Cooking tomatoes -- such as in spaghetti sauce -- makes the fruit heart-healthier and boosts its cancer-fighting ability. All this, despite a loss of vitamin C during the cooking process, say Cornell food scientists. The reason: cooking substantially raises the levels of beneficial compounds called phytochemicals. Writing in the latest issue of the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry (April 17), Rui Hai Liu, M.D., Cornell assistant professor of food science, notes, "This research demonstrates that heat processing actually enhanced the nutritional value of tomatoes by increasing the lycopene content -- a phytochemical that makes tomatoes red -- that can be absorbed by the body, as well as the total antioxidant activity. The research dispels the popular notion that processed fruits and vegetables have lower nutritional value than fresh produce." (April 19, 2002)
A Ford Foundation grant of $195,000 to Cornell University's Africana Studies and Research Center will support the second phase of "Africa in Venice," a project under the direction of Professor Salah Hassan.
An appeal to Congress to raise fiscal 2003 funding for NASA's National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program was made Tuesday (April 16, 2001) by Yervant Terzian, a Cornell astronomy professor and director of the program in New York state.
Cornell University has made substantial progress in its multi-year faculty improvement plan, with salaries for continuing faculty increasing 8.1 percent in 2001-02, compared with the university's overall goal of 8 percent, President Hunter Rawlings announced.
Georgia Harper, manager of the Intellectual Property Section of the Office of General Counsel for the University of Texas System, will speak on "Copyright Law and Cyberspace" at 1 p.m. Thursday, April 25, in 133 Warren Hall on the Cornell University campus.
The GE Fund, the philanthropic foundation of General Electric Co., has awarded $200,000 to Cornell University to support an integrated range of projects in the fund's Math Excellence initiative over two years.
New York, NY (April 12, 2002) -- A large, randomized study of more than 3,000 New York City schoolchildren has shown for the first time that a school-based prevention program that teaches early adolescents drug refusal skills and other essential behaviors can significantly decrease binge drinking for as long as two years after the initial intervention. The program is the LifeSkills Training (LST) program developed by Weill Cornell Medical College."This is the largest and most rigorous prevention study conducted with inner-city youngsters, and one of the first to examine binge drinking in these youth," said the study's lead investigator, Gilbert J. Botvin, Ph.D., an internationally known expert on drug abuse prevention, who is Professor of Public Health and Psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and Director of Weill Cornell's Institute for Prevention Research. Dr. Botvin is also Chief of the Division of Prevention and Health Behavior in Weill Cornell's Department of Public Health and Attending Psychologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital's Weill Cornell Medical Center.
Two members of the Cornell University faculty have been awarded Sloan Foundation Research Fellowships. They are Lillian Lee and Andrew Myers, both assistant professors of computer science. The two are among 104 young scientists and economists selected as 2002 Sloan fellows, representing faculty from 53 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. The fellowships, totaling $4.16 million this year, allow scientists to continue their research with awards of $40,000 each over two years. Fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them. (April 15, 2002)
Golan Yona, assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program award to support his research into creating a map of all known proteins.
Carolyn S. Shoemaker, the world's most successful living "comet hunter," will speak at Cornell University Sunday, April 21, at 1 p.m. in the David L. Call Alumni Auditorium, Kennedy Hall. The talk is free and is open to the public. The subject of the talk, which is aimed at science educators, will be asteroid and comet collisions within the solar system. The talk is sponsored by NASA's Comet Nucleus Tour (Contour) and the central and southern sections of the Science Teachers Association of New York State. Contour, which is scheduled for launch July 1, is managed by the Applied Physics Laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University, with Cornell's Department of Astronomy leading the science team. (April 11, 2002)
The fruits of genetic research are about to ripen: Scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, Inc. (BTI), located on the campus of Cornell University, have discovered a gene that controls ripening in tomatoes. This means that tastier, more-nutritious grocery-store tomatoes are not far behind, say the researchers in an article in the latest issue of the journal Science (April 12, 2002), titled "A MADS-box gene necessary for fruit ripening at the tomato ripening-inhibitor (rin) locus." (April 9, 2002)
"Diversity Dialogues," a campuswide discussion at Cornell University on diversity in America, is scheduled for April 18 through 30, with events both on campus and in downtown Ithaca.
