager Missions and Humanity's Message to Space Panel.
Frank Drake BEP ’51, former Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy, died on Sept. 2. He was 92.
“Frank Drake was a pioneer of radio astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence using radio telescopes,” said fellow astronomer Jonathan Lunine. “During his tenure at Cornell, Arecibo became a true astronomical observatory and planetary radar facility which went on to make profound…
Neuroscientist Antonio Fernandez-Ruiz has been awarded the 2022 Freedman Prize for Exceptional Basic Research from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. The annual prize recognizes exceptional clinical and basic research in mental illness.
“The Klerman and Freedman prizes recognize innovative thinking and outstanding talent across the field of neuropsychiatry,” said Jeffrey…
Courtesy of T. Urban
Ground-penetrating radar image of several footprints from the Utah site. Overlapping footprints of several sizes were detected, indicating an adult walking with children. The scenario was confirmed with excavation.
Human footprints believed to date from the end of the last ice age have been discovered on the salt flats of the Air Force’s Utah Testing and Training Range (UTTR) by Cornell researcher Thomas Urban in forthcoming research.
Urban and Daron Duke, of Far Western Anthropological Research Group, were driving to an archaeological hearth site at UTTR when Urban spotted what appeared to be …
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
In this image of Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope, sparkling clusters of millions of young stars and starburst regions of fresh star birth are revealed. Sweeping tails of gas, dust and stars are being pulled from several of the galaxies due to gravitational interactions. Most dramatically, Webb captures huge shock waves as one of the galaxies, NGC 7318B, smashes through the cluster.
by :
Linda B. Glaser
,
Arts & Sciences Communications
As praise pours in for the images released July 12 from NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – the next-generation telescope able to peer deeper into the cosmos – Cornell astronomy faculty who have worked on the decades-long effort are marking the milestone.
“For the entirety of my scientific career, I have thought about and planned for the giant leap forward in our understanding of…
Ann Simmons, The Wall Street Journal’s award-winning Moscow bureau chief, has been named the Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist (DVJ) Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences for the fall.
The program brings accomplished journalists to Cornell each year to interact with faculty, researchers and students.
“We’re privileged to host Ann Simmons on campus at this time of global turmoil…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Martha Haynes speaks at Reunion 2013.
When Martha Haynes was thirteen years old, her brother convinced her to give him a big chunk of her babysitting money so he could buy a telescope. He never used it much, but Haynes found the night sky fascinating.
“I remember showing the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter to a couple of passing police officers one night,” she wrote. The thrill she got from explaining to them what they…
Provided
Cornell Physics junior J Nation performing on their balloon-powered “foghorgan.”
The FutureSounds Festival – an instrument-builder’s extravaganza hosted by the Cornell ReSounds Project, featuring guest builders and performers as well as the newly designed instruments and compositions by Cornell students, took place May 13 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.
“The festival’s objective was to enable attendees to encounter the unfamiliar, musically speaking, and find…
Provided
From left to right: Chunyi Hu, Gabriel Schuler and Ailong Ke.
CRISPR has ushered in the era of genomic medicine. A line of powerful tools has been developed from the popular CRISPR-Cas9 to cure genetic diseases. However, there is a last-mile problem – these tools need to be effectively delivered into every cell of the patient, and most Cas9s are too big to be fitted into popular genome therapy vectors, such as the adenovirus-associated virus (AAV).
…
Chris Kitchen
“Rising Warrior Within” by artist Sherwin Banfield
Two sculptures peer out from among the rows of empty storefronts in the Ithaca Mall. One depicts an ancient Greek athlete holding a discus. The other is of a male warrior’s dramatic face above a roaring lion; “Rising Warrior Within” is by contemporary Black artist Sherwin Banfield.
“The two plaster casts are in dialogue with each other,” said Verity Platt, associate professor of classics and…
EHT Collaboration/Provided
This is the first image of Sagittarius A\*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
An international team of more than 300 scientists from 80 institutions has created the first-ever image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
Called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the image was produced by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, using observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes.
The image is a long-anticipated look at the…
Provided
A hole 22 meters in diameter near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile’s Atacama Desert, at an elevation of 18,400 feet stands ready for the cement foundation on which the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope will one day rest.
An enormous hole 22 meters in diameter has been dug near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile’s Atacama Desert, at an elevation of 18,400 feet. The hole stands ready for the cement foundation on which the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST, pronounced “feest”) will one day rest. The foundation, which was designed in Chile, began construction in the fall of 2021 and is scheduled…
Zepyoor Khechadoorian, graduate student in the field of physics, is one of 80 students selected to receive the prestigious U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research Award (SCGSR) for the 2021 Solicitation 2 cycle. The fellowship provides world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE national laboratories. Khechadoorian…
Verity Platt
Installation by artist Rhonda Weppler, featuring cast resin fungi and Cornell’s cast of the Apollo Sauroktonos.
This month, shoppers at the Ithaca Mall will have something more exciting to view than price tags and bargain bins: The Sculpture Shoppe, an exhibition of plaster reproductions of classical Greco- Roman art from the Cornell Cast Collection and responses to cast culture and classical art by contemporary artists and thinkers.
The exhibition opens May 5 at 6 pm with a live performance of MUSE–AK:…
A new sociology study has found that girls raised by Jewish parents are 23 percentage points more likely to graduate college than girls with a non-Jewish upbringing, even after accounting for their parents’ socioeconomic status. Girls raised by Jewish parents also graduate from more selective colleges, according to the study.
Researchers from Cornell, Tulane and Stanford universities…
Lindsay France/Cornell University
Associate professor Song Lin, center, pictured in 2017 with postdoctoral researcher Niankai Fu and graduate student Greg Sauer.
Song Lin, associate professor of chemistry in the College of Arts & Sciences, is being honored as an LGBTQ+ trailblazer by Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, in a special Trailblazers issue.
“This collection gives voice to LGBTQ+ members of the chemistry community and celebrates their contributions,” said Tehshik P. Yoon, issue…
Marc Lacey ’87, the inaugural fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Visiting Journalist Program, has been named managing editor of the New York Times, along with Carolyn Ryan.
“Marc is not only a tremendously accomplished alumnus of the College of Arts and Sciences, but he continues to engage with us in meaningful ways – serving as our inaugural Distinguished Visiting…
J.J. Zanazzi, Ph.D. ’18, has been selected as a 2022 51 Pegasi b Fellow. The 51 Pegasi b Fellowship provides exceptional postdoctoral scientists with the opportunity to conduct theoretical, observational, and experimental research in planetary astronomy. The fellowship award provides up to $385,000 of support for independent research over three years.
“It is great to see our Cornell alumni…
Noël Heaney/Cornell University
Natalie Wolchover speaks March 15 in Lewis Auditorium.
Writing about science in easy-to-understand terms “is a good exercise for you and good for the world,” award-winning journalist Natalie Wolchover told close to 100 people gathered in Lewis Auditorium on March 15 for her master class on bringing science to life through storytelling.
“Clearly, there’s a lot of work to do for science communicators to improve literacy and it’s an important…
Mutating viruses, nuclear fusion, quantum computing –scientific intricacies seem to make headlines daily, yet successfully communicating them to a general audience can be difficult. On March 15, award-winning science journalist Natalie Wolchover, Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist in the College of Arts and Sciences, will offer a master class on “Bringing Science to Life Through…
Maya Phillips, a critic at large for the New York Times, has been named winner of the 2020-21 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.
The award committee noted that Phillips “chronicled a tumultuous, uncertain year in live art – one in which COVID-tested New York theaters recalibrated their online presence and carefully returned to in-person performance ... Phillips recognized that…
Morten H. Christiansen, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been elected a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
Founded in 1742 with the purpose of strengthening the position of science in Denmark as well as promoting interdisciplinary understanding, the Academy has approximately 250 Danish and 250 foreign…
From cell-sized robots to quantum computers to the manipulation of human genes, the Arts Unplugged: Science of the Very, Very Small event on March 9 will explore the nanoscale and quantum innovations shaping our future.
Presented by the College of Arts and Sciences, the virtual event will include short talks by and conversations with some of Cornell’s top scientists and humanists, including…
Trevor Pinch, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Science and Technology Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, who helped found multiple areas of study related to science, technology and sound, died Dec. 16 after living with cancer for more than four years. He was 69.
“Trevor was one of the brightest lights in science and technology studies, a field he helped to create. And…
As polarization has escalated in the U.S., the question of if and when that divide becomes insurmountable has become ever more pressing. In a new study, researchers have identified a tipping point, beyond which extreme polarization becomes irreversible.
The researchers employed a predictive model of a polarized group, similar to the current U.S. Senate, to reveal what can happen when the…
Cornell BrAIn, initiated and led by the College of Arts & Sciences, will host a two-day symposium Dec. 9-10, bringing together innovators in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and neuroscience to explore the connections being forged between neurotechnology, deep learning, natural intelligence and AI.
The symposium will be from 9 a.m. - 5:45 p.m. and is open in-person to the Cornell…
The inaugural Einstein Foundation Berlin Award for Promoting Quality in Research by the Einstein Foundation has been awarded to Paul Ginsparg, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, for his work in developing arXiv.org, the first platform to make…
A new book, “Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern” (Cornell University Press), co-edited by a Cornell professor, explores what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the modern division of gender difference into a binary form.
“The book is a collection of essays about trans, nonbinary and gender-complicated people across a broad geographic…
The newly released “Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s,” a decadal survey from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, identifies scientific priorities, opportunities, and funding recommendations for the next ten years of astronomy and astrophysics.
A quarter of the faculty from the Department of Astronomy in the College of Arts and…
Kannan Arunasalam/Provided
Interview with subject Patsy Bansfield.
“We Love We Self Up Here,” a new documentary focused on the complex histories of labor and migration in Trinidad and Tobago, is a transdisciplinary collaboration between Tao DuFour, assistant professor of architecture in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning; Natalie Melas, associate professor of comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences; and…
Five Cornell mathematicians from the College of Arts and Sciences have been invited to speak at the world-renowned International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) this year – an unusually high number and a great honor for the Cornell researchers, according to the department chair.
The ICM is the largest conference of its kind and meets every four years; the Fields Medals – mathematics’ highest…
Health is an exceptionally expensive resource in the United States, “though it should not be,” political scientist Jamila Michener told the House Rules Committee on Oct. 13.
Her testimony about the relationship between poverty and health care was given during the “Ending Hunger in America: Family Budgets and Food Insecurity” roundtable convened by James McGovern (D-Massachusetts) committee…
Black holes are paradoxically both the simplest and most complex objects in the universe, as shown by the still-mysterious set of laws Stephen Hawking discovered a half century ago. Resolving this paradox is a central goal of modern physics. In the Fall 2021 Hans Bethe Lecture, physicist Andrew Strominger will describe the compelling progress made towards this goal as well as future prospects for…
Students across the university can now minor in the growing field of moral psychology, with faculty approving the new area of study July 15. The curriculum will offer students interdisciplinary engagement with moral psychology theory and research as well as hands-on experience applying moral psychology to practical ethical issues. The minor will first be offered in the spring 2022 semester.
…
A Cornell-led international team of researchers has received a $65,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for its project, “The Next Monsoon: Climate Change and Contemporary Cultural Production in South Asia.”
The grant will fund a three-day conference, tentatively scheduled for September 2022, and an open-access volume on the topic of humanistic approaches to climate…
CERN
A neutrino interacts with an electron, the track of which is seen horizontally, and emerges as a neutrino without producing a muon, in the real tracks produced in the Gargamelle bubble chamber at CERN.
Astronomer Ray Jayawardhana, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences, is featured in the new PBS NOVA/BBC documentary on neutrinos, “Particles Unknown,” airing Oct. 6.
Throughout “Particles Unknown,” Jayawardhana offers “his insight into the nature of neutrinos, their importance in the universe and how scientists have battled against the odds to detect them for almost a century,” said…
Natalie Wolchover, an award-winning science writer with Quanta Magazine, has been named the Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist (DVJ) Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences for spring 2022.
The program brings accomplished journalists to Cornell each year to interact with faculty, researchers and students. Marc Lacey ’87, assistant managing editor for The New York Times, was…
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the 1619 Project and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, will give the Daniel W. Kops Freedom of the Press Lecture on Sept. 9 at 5 p.m.
The event is currently scheduled to be held in the Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall, with a simultaneous livestream. A limited number of tickets for the in-person…
