A new team has been named to lead the Cornell Migrant Program (CMP) and to suggest ways to restructure the program to better meet the changing and complex needs of New York's agricultural community, including migrant and other farm labor, their families and communities. The announcement was made today by the deans of Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and College of Human Ecology (CHE), and the director of Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE). (May 14, 2004)
Cornell University is changing the way in which it handles its intellectual property (IP) and transfers its many new technologies to the public. The changes are designed to foster university-industry research collaborations, promote innovation and encourage entrepreneurship on campus. IP management, licensing and economic development now will be combined in a single office, the Cornell Center for Technology, Enterprise and Commercialization (CCTEC), also referred to as the Cornell Center for Technology or "C-tech." (May 14, 2004)
James H. "Jaime" McManamon, 19, a freshman at Cornell University who was a defensive lineman on the varsity football team and a shot-putter on the men's track and field team, was killed in a car accident May 13 on Interstate 86 in Chautauqua County, N.Y. McManamon was traveling with his mother, Kerry McManamon, 41, and Kelly Smith, 41, to his home in Westlake, Ohio. According to police reports, his 2000 Chevrolet Suburban left the road and rolled over several times. He was airlifted to the Hamot Medical Center in Erie, Pa., and pronounced dead upon arrival. Kerry McManamon, who was in the rear seat, was ejected from the vehicle and suffered injuries. She remains hospitalized at Hamot Medical Center. Kelly Smith, in the front passenger seat, suffered minor injuries. (May 14, 2004)
The Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City voted today to establish the new Ansary Center for Stem Cell Therapeutics. The unique Center will bring together a premier team of scientists to focus on stem cells – the primitive, unspecialized cells thought to have an unrivaled capacity to form all types of cells in the body.
James A. Krumhansl, a professor of physics emeritus at Cornell University who led the scientific community's opposition to the superconducting supercollider in the 1980s, died May 6 in Hanover, N.H. He was 84. It was while Krumhansl was president-elect of the American Physical Society (APS) in 1987 that he testified before Congress that the supercollider should not be built if the cost would penalize superconductivity research funding. Although Krumhansl, who became president of the APS in 1989, was not speaking for the society, his words carried great weight with Congress, which in 1993 halted the project after14 miles of tunneling were completed and two billion dollars spent. (May 12, 2004)
Any day now, Brood X, the largest, most prolific brood of 17-year cicadas, will emerge from the ground and cut a swath across the Eastern seaboard. But many won't even make it to the surface: While the cicada nymphs have been developing into adults underground, their habitats have been paved over by parking lots, enormous shopping malls and large tracts of homes. (May 12, 2004)
New York state consumers can discover ways to improve lighting efficiency in a special distance-learning event Wednesday, May 19, at 7 p.m. at 10 Cornell Cooperative Extension sites throughout the state. The event will feature interactions with experts in residential and small-business lighting energy efficiency. The Energy Town Meeting, sponsored by Cornell University and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), will allow consumers to watch presentations over an Internet broadband connection and then ask questions of the experts. (May 11, 2004)
New York, NY (May 10, 2004) -- Women with diabetes are at greater risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD) than men with diabetes and persons without diabetes -- yet prevention and treatment of CVD in women with diabetes is inadequate, according to an article authored by a NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center physician-scientist and published today in the Archives of Internal Medicine.The risk of heart attack is 150 percent greater in women with diabetes than in women without diabetes, but only 50 percent greater in men with diabetes versus men without the disease. Women with diabetes are also more likely to have hypertension than are men with the disease.
A head-cooling device called CoolCap prevents brain damage in some oxygen-deprived newborn babies, providing the first evidence in humans that many birth-related neurological problems can be reversed.
Mothers can be a positive influence in their children's lives, whether or not they are single parents. A new multiethnic study at Cornell University has found that being a single parent does not appear to have a negative effect on the behavior or educational performance of a mother's 12- and 13-year-old children. What mattered most in this study, Cornell researcher Henry Ricciuti says, is a mother's education and ability level and, to a lesser extent, family income and quality of the home environment. He found consistent links between these maternal attributes and a child's school performance and behavior, whether the family was white, black or Hispanic. (May 06, 2004)
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- No longer the "me generation," American engineering students are actively taking on some of the world's toughest problems. A Cornell University-based national engineering service organization will bring stories of students and professional engineers working to improve the lot of some of the world's poorest communities, many in the developing world, to New York City next week. The group, Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW), will host students and supporters from across the United States at the Mezzanine Conference Room, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, at 5:30 p.m. May 12. The event, which will be both fund-raiser and a call for volunteers, will feature students recently returned from Bosnia, South Africa and Nigeria describing their community-service engineering projects that have made a big difference in people's lives by enabling self-help, making the projects sustainable. (May 06, 2004)
Graduate students at Cornell University want to make their campus and their surrounding communities more aware of the power of science and the role that science and technology play in decision-making in Washington and the world at large. To spread this awareness, they have invited leading authors and journalists to a one-day conference on campus, May 10, on science communication. The students and their faculty adviser, Cornell professor of applied mathematics Steven Strogatz, author of the recently published book Sync and a well-known science communicator himself, are inviting all interested people on and off campus to attend the conference. The featured writers, including Ivan Amato, author of Stuff: The Materials the World is Made Of, and journalists Rick Weiss (a 1974 Cornell graduate) of The Washington Post and Robert Krulwich of ABC News, will describe the problems and rewards of successful science communication. The conference will be held in Sage Hall B-09, beginning at 10 a.m. There is no charge. (May 05, 2004)
