Drew Harvell, a professor of marine ecology at the College of Arts & Sciences and one of the researchers, calls plastic “a triple whammy for coral. It cuts open the skin of the coral and then it can convey pathogenic microorganisms, and finally it can shade the light coral needs and cut off water flow.”

Op-ed from Jonathan Lunine, astronomy professor in the College of Arts & Sciences, on the significance of the discovery of organic compounds on Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover.

“Trump’s bull in a china shop act is clearly grating on other trading partners, who now see the U.S. as a recalcitrant and unruly member of the global trading system rather than as a responsible steward,” says Eswar Prasad, a trade policy professor at Dyson.

An outbreak of the highly contagious canine influenza virus H3N2 has now hit New York, with 91 cases recorded since April 30. Edward Dubovi, professor of population medicine and diagnostic sciences at Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, explains the risks and how to protect your pets.

“It stands to be seen what kind of effect Trump's policies will have on the poverty rate, the child poverty rate, the incarceration rate, wealth inequality, or a bunch of other factors,” says Arts & Sciences Professor Jamila Michener. “But my expectation is most if not all these outcomes will look worse post-Trump than they did pre-Trump.”

“I don’t have a good explanation for his behavior, because it makes no sense, especially given the amount of scrutiny surrounding Manafort’s communications and contacts while he awaits trial,” says Law School Professor Jens David Ohlin. “The No. 1 rule of lawyering is don’t piss off your judge before trial.”

Cornell researchers Yuhan Hu, Zhengnan Zhao, Abheek Vimal and Guy Hoffman built a robot prototype that expresses its emotions through its skin. The idea is to experiment with new ways of interacting with robots.

Opinion piece from Robert A. Friedman, clinical psychiatry professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, on the right kind of stress. The right kind of stress can be beneficial and is particularly important for young people, whose brains and bodies are uniquely sensitive to the impact of experience. 

Piece by Julia Powles, a research fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, on the General Data Protection Regulation. Under the GDPR, it will now be difficult for any large data operation not to know what data it has, where it is held and what it’s doing with it.

Labor relations professor Kate Bronfenbrenner comments on Hoffa’s fading mystique. “At first it was scary to take him on, and then there was a realization that, one by one, the old mob guys had been taken out. They no longer have the power they did.”

The pressure to publish before earning a doctorate has been gradually building for decades, but the dismal job market since the Great Recession has amped it up. ILR professor Ronald Ehrenberg says the bigger demands necessitate extra time to finish degrees and place more demands on departments too.

Ecology and evolutionary biology professor Drew Harvel searches out animals that match handcrafted glass masterpieces to gauge the health of ocean invertebrates.