Army ants, nature's ultimate coalition task force, strike their prey en masse in a blind, voracious column and pay no attention to the conventional wisdom of evolutionary biologists.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told students who filled Cornell University's Call Alumni Auditorium April 23 for the first Kaplan Family Distinguished Lecture in Public Service.
Cornell University is leading a newly formed international consortium of six universities and institutes collaborating on high-energy density plasma research, with the aim of developing a promising fusion power source.
Morris K. Udall Scholarships for the 2003-04 academic year have been awarded to two Cornell University undergraduates – Abigail Krich and Summer Rayne A. Oakes.
Two members of Cornell University's faculty – one from Lebanon, the other from South Africa, one studying plant reproduction, the other probing black holes – have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot," singer Joni Mitchell lamented in the 1970s. Three decades later, they are demolishing a parking lot and paving the way for a paradise.
How safe is New York state according to the people who live here? What do New Yorkers believe are the most pressing problems facing the state today? And how does the state stack up as a place to find good jobs with benefits and room for advancement? The answers to those and a range of other questions can make an enormous difference in everything from state policies to federal grants. But while many other states have long had reliable, nonpartisan annual survey data on their residents, New York state hasn't until now. This June the results of the first ever Cornell Empire State Poll will be released. The new poll is a joint initiative between the Survey Research Institute (SRI) at Cornell University and Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, with assistance from the Department of Communication and other research departments. (April 30, 2003)
Cornell University is to become a site in an innovative national earthquake research system linking 15 of the nation's leading engineering schools. A $2.1 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) is enabling Cornell to develop a state-of-the-art facility, scheduled to open in October 2004, to test the effects of earthquake-caused damage to the nation's lifelines. These are structures, from bridges to pipelines to communications conduits, that form parts of complex networks of vital resources and services. The Cornell laboratory, a collaboration with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), will become a link in an NSF-funded chain of testing and research sites called the George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). The facility is under construction in the Winter Lab in Thurston Hall at Cornell's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. (April 30, 2003)
New York, NY (April 24, 2003) Scientists at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center have found that an increase in global temperatures due to global warming may be a contributing factor in the decline of birth rates. A new study, which appears in the June issue of the Journal Medical Hypotheses, compared global air temperatures from 1900 to 1994, and the corresponding birth rates from nineteen industrialized nations, including the United States.Birth rate decline has been historically attributed to social, cultural, and economic changes, such as increases in the cost of living, postponement of marriage and child bearing, and the increased use of contraception and legalized abortions. This study, led by Dr. Harry Fisch, associate attending physician in the department of urology at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and associate clinical professor of urology at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons, is the first to suggest that an environmental factor, specifically rising global temperatures, may also have contributed to the decline in human fertility.
Most hotels made no changes to safety and security staffing or procedures in the year following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, possibly because they already were in good shape. Exceptions: modest improvements to staffing and procedures were made at hotels in New York, New Jersey and the central southwest. The news is from a national survey of hotel managers conducted at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration. (April 30, 2003)
Black women in the United States should be the focus of more HIV/AIDS education because they strongly influence the quality and survival of their families and communities, says a Cornell University expert on AIDS who is co-editor of a new book on the topic. Two-thirds of HIV/AIDS cases in the United States occur among black Americans, and AIDS is the second-highest cause of death among black American women, ages 18 to 44. (April 25, 2003)
