The Louisville Cardinals may have lost early to the Montana State University Eagles in the NCAA Sweet Sixteen, but that is no indicator of the Northern Cardinal’s performance in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “March Migration Madness.” The #2 seeded Northern Cardinal flew all the way into the Feathered Four.

As part of an outreach project, the Lab set up its own March Madness by seeding the top 12 most-visited bird species on their All About Birds online guide, rounding out the Tweet Sixteen with four staff-chosen wild cards. The tournament had its fair share of upsets with the wild card Cedar Waxwing knocking out the #1 seeded favorite Red-Tailed Hawk in the very first round. 

Headed by researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Broad Institute, the 1000 Genomes Project has announced results from several pilot studies in a paper published in Nature on Oct. 28. The report described the use of advanced technology for sequencing more than 1000 human genomes from 27 populations worldwide. 

What first started as a research effort to collect an accurate account of all the trees at Cornell’s campus may turn out to be useful in the University’s plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

Over the summer, a tree inventory project was conducted by Fred Cowett, a Ph.D. student in horticulture, and Chris Gruber, a third-year graduate student in landscape architecture. In the course of two months, the project identified 7,205 trees, ranging across 225 species, throughout Cornell’s campus.

Nature. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. My friend and fellow columnist, senior editor Katie Engelhart ’09, asked me if I thought it would be fun to go camping sometime soon. Yes! It would! But I think you should know a little something about me first, young Katie. Longwinded as I am, I am going tell you publicly and ramble on about my retardation (and how it relates to my parents messing me up) for as long as my editor will allow.