ITHACA, N.Y. -- Education officials don't usually have to make life-or-death decisions on the job. But for Enver Halilovic, who was responsible for education in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the war there, moral questions loomed over his every mandate. "This was a real human problem as well as a moral problem, deciding whether or not children should go to school," he recently told students in a European history class at Cornell University. Though the United Nations had identified Tuzla as one of six "safe areas" in Bosnia, he said, it was shelled regularly by Serbian forces -- who often targeted schools.
Safely back in Ithaca, the 12 students from BioES 400 (Canopy Biology and Canopy Access in the Neotropics) are glad they learned climbing fundamentals on indoor rock before heading up the Virola trees.
Cornell biologists who study dwindling populations of one of the rarest mammals in North America have found another reason to let "natural" fires burn. Without lightning-sparked fires every 10 to 12 years, they say, pine trees are isolating Northern Idaho ground squirrels into shrinking groups.
Four of Cornell's faculty have been named 1997 Weiss Presidential Fellows for distinguished teaching of undergraduates. The honorees were announced at a dinner on May 24.
An unusual type of eye - resembling a tiny raspberry and possibly following a design principle that vanished with the extinction of trilobites hundreds of millions of years ago - lives today in a parasitic insect.
Slavishly devoted to a charismatic figure, wearing more hair on their toes than on their wrinkled heads, living in the underground among scores of near-identical gang members with really gross personal hygiene — they're the kind of cult parents pray their children won't join.
Intelligence test scores of Whites compared with African Americans, and of the members of high compared with low socio-economic groups, are not growing ever wider. This is contrary to often-reported arguments that Americans are getting dumber because low-IQ parents are outbreeding high-IQ parents.