Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of Major League Baseball, will deliver the Stephen and Evalyn Milman Lecture in American Culture and Baseball Wednesday, Sept. 22, at 4:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall. Vincent's talk, "The Baseball Mystery: Why Is It So Special?" is free and open to the public. Vincent became the eighth commissioner of baseball in 1989, following the death of A. Bartlett Giamatti, and resigned in 1992. In his first tumultuous year as commissioner, he presided over the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics, which was interrupted for 10 days by the Loma Prieta earthquake. During his first year, Vincent also endured an acrimonious owners lockout and oversaw the suspension of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. (September 16, 2004)
The past and future of modernism in Havana and Miami as it is embodied in art, buildings and landscapes is the subject of a conference at Cornell this Friday and Saturday, Sept. 17-18.
Using a carbon nanotube, Cornell University researchers have produced a tiny electromechanical oscillator that might be capable of weighing a single atom. The device, perhaps the smallest of its kind ever produced, can be tuned across a wide range of radio frequencies, and one day might replace bulky power-hungry elements in electronic circuits. Recent research in nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) has focused on vibrating silicon rods so small that they oscillate at radio frequencies. By replacing the silicon rod with a carbon nanotube, the Cornell researchers have created an oscillator that is even smaller and very durable. Besides serving as a radio frequency circuit element, the new device has applications in mass sensing and basic research. (September 15, 2004)
Eighty-five hundred years after someone in ancient Anatolia drilled holes in the wings of a crane -- evidently to make a bird costume for a ritual dance -- then hid one wing in a narrow space between mudbrick houses at Çatalhöyük in what today is Turkey.
The Community Partnership Board, a program of the Cornell Public Service Center, is beginning its 2004-05 funding year by announcing the availability of grants for grassroots community service projects. The board grants some $25,000 annually to service projects developed between Cornell students and community agencies. In the 13 years since the board's inception, more than $100,000 has been awarded to students for student and community developed service projects. The Community Partnership Board seeks to foster leadership and social responsibility by encouraging students to take action against social problems. The board assists students in developing grassroots community action projects and administers grants funded in part by the Cornell Student Activities Fund and the Public Service Center. Up to $2,000 per project per year is available in funding. (September 13, 2004)
New York, NY (September 9, 2004) -- For years, experts have puzzled over the fact that lupus patients often experience accelerated declines in thinking and memory as they age, despite the absence of the usual neurological culprits, such as neurovascular inflammation or stroke.Now a husband-and-wife team of researchers, including Dr. Bruce T. Volpe, Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and Attending Neurologist at New-York Presbyterian Hospital and Burke Medical Research Institute in White Plains, say they have a new approach to this puzzle that may open the door to treatments that slow or prevent lupus-related cognitive decline.
Bill Shore, the founder and CEO of Share Our Strength, a leading organization that mobilizes industries and individuals to fight hunger and poverty, will speak at Cornell University Tuesday, Sept. 14, at 4:30 p.m. in G73 Martha Van Rensselaer (MVR) Hall. The title of Shore's talk is "The Light of Conscience: How a Simple Act Can Change Your Life," which is also the title of Shore's most recent book (Random House 2004) that explores how acts of conscience can and have changed the world. (September 09, 2004)
The future of fusion power may lie not in a 20 million-ampere bang, but a 1-million-ampere pop. Plasma studies unwinds a powerful COBRA for high-density simulations.
As part of Cornell University's annual commemoration of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Aaron Brown, lead anchor on CNN during the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, will deliver a talk titled "On Being Part of History: 9/11 and the Election" on Saturday, Sept. 11, at 7 p.m. in Statler Auditorium on campus. Brown's talk is free and open to the public; seating is first-come, first-served. Following the lecture, there will be a meet-and-greet session. (September 07, 2004)
Last-second touchdowns and pennant-waving alumni are staples of the fall college scene. But while big-time athletic programs consume enormous resources on college campuses, they don't bring the rewards colleges expect.
Some are cylindrical, some look like a double sandwich and some are continuous three-dimensional cubic structures. All are generated by a class of designer macromolecules that could lead to improvements in solar-cell and fuel-cell technology, as well as advances in ultra-miniaturization of electronic devices. These synthesized molecules self-assemble themselves into structures with dimensions on the order of ten nanometers, an unusual process that mimics nature's most fundamental system of organizing living tissue. (One nanometer is about the width of three silicon atoms). (September 03, 2004)
More than 35 Buffalo workers got a raise this year and many more will soon get one, thanks to the persistence of a volunteer commission headed by Lou Jean Fleron, a Cornell University faculty member. The group is Buffalo's Living Wage Commission, the only unpaid citizen's group in the country charged with enforcing a city's living wage law (about 100 cities across the country have a living wage ordinance). (September 3, 2004)
