Cornell's soccer-playing robots placed second in the Small Size league in the RoboCup 2005 competition held July 13-17 in Osaka, Japan, losing 4-0 in the final match against the FU-Fighters of the Free University of Berlin, Germany.
A patch of land once hidden among the trees on Cornell's West Campus will become a 176-space parking lot this fall -- the culmination of years of efforts by Cornell administration to provide adequate parking for the West Campus Residential Initiative.
During last week's enervating hot spell in the Northeast, the discomfort was not entirely due to the heat or the relative humidity. The real culprit, say Cornell climatologists, was the high dew point. The dew point is the day-to-day measure of humidity in the atmosphere. Another critical measure is the "design dew point" -- the maximum humidity level at which air-conditioning systems can operate efficiently in different regions.
Fruit-eating fish in South America help disperse fruit trees during flood season. Fungi that attack sea fans get even nastier when the tropical waters warm by just a few degrees, and although sea fans counterattack with upgraded defenses, the fungi win out.
ARECIBO, PUERTO RICO -- Talia Kohen always pictured herself in law school after college. But she figured that plan left her free to pursue a bachelor's degree in pretty much anything, so she decided to indulge her analytical side and spend her undergraduate years studying electrical engineering.
One of the world's most endangered whales, the North Atlantic right whale, is on a path toward extinction due to collisions with ships and entanglements in fishing gear, according to Cornell whale expert Christopher Clark. A paper co-authored by Clark in the latest issue of the journal Science (July 22, 2005) urges emergency measures, such as reducing boat speeds, rerouting shipping lanes around the whales' migratory paths and modifying fishing techniques and gear.
New types of adversaries and rapidly changing technology are changing how wars are fought. Two Cornell faculty members have gathered perspectives from international experts to produce a scholarly look at changing wars, aging international laws and the need for new laws in a new book, "New Wars, New Laws? Applying the Laws of War in 21st Century Conflicts."
An asteroid's external features, when analyzed carefully, can say a lot about its interior. So it was while he was mapping the surface of the asteroid 433 Eros that Peter Thomas, a senior research associate in astronomy at Cornell, found a simple solution to an earlier puzzle about the asteroid's composition.
Kelvin Lee, associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University, is the new director of Cornell's Institute for Biotechnology and Life Sciences Technologies. The institute promotes research, education and technology transfer to benefit the Life Sciences industries, including agriculture and medicine.
The Future of Minority Studies (FMS) Research Project's Summer Institute at Cornell shifts into high gear with a series of thematic symposia July 29-31 that feature presentations by outstanding scholars and university leaders. FMS is an academic think tank and research team composed of minority scholars and others from more than 25 campuses in the United States and abroad. All four events are free and open to the public.
Position papers from an international conference held at Cornell in the spring of 2004, "Inevitable Alliance? European-American Relations After the Iraq Invasion," have been revised and reintroduced as a book: "Partner of Rivals? European-American Relations After Iraq," co-edited by Matthew Evangelista of Cornell and Vittorio Emanuele Parsi of Catholic University in Milan.
In March 2005, Cornell scientists confirmed the fears of many Empire State public health officials, deer farmers, hunters and other stakeholders: Chronic wasting disease (CWD), an incurable and fatal condition in deer and elk, had spread to New York. On Aug. 13 in Syracuse, N.Y., experts from around the nation will address this problem at a special seminar: "Deer and Chronic Wasting Disease in New York State: A Workshop for Sportsmen, Farmers and Outdoor Writers."
