The federal Agricultural Research Services’ Grape Genetics Research Unit at Cornell AgriTech will be getting an updated laboratory, after receiving nearly $69 million in federal funding announced by Sen. Charles Schumer Tuesday.

“Trump has now substantially ratcheted up the pressure on his negotiators to strike a deal with China, even if it does little to assuage U.S. hard-liners’ concerns about China’s commitments on core structural issues,” says Cornell University China expert Eswar Prasad. “There is still a yawning gap between the two sides on major issues due to U.S. lack of trust in China’s commitments on structural issues and China’s unwillingness to make any fundamental changes to its industrial and economic strategies.”

Alexandra Cirone, assistant professor of government for the College of Arts & Sciences, discusses direct democracy and Brexit.

“There isn’t a pre-existing model for organizing these workers — they are creating something new,” says Louis Hyman, an associate professor of labor relations, law and history at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, who argues that existing labor and unionization laws have long been insufficient. 

NASA’s first 24 hour Mars weather station has detected an unexplained, low-frequency infrasound. The infrasound was detected some 72 hours ago as it swept past a suite of detectors atop the InSight Mission lander, Cornell University planetary scientist Don Banfield says. 

“Getting money for shark genomics is really difficult,” says Michael Stanhope, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University, who co-led the genome-mapping project. “Sharks have some fascinating biology going on that really warranted more investigation.”

"People talk about food assistance programs as if they were created to help poor people out," says Andrew Novakovic, professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University. "Yes that's true, but almost all of the major food assistance programs were ideas that came from agriculture because we had too much of something."

Lisa Kaltenegger, who directs the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University, has published the spectral characteristics of 137 microorganisms, including ones in extreme Earth environments that, on another planet, might be the norm. “For the first time, we’ll be able to collect enough light,” says Kaltenegger. “We’ll be able to figure things out.”

Susan Brown, professor of agriculture at CALS, explains that the decayed flesh of some apples seeps out after it's encased in ice, leaving hollowed-out casings of fruit that was never harvested.

Cornell economist Francine Blau says the new analysis was consistent with her own work. “The gender pay gap declined much more slowly at the top of the wage distribution than at the middle or bottom and, by 2010, was noticeably higher at the top,”Blau says.

Maulik Jagnani, a PhD student at Dyson who studies economics, argues that a single time zone leads to a decline in quality of sleep, especially of poor children. This, he says, ends up reducing the quality of their education.

“School districts and cities have been cutting back and cutting back and cutting back on putting money into the school system, and it’s reached a point where teachers just can’t do this anymore,” says Ileen DeVault, a labor historian at Cornell University.