In an easy, unassuming way, though, University of Iowa President David Skorton was quickly slipping into his role as an integral part of Cornell. Cornell's 12th president began his first day on campus Jan. 21.
William Julius Wilson was the opening speaker Oct. 19 at a symposium titled "American Society: Diversity and Consensus," honoring another heavyweight sociologist, Cornell's Robin M. Williams Jr., the Henry Scarborough Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus.
In the lobby of Cornell University's Thurston Hall, floor-to-ceiling windows provide a sweeping view of the four-story crane bay of the George Winter Laboratory with its mysterious monolithic constructs of concrete and steel. This massive lab, one-third the size of a football field, has become the home for a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded $2.1 million project to establish the nation's premier center for large-scale earthquake simulation experiments. The completed lab will have its public debut on Nov. 15 with an NSF-sponsored live webcast of an experiment designed to study the deformation and rupturing of underground pipelines -- carrying, for example, water, natural gas, liquid fuel or telecommunications -- during an earthquake. The experiment will be described by the earthquake facility's director Harry Stewart, an associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). His co-investigator is Thomas O'Rourke, a CEE professor who first became interested in earthquake-pipeline research about 25 years ago while working as a research engineer digging the Metro tunnels in Washington, D.C. (November 15, 2004)
The tiny Belding's ground squirrels appear to be "kissing". Instead, they are sniffing to analyze secretions from facial scent glands, hoping to learn from the complex odor bouquet who is family and who's not.
Almost 50 years ago, physicists determined the value of one of the fundamental fixed values of physics, the fine structure constant, using quantum electrodynamics theory -- or did they?
Digging through history to a time before agriculture, archaeologists from Cornell and the University of California at Berkeley have found evidence of a village that was continuously occupied from 2000 B.C. to A.D. 1000.
In 1917 three young men graduated from Indiana University with the word "Colored" emblazoned across their academic transcripts. One of them, Elbert Frank Cox, would go on to enter Cornell and become the first black man in history to receive a doctorate in pure mathematics. (Feb. 28, 2002)
Cornell chemists have created the world's smallest wires and encased them in a plastic polymer, an accomplishment that could lead to a host of new electrical or optical uses at the nanometer scale.
One universal principle – opposites attract – accounts for homosexuality as well as heterosexuality, according to a Cornell University psychologist who proposes a sweeping new theory of how sexual orientation develops.