Science-based information on the relationships between breast cancer and environmental risk factors -- including pesticides and diet – is offered at a Cornell University-based web site. In time for October's national Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the web site from the Program on Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors in New York State has been expanded with several features.
Legislators, politicians, educators, governmental agencies, business leaders, judges and others regularly attempt to make decisions based on sound scientific research. Translating that research to sound policy decisions can be challenging.
Two years ago a 14-year-old boy in Genoa, N.Y., stood atop a mound of corn while unloading a tractor-trailer on the family farm. Suddenly the truck's unloading trough opened and he was engulfed by grain, and sank as if in quicksand. John Ducey, chief of the Genoa Fire Department, recalls that the boy "had swallowed and breathed in corn" and it appeared that "his time was about done."
The Cornell University Public Service Center has been awarded AmeriCorps funding by the Federal Corporation for National Service, the New York State Commission on National and Community Service and the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, for the 2000-01 program year.
"The born-to-dechlorinate bug" is what Cornell researchers called Dehalococcoides ethenogenes Strain 195 when they found the bacterium obligingly detoxifying the pollutant PCE, or perchloroethylene (a chlorinated solvent used for dry cleaning), in sludge from an Ithaca, N.Y., sewage treatment plant.
James E. Turner, the founding director of Cornell's Africana Studies and Research Center, was reappointed to the post for a five-year term by the provost, effective July 1. A professor of Africana Studies whose first stint as director lasted 17 years, Turner is a political sociologist specializing in African-American social movements and is a leading expert on Malcolm X.
Nobel Prize winner Hans A. Bethe, Cornell University professor emeritus of physics, has a new award named in his honor established by the American Physical Society (APS). The APS will announce the award at a reception on the occasion of Bethe's 90th birthday on July 2.
A surgeon at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and a professor of textiles and apparel at Cornell's Ithaca campus have partnered to create a biodegradable artificial skin for burn victims.
William B. Lacy, director of Cornell Cooperative Extension, has been elected president of the Rural Sociological Society for the 1998-99 academic year, the sixth time a Cornell professor has held the post.
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center has established the Cornell Institute of Robotic Urological Surgery within the Brady Department of Urology. Robotic prostate surgery for prostate cancer patients will be the centerpiece of the new program.