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)
Lisa Staiano-Coico, executive director of the Tri-Institutional Research Program (TIRP) and vice provost for medical affairs at Cornell University, has been selected as dean of the College of Human Ecology at Cornell. Since 2003, Staiano-Coico's work as executive director of the New York-based TIRP has put her at the helm of an alliance encompassing New York City's Rockefeller University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medical College, as well as Cornell's main campus in Ithaca. Established in 2000 with a $160 million gift, TIRP's collaborative research is focused in three areas -- chemical biology, computational biology, and cancer and developmental biology -- with tri-institutional graduate training programs offered in chemical biology, computational biology and medicine. (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)
Cornell University undergraduates can take courses in everything from canine genetics to elementary Pali (the language of Theravaada Buddhist texts). To this rich assortment add one on migrant farmworkers, a course believed to be the only one of its kind in the nation. "The course is intended to provide a very broad and eclectic perspective on the world of migrant, rural laborers, primarily from the Caribbean and mainland Latin America who work in central and upstate New York," says Ray Craib, assistant professor of history and the primary coordinator of the course. (May 5, 2004)
The Cornell Public Service Center is currently seeking applications for the fourth annual Cornell Civic Leaders Fellowship Program. This initiative enables the Cornell Public Service Center to initiate collaborative relationships between Cornell University and the local community, and it allows the center to award $5,000 to each selected fellow. (May 4, 2004)
It took 100 years to develop, but this multi-flavored melange was worth the wait. To celebrate the centennial of Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), the university's dairy has created an ice cream it calls Bailey's Creme with Henry's Crunch. Its flavor is Irish cream and it is combined with dark chocolate flakes, caramel and peanuts. The ice cream will be unveiled -- with free samples -- on May 12 following an afternoon parade across the campus to celebrate the college's centennial. (May 4, 2004)
Cornell University's Ives Hall will resemble a World Bank convention center this week as more than 100 international experts arrive to discuss issues that range from the impact of the AIDS epidemic on poor countries to child labor and exchange rate crises in developing nations. The colloquium, titled "75 Years of Research Development," will be held Friday, May 7, through Sunday, May 9, and features four keynote speakers of international repute: Abhijit Banerjee of MIT; Jean Ensminger of the California Institute of Technology; Steve Morris of Yale University; and Dani Rodrik of Harvard University. Many young scholars from developing nations also will present their papers alongside more celebrated colleagues in the field. The Program on Comparative Economic Development (PCED) at Cornell is hosting the event, and all talks are free and open to the public (with the exception of the dinner/lecture on Saturday evening, which is restricted to registered participants and special invitees). (May 3, 2004)
On May 12, 1904, six black bulls, a cadet band, an entomology float and more than 2,000 students marched in a parade celebrating Cornell's designation as the official New York State College of Agriculture.
