The Heckscher Foundation for Children recently awarded a $900,000 grant to the Cornell Urban Scholars Program, in which students from Cornell University help address challenges confronting New York City's poorest children, families and neighborhoods. The grant will provide three years of operational funds for the Urban Scholars Program.
Three days after his death, Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, emeritus professor of physics at Cornell University and an architect of the age of modern atomic theory, was posthumously awarded the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences by the American Philosophical Society (APS).
Beyond the tragic deaths on Sept. 11, 2001, there were more lives lost as an indirect result of the terrorist attacks. Using airline passenger and highway statistics, nearly 1,200 more people died in the months subsequent to the attacks when they switched their travel plans from flying to driving, according to Cornell University economists.
More than half of all New York state residents (51 percent) oppose President Bush's proposal to change Social Security by allowing individuals to privately invest a portion of their Social Security taxes, according to a poll by Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations Survey Research Institute (SRI). The poll found that only about one-third of residents (36 percent) surveyed support the proposal.
Prompted by students from KyotoNOW!, Cornell University is in the process of studying the possibility of producing wind-generated electricity for its campus in Ithaca and has opened discussions with its neighbors. "Our investigation into using renewable wind energy is still in the study phase, and there still are a lot of issues to explore," said Harold Craft, Cornell vice president for administration and CFO, "but, so far, the possibility looks promising."
Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, the last of the giants of the golden age of 20th-century physics and the birth of modern atomic theory, and one of science's most universally admired figures, died at his home in Ithaca, N.Y.
The Cornell University Board of Trustees will meet in Ithaca, March 9-11. The full board will meet from 9 to 11:45 a.m. and from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. Friday, March 11, in the Beck Center of Statler Hall on the Cornell campus.
John Hsu, one of Cornell University's most beloved professors and musicians -- and 50-year faculty member -- will conduct a "farewell concert," Saturday, March 12. Hsu, Cornell's Old Dominion Foundation Professor of Music, will mark the occasion of his retirement by conducting a gala performance of The Creation by Joseph Haydn at Ithaca College's Ford Hall, within the James J. Whalen Center for Music.
Randy Cohen, Emmy-Award winner and writer of "The Ethicist" column in The New York Times Magazine, is the featured speaker at this year's Cornell Commitment Convocation, Friday, March 11, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in Call Alumni Auditorium of Kennedy Hall at Cornell University.
Cornell Hillel's Board of Trustees has announced that Barbara Friedman '59 will be the first recipient of the Tanner Prize for her significant contributions to the Jewish people and to Cornell University. The prize will be given to Friedman at an honorary luncheon April 21 at the Cornell Club in New York City.
A Cornell University-led team operating the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS), the largest of the three main instruments on NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, has discovered a mysterious population of distant and enormously powerful galaxies radiating in the infrared spectrum with many hundreds of times more power than our Milky Way galaxy. Their distance from Earth is about 11 billion light years, or 80 percent of the way back to the Big Bang.
