“If they did nothing, they would be more vulnerable to some kind of backlash,” says CALS communications professor Drew Margolin. Bart Selman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, notes that while the company is “hiring great people” and building up fast to catch up to rivals like Google on this front, it might be too optimistic on how quickly AI will help them address big problems such as fake news and political manipulation. 

“Even experts disagree about what intelligence is,” says Robert Sternberg, professor of human development at the College of Human Ecology. “So we would be raising intelligence according to someone’s definition, but maybe not someone else’s. What, then, exactly, would we be raising?”

“It’s not just a trade war anymore,” says Eswar Prasad, a trade policy professor at Dyson. “It’s becoming a more open economic conflict between the two countries.” The deal’s collapse, he says, “certainly is a strong signal that China is going to use every available lever.”

“It’s not a problem confined to a single region or type of place,” says the study’s lead author, Frank Edwards, postdoctoral associate at the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research. “There are places where the risk is much, much higher, but across the country, there’s nowhere the risk [of black men being killed by police] isn’t at least double.” 

“I think it’s the desperation strategy,” says Cornell Law School Professor Jens David Ohlin. “I think he doesn’t have a lot of options available to him, so his lawyers are doing whatever they can to score a win. From their perspective, that’s the only strategy they have.”

Gail Saltz, associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine, says, “Many, many people have at least unconsciously some sexual inhibitions, and they may long to feel less conflicted and more uninhibited.”

Kevin McGowan, a professor at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and not involved in the study, says he’d never witnessed a sign of necrophilia in more than three decades of observing crows. But he suspects over-charged hormones are largely at play. “So it’s not surprising that you would see incidental sexual behavior pretty much only in the breeding season.”

“Even though the national parks are supposed to be icons of a pristine landscape, quite a lot of people are being exposed to ozone levels that could be detrimental to their health,” says study co-author Ivan Rudik, assistant professor of environmental economics at Dyson.

Bart Selman, a professor of computer science at the College of Engineering and an AI expert, says it’s a good idea for Facebook to broaden its reach in AI and take on projects that might not be directly related to the company’s business. The broader the research agenda, the better the labs become, he says.

Manish A. Shah, a medical oncologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, says Hepatitis C, spread by sharing needles, drove elevated rates of liver cirrhosis, or scarring due to damage to the liver, in the 1990s and 2000s. Cirrhosis increases the risk for liver cancer, although it is not clear why.

“They’re frustrated that he didn’t get it,” says Cornell Law School Professor George Hay. “The appeal has to be at the end of the day that he never got the message about why this merger could be anti-competitive. I don’t think they’re going to win, but they have a coherent basis for appeal.”

During the Azolla boom, global temperatures plummeted, suggesting the diminutive fern “played a key role in transitioning Earth from a hot house to the cool place it is today,” says Fay-Wei Li, an adjunct assistant professor of plant biology at CALS.