Physician and former astronaut Mae Jemison and renowned primatologist Jane Goodall are among an interdisciplinary cast of Andrew D. White Professors-at-Large who will give public talks during their visits to Cornell University in March and April.
Richard Meier, Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate and recently named designer of Cornell University's future life science technology building, returns to the Cornell campus for his fourth visit as a Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 University Professor, March 4-7. Meier will deliver a free public lecture titled "The New Museum" Wednesday, March 6, at 4:45 p.m. in Call Alumni Auditorium of Kennedy Hall. He will discuss the museums he has designed through his firm, Richard Meier & Partners. These include: The Getty Center (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Barcelona), High Museum of Art (Atlanta) and Museum for Decorative Arts (Frankfurt). No tickets are required for the lecture. (February 26, 2002)
By using optical tweezers to pull individual strands of chromatin -- the DNA-protein complex that chromosomes are made of -- researchers have seen for the first time how information in fundamental genetic packaging units, called nucleosomes, might become accessible to molecules that "read" it. (February 26, 2002)
A one-of-a-kind X-ray camera, capable of capturing a succession of microsecond images of events hidden to optical cameras, has been developed by researchers at Cornell University. The first experiment using the novel camera has captured a moving image of shock waves from diesel fuel as it emerges at supersonic speeds from an automobile engine fuel injector. The X-ray imaging was able to penetrate the fog of aerosol droplets formed by the fuel as it cycles through the injector within a thousandth of a second. In a series of images, the camera depicted the shock wave created by the fuel, a phenomenon never before observed or measured, according to the camera's principal developer, Sol Gruner, professor of physics at Cornell. (February 26, 2002)
If current trends continue for the Northeast through Feb. 28, then the meteorological winter of 2001-02 will be the region's warmest on record, with an average temperature above freezing for the first time in 107 years of official record-keeping, say Cornell University climatologists.
Add this universal truth to biology textbooks: the mass of a plant's leaves and stems is proportionally scaled to that of its roots in a mathematically predictable way, regardless of species or habitat. In other words, biologists can now reasonably estimate how much biomass is underground just by looking at the stems and leaves above ground. Up to now, plant biologists could only theorize about the ways stem and leaf biomass relate to root biomass across the vast spectrum of land plants. Researchers from Cornell University and the University of Arizona spent two years poring over data for a vast array of plants -- from weeds to bushes to trees -- in order to derive mass-proportional relations among major plant parts. (February 19, 2002)
Add this universal truth to biology textbooks: the mass of a plant's leaves and stems is proportionally scaled to that of its roots in a mathematically predictable way, regardless of species or habitat. In other words, biologists can now reasonably estimate how much biomass is underground just by looking at the stems and leaves above ground. Up to now, plant biologists could only theorize about the ways stem and leaf biomass relate to root biomass across the vast spectrum of land plants. Researchers from Cornell University and the University of Arizona spent two years poring over data for a vast array of plants -- from weeds to bushes to trees -- in order to derive mass-proportional relations among major plant parts. (February 19, 2002)
If you want to see what computers will be doing for us tomorrow, take a look at what students are doing with them today. BOOM, or Bits On Our Minds, is an annual show organized by the Cornell University Department of Computer Science and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, but which involves students from all over the campus displaying their computing projects. The fifth annual show will take up parts of three floors of Upson Hall from 4 to 6 p.m. on Wednesday, March 6. The students will be on hand to explain their work, and many exhibits will include interactive displays. (February 25, 2002)
If you want to see what computers will be doing for us tomorrow, take a look at what students are doing with them today. BOOM, or Bits On Our Minds, is an annual show organized by the Cornell University Department of Computer Science and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, but which involves students from all over the campus displaying their computing projects. The fifth annual show will take up parts of three floors of Upson Hall from 4 to 6 p.m. on Wednesday, March 6. The students will be on hand to explain their work, and many exhibits will include interactive displays. (February 25, 2002)
The Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly has received an Emerald Golden Page Award for making research on the hospitality industry both usable and accessible to practitioners.
A Cornell University study finds that small-scale, team-oriented offices with few Dilbert-like panels are more effective work environments than private, closed offices because they more readily foster communication, cohesiveness and organizational learning among co-workers without undermining their ability to concentrate, the study finds. "Surprisingly, one-person closed offices, often preferred by workers and seen as the Shangri-la of office designs, were not universally viewed as the best or most effective work environment," concludes Franklin Becker, director of the Cornell International Workplace Studies Program (IWSP), and his colleague, William Sims. Both are professors of facility planning and management and human-environment relations in the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell. (February 18, 2002)
Stanford E. Woosley, an international authority on the physics of giant stellar explosions, called supernovae, will be the 2001-2002 Hans A. Bethe Lecturer at Cornell University, presenting three talks in February and March. Woosley is professor of astronomy and chair of the Department of Astronomy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. (February 18, 2002)
