It's possible that one day all the cooling power of a noisy, bulky household refrigerator will be available on a small device that is lightweight and has no moving parts. And the same device, when given a heat source like a car's exhaust pipe, could be used to generate electricity.
When the going gets toxic, the hungry get clever - very quickly - say biologists from Cornell and Germany's Max Planck Institute für Limnology whose study of tough times in a German lake has shown that rapid evolution can influence the environmental effects of pollution.
Scientists and engineers have waged a long war on the Eurasian watermilfoil, a non-indigenous water weed that diminishes swimming, boating and the environment. Using standard mechanical means of harvesting the milfoil, winning the war looked bleak, but environmentally friendly biological control may be the answer.
Founded as the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future in 2007 and then named and permanently endowed by David R. and Patricia Atkinson three years later, the Atkinson Center funds multidisciplinary solutions to sustainability challenges throughout the world.
Years from now, democratically determined population-control practices and sound resource-management policies could have the planet's 2 billion people thriving in harmony with the environment. Lacking these approaches, a new study suggests, 12 billion miserable humans will suffer a difficult life on Earth by the year 2100.
Ray J. Wu, Cornell professor of molecular biology and genetics, who developed the first method for sequencing DNA and some of the fundamental tools for DNA cloning, died at Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca Feb. 10.
An increasingly popular commercial corn, genetically engineered to produce a bacterial toxin to protect against corn pests, has an unwanted side effect: Its pollen kills monarch butterfly larvae in laboratory tests, according to a report by Cornell University researchers.
Mother Nature had its own April Fools' prank in store for the Northeast -- it took only the first day of this month to record the snowiest April ever for Boston, Worcester, Mass., and Providence, R.I., according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University.
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?
Surveying aquatic life from the Great Lakes to small ponds, ecologists at Cornell and the Institute of Ecosystem Studies have found that food-chain length — the number of mouths food passes through on the way to the top predators — is determined by the size of an ecosystem, not by the amount of available food energy.