Native Americas, a journal published by Akwe:kon Press at Cornell's American Indian Program, shared the top honor -- General Excellence -- with Tribal Colleges magazine in the Native American Journalists Association's annual awards, presented in Minneapolis June 20.
Astronomer Joe Veverka, chair of Cornell's Department of Astronomy, will celebrate his 60th birthday with a unique gift from his colleagues: a symposium, "Exploration of the Universe," to be held Oct. 4-6 on campus.
The public-health infrastructure -- both in the United States and worldwide -- is ill-prepared to deal with emerging viruses and microbes, journalist Laurie Garrett will assert when she delivers the 2003 Iscol lecture Thursday, April 24, at 4:30 p.m. in Call Alumni Auditorium, Kennedy Hall, Cornell University. Free and open to the public, the lecture is titled "Coming Plagues: Signaling an Environment in Distress." Garrett, a 1996 Pulitzer Prize winner for her hands-on coverage of Zaire's Ebola epidemic, is a medical and science writer at Newsday. The author of two books about disease epidemics and the state of global health care, Garrett is expected to tell her audience that many scientists today know what policy-makers and governmental leaders fail to acknowledge: that emerging and re-emerging diseases -- far from being eradicated -- pose an unprecedented threat to human health. She contends that dramatic changes in attitudes, as well as resource allocation, will be needed to construct a public-health infrastructure capable of coping with the myriad challenges of globalization. (April 14, 2003)
Cornell's mock trial team took first place in the Ivy League Invitational Mock Trial Tournament at Yale University on Nov. 13 and 14, beating a team from archrival Princeton in the fifth and final round.
Unwed mothers are significantly less likely to marry; when they do marry, they are less likely to improve their socioeconomic status through marriage than their childless counterparts, says a Cornell study.
Four films about Jimmy Hoffa, the former president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters whose 1975 disappearance is still unsolved, are included in a guide, published by Cornell University Press, to the 150 most noteworthy and significant films and documentaries about labor.
The annual Agribusiness Economic Outlook Conference will be held Tuesday, Dec. 15, from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Cornell. Sponsored by Cornell's Department of Agricultural, Resource, and Managerial Economics, in cooperation with the Department of Policy Analysis and Management.
Cooking tomatoes -- such as in spaghetti sauce -- makes the fruit heart-healthier and boosts its cancer-fighting ability. All this, despite a loss of vitamin C during the cooking process, say Cornell food scientists. The reason: cooking substantially raises the levels of beneficial compounds called phytochemicals. Writing in the latest issue of the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry (April 17), Rui Hai Liu, M.D., Cornell assistant professor of food science, notes, "This research demonstrates that heat processing actually enhanced the nutritional value of tomatoes by increasing the lycopene content -- a phytochemical that makes tomatoes red -- that can be absorbed by the body, as well as the total antioxidant activity. The research dispels the popular notion that processed fruits and vegetables have lower nutritional value than fresh produce." (April 19, 2002)