Teenagers and young adults across the country and in this area are going to be surrounded with a strong safety campaign message: "Click It or Ticket; If you won't buckle up to save your life, then buckle up to save yourself a ticket," as Cornell University Police joins more than 13,000 law enforcement agencies and other campus and university law enforcement officers in a nationwide crackdown on seat belt law violators. The message to teens and young adults will be seen and heard in television and radio ads, across college campuses, over high school public address systems and through enforcement in locations where young people congregate -- such as schools and sporting events. (May 24, 2004)
Just as low-carbohydrate diets are trimming the American waistline, more judicious use of hydrocarbon-based fossil fuels would reduce U.S. energy consumption by 33 percent and save consumers $438 billion a year by 2014, according to an analysis by Cornell University ecologists. David Pimentel, Cornell professor of ecology, and 11 student ecologists found the most fat for trimming -- with the best potential for major energy savings -- in the transportation, residential heating and cooling, industrial and food-production sectors. Energy conservation and implementation of energy-efficient technologies also would allow significant savings in the production and use of chemicals, paper and lumber, household appliances, lighting and metals, the analysis showed. Their report on "U.S. Energy Conservation and Efficiency: Benefits and Costs" is in the latest issue of the journal Environment, Development, and Sustainability (Vol. #6, Issue 3-4). (May 24, 2004)
The Cornell University Board of Trustees will meet in Ithaca Thursday, May 27, through Saturday, May 29. The Executive Committee of the board will hold a brief open session at the start of its meeting Friday, May 28, at 7:30 a.m. in the Taylor A&B Room of the Statler Hotel on campus. The open session will include a discussion of the 2004-05 financial plan for the contract colleges. (May 24, 2004)
Cornell University graduate student Lauren Alleyne won first place in the poetry category in The Atlantic Monthly's 2003 Student Writing Contest, and graduate student Pilar Gómez-Ibáñez won an honorable mention. Both Alleyne and Gómez-Ibáñez are first-year students in Cornell's Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in creative writing. The prestigious Atlantic Monthly contest is open to full-time graduate and undergraduate students at American universities. More than 500 students entered the poetry category. (May 24, 2004)
New York, NY (May 21, 2004) -- By simply switching off one copy of a gene, Weill Cornell Medical College researchers have enabled fruit flies to live 51% longer -- the equivalent in human terms of extending average lifespan to the ripe old age of 113.The gene, called stunted, is one of only a few such longevity genes to be discovered in the Drosophila fly, a favorite model for studies into aging and longevity. What's more, stunted works by encoding a molecule that connects to a receptor lying on the surface of cells -- a receptor that's long been a favorite target for pharmaceutical research.
A.R. Ammons, Cornell University's legendary bard, is celebrated in an unprecedented 480-page issue of Epoch magazine, Cornell's literary journal. The volume titled This Is Just a Place: The Life and Work of A.R. Ammons (Cornell University, $12.95) includes 30 previously unpublished poems, prose pieces from all phases of the poet's career, entries from Ammons' Navy diary, 21 remarkable paintings by the poet, plus letters, conversations and other ephemera. Ammons, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell, died in February 2001 at age 75. During his career, he won virtually every major prize for poetry in the United States, including two National Book Awards -- one in 1973 for Collected Poems, 1951-1971 and another in 1993 for Garbage. (May 24, 2004)
Five Cornell University researchers have been honored by prestigious U.S. and international academic groups. They are Leonard Gross, professor of mathematics; Éanna Flanagan, associate professor of physics; D. Tyler McQuade and Paul Chirik, both assistant professors of chemistry and chemical biology; and Thomas W. Parks, professor of electrical engineering. (May 21, 2004)
Winter-weary eyes will find relief at Cornell Plantations, where early azaleas are now blooming and opulent rhododendron flower trusses soon will brighten with sumptuous reds and pinks. It's all happening on Comstock Knoll, the wooded hilltop near Plantations headquarters building, according to Plantations Horticultural Director Mary Hirshfeld, who says, "The best time to catch the peak bloom is around the end of May." Tucked in among the rhododendrons are sky blue flowers of lungwort, the golden yellow of fairy bells, the delicate white of Solomon's seal and the rich golds and greens of unfurling hosta leaves and fern fronds. (May 19, 2004)
Among women who are not anemic, only those with tissue-iron deficiencies can benefit from taking iron supplements, concludes a new study by Cornell University nutritionists. "Supplementation makes no difference in exercise-training improvements in women with low iron storage who are not yet tissue-iron deficient or anemic," says Thomas Brownlie, the first author of the study and a Cornell doctoral candidate in nutritional sciences. (May 19, 2004)
New York, NY (May 18, 2004) -- Peering into the mysteries of embryonic development, Weill Cornell Medical College researchers have identified compounds that inhibit the growth of new blood vessels.If these chemical signaling mechanisms hold true in adult tissue, the discovery could pave the way for therapies to repair damaged heart tissue or, conversely, starve malignant tumors of the blood supply they need to grow.
New York, NY (May 17, 2004) -- Imagine a puzzle made up of one hundred billion pieces, each reacting to the other, and you have a glimpse of the enormity of the challenge facing researchers bent on understanding how brain cells work together to create human perception, thought, and action. Every day, over 50,000 neuroscientists around the globe collect data on just these types of neural interactions, publishing their collected facts and figures in over 300 journals and scientific assemblies worldwide. But the sheer quantity and scope of neuroscientific data means that individual researchers cannot hope to utilize but a small fraction of what is available.--Many experts -- including Dr. Daniel Gardner, a Weill Cornell Medical College Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, and Director of the College's Laboratory of Neuroinformatics -- now believe the time has come to give this community of scientists a better means of accessing -- and re-analyzing -- this vital data.
David W. Butler, who has served as dean of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration since 2000 and was associate dean of executive education from 1993 to 2000, has announced that he will not seek reappointment when his term ends June 30, 2005. Butler has announced he plans to go into "semi-retirement" to enjoy time with his wife and to undertake targeted professional projects. (May 17, 2004)
