Experts with a wide variety of perspectives at an April 1-2 conference at Cornell will attempt to answer the question: Who should rightfully profit from biotechnology's exploitation of the "intellectual property" of nature?
David Liben-Nowell, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, has received a 1999 Winston Churchill Foundation scholarship providing for one year of graduate study at Churchill College of Cambridge University in England.
Anthropologist Brackette F. Williams, a 1973 Cornell alumna and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Award, is slated to give the College of Human Ecology's annual Flemmie Kittrell Lecture.
Daniel Kleppner, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will give the 1999 Bethe Lectures in physics March 29 through April 7 on the Cornell campus.
David Kelly, an expert on biological warfare with UNSCOM, the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq, will discuss Iraq's biological weapons program at the auditorium in the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) on the campus.
Think of scenes from the movie "Twister." Tornado chasers load up their trucks with ping-pong-ball-sized spheres and head for a twister. The spheres are then released into the storm's vortex, resulting in the transmission of valuable scientific information on tornadoes' actions to the chaser's computers.
Biotechnologists at Cornell have engineered a strain of bacteria with two environment-saving abilities: To soak up heavy-metal pollutants, such as mercury, and then to sequester them for recycling. Now the researchers are ready to begin field trials of a system that should reduce water and soil contamination to the parts-per-trillion level.
A recycling plan devised by Cornell students, with assistance from community members and waste-management experts, would save restaurant scraps from the garbage can and send them to the compost pile. The resulting compost could boost community greenhouse-gardens.
A new Cornell invention can clean up waste water from pesticides and textile processing on-site efficiently, inexpensively and without some of the problems of current technologies, say two Cornell environmental chemists.
A new chemical isolated from spider venom might one day prevent human brain cells from dying after being deprived of oxygen for short periods, a Cornell chemist believes. In a talk today (March 23) at the American Chemical Society national meeting at the Anaheim Hilton.
By mimicking nature, a Cornell University chemist has found a seemingly efficient way to create a new plastic material. It would be either biodegradable or able to react with water to convert into nontoxic materials, and it would have properties such as impact resistance.
