In areas prone to high radon levels, homes occupied by limited-resource households have significantly higher levels of radon than those occupied by higher income households, and some child-care centers have unsafe levels of radon, lead and mold, according to a new study at Cornell University.
The launch of NASA's Comet Nucleus Tour, CONTOUR, has been delayed until 2:47 a.m. EDT July 3, Cornell University space scientists said today. The launch had been scheduled for the morning of July 1.
If you are still sore about last week's United States quarterfinal loss to Germany in World Cup soccer in South Korea, don't be. On June 23 on behalf of Americans everywhere, Cornell students got revenge, beating the Freie Universität (FU) Fighters of Berlin, 7-3.
A decade after microbiologists began to suspect that many groups of bacteria can communicate -- by releasing and detecting chemical pheromones to gauge their population density -- the molecular structure of a key protein in this interbacterial communication has been solved.
Jennie Tiffany Towle Farley, a champion of women's rights and Cornell University professor of industrial and labor relations, co-founder of Cornell's Women's Studies Program and a former member of the university's Board of Trustees, died June 19 in Hudson, N.Y., after a long illness. She was 69.
Cornell University officials announced today (June 20) that on June 14, Vice President for Human Resources Mary George Opperman received a subpoena duces tecum from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), issued at the request of the associate general counsel of the United Auto Workers in Detroit, demanding that the university produce by July 9 an enormous array of materials dealing not only with graduate and undergraduate students serving in teaching assistant, research assistant and related titles, but also dealing with all faculty of the university and all employees of the university "exclusive of TAs [teaching assistants], supervisors, managers and guards." Opperman observed that, since the initial hearing before a regional hearing examiner of the NLRB held in Ithaca on May 29, the university has been actively engaged in attempting to determine which individuals have been included in the proposed bargaining unit in the petition filed May 13 by the Cornell Association of Student Employees CASE/UAW. The inclusion of undergraduate students in the proposed unit has substantially complicated the data-gathering activity, since the university has no centralized record-keeping of undergraduates serving in the job titles identified by the union: teaching assistant, research assistant, tutors, graders, readers and consultants. (June 20, 2002)
Two years after the New York State Board of Regents removed the option of a local diploma in favor of more-demanding Regents diplomas for all students, 28 percent of the state's school superintendents, not including New York City, are reporting an increase in dropouts, according to a Cornell University survey. The findings were presented as a preliminary draft to the state's education leaders in May, and its final version is being released today (June 19, 2002). Among low-performing school districts, about 45 percent of the superintendents reported an increase in dropouts. Most average- and high-performing school districts reported no change in the dropout rate, according to the survey of superintendents and principals throughout New York state, conducted by John W. Sipple, Cornell assistant professor of education, and Kieran Killeen, an assistant professor at the University of Vermont. The survey included administrators from across upstate New York state. (June 19, 2002)
A newly established national biomedical center at Cornell University is reporting its first major advance: a new way of measuring, or "visualizing," proteins. The new technique will hasten the transformation of the human genome project's blueprints of life into a comprehensive view of the biochemical and physiological circuitry that interconnect to form entire organisms. The technique, which determines the structure of a protein by measuring the distances between atoms in the molecule at greater separations than previously possible, is an important development, says Jack Freed, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell, who is director of the National Biomedical Center for Advanced ESR Technology (ACERT), established at Cornell last year by the National Institutes of Health. "This is in the spirit of seeing the whole forest of the protein, whereas before we have been seeing the trees one after another," says Freed. (June 19, 2002)
The very-low-frequency courtship songs of fin whales and blue whales are the most powerful and ubiquitous biological sounds in the oceans. But the artificial racket created by ships and other human sources could be interfering with whale reproduction and population recovery, marine scientists report in the latest edition (June 20, 2002) of the journal Nature. Scientists from the University of California-Santa Cruz, Cornell University, Mexico's Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur and the California Academy of Sciences studied fin whale courtship songs in frequencies far below the range of human hearing. Natural sounds that low often can travel many hundreds, if not thousands, of miles under water. But so can very-low-frequency, human-made noises that have increased dramatically in the last 100 years of motorized shipping. (June 19, 2002)
Camp $tart-Up‚, a new program held at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University this July 20-27, will offer 17- to 19-year-old women some of the skills they'll need to pursue careers in business or run their own small enterprises.
Erica Pagel, a master's degree student in Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, has been named an agricultural fellow for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). For a six-month term, Pagel will be working with the senator's Agricultural Advisory Council and will provide expertise on the federal agricultural policy process. As a member of Clinton's legislative staff, Pagel will follow legislation and appropriations related to New York agriculture and serve as a liaison between constituents and the legislative staff. She will return to Cornell at the end of her term to complete her thesis and degree. (June 18, 2002)
