Having his acclaimed book of literary criticism, "The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition," ranked as No. 25 in the Modern Library's list of the 100 best nonfiction books written in English during the past 100 years doesn't seem to have fazed M.H. (Mike) Abrams.
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered an enormous cyclonic storm system raging in the northern polar regions of the planet Mars. Nearly four times the size of the state of Texas, the storm is composed of water-ice clouds like storm systems on Earth, rather than dust typically found in Martian storms.
For the first time in history, humanity will send a sundial to another planet. Inscribed with the motto "Two Worlds, One Sun," the sundial will travel to Mars aboard NASA's Mars Surveyor 2001 lander.
Franklin A. Long, professor emeritus of chemistry at Cornell and the university's vice president for research and advanced studies from 1963 to 1969, died. He was 88.
In a new book, The Deep Hot Biosphere, Cornell professor emeritus of astronomy Thomas Gold argues that subterranean bacteria started the whole evolutionary process, and that there's no looming energy shortage because oil reserves are far greater than predicted.
NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter today (Dec. 11, 1998) from Cape Canaveral, Fla. On board the spacecraft was the Mars Color Imager -- known as MARCI -- designed with the help of two Cornell astronomers. Engineering problems had forced postponement of the launch from Dec. 10.
William T. Miller, a key scientist on the Manhattan Project team that developed the atomic bomb in World War II and a member of the chemistry faculty at Cornell from 1936 to 1977, died Nov. 15 at the Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca.
Franoise Gaspard, professor of sociology at the famed Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School of Higher Education in Social Sciences) in Paris, will give two free and open lectures Oct. 21-22 at Cornell on women in politics in France.
Richard Ernst, 1991 Nobel laureate in chemistry and professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, will visit Cornell Oct. 14-29 as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large.
