WASHINGTON, D.C. -- About 5,000 light years away across our Milky Way galaxy, a highly brilliant star called VY Canis Majoris has long been thought to have smoke in its eyes because most of its light is blacked out by a cloud. Now the mystery of this smoky shroud is partly unveiled. It turns out that the star appears to be blinded not by smoke but by sand and by whiskers, a form of iron. (January 9, 2002)
Cornell University alumnus Fred Young, a retired Racine, Wis., businessman and longtime follower of astronomy, has given $250,000 for the study phase of a proposed infrared telescope, planned for the Atacama desert in the high Andes of northern Chile. Young said he will provide a further $250,000 for the Atacama project if by next year substantial progress has been made toward establishing a firm partnership that will lead to the construction of the telescope within a decade. The telescope, estimated to cost more than $100 million, would be built entirely with private funds from Cornell and other sources, although it is expected that its operation will involve federal funds. (November 13, 2002)
Shawhin Roudbari, a graduate student in Cornell University's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working to help rural communities in South Africa hold on to more of their precious resource of water, which appears only briefly in late summer, leaving dry farmland when winter returns. He is one of six EWF-USA volunteers who are using their engineering skills to make a difference overseas this summer. He is spending three months designing and building rainwater storage tanks and installing them in eight villages, supported by a partnership of the International Water Management Institute, a research organization headquartered in Sri Lanka, and Engineers Without Frontiers USA (EWF-USA), a two-year-old national nonprofit group based at Cornell and supported by the university. (August 19, 2003)
Humpback whales seem not to be bothered as they swim near a scaled-down version of the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate underwater speakers that produce a sound some critics fear would harm them, a Cornell team of biologists has reported to the National Marine Fisheries Service.
For the past 34 years, food industry employees across the United States and from distant regions of the globe have been mailing their assignments and completed exams to Cornell's Food Industry Distance Education Program.
Science is central to research universities, but what are the implications of its growing importance and costs, and who should pay for it? A national conference convened by a Cornell University-based higher education group looks at those issues next Tuesday and Wednesday, May 20 and 21. The conference, "Science and the University," is sponsored by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI). Most sessions will take place in 115 Ives Hall on the Cornell campus and are free and open to the public. (May 13, 2003)
About 500 people – alumni, friends, students and faculty at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell are taking part in the official grand opening of the Robert A. and Jan M. Beck Center addition to Statler Hall.