Science
Archived Stories
Safety of G.M. Plants Questioned
February 25th, 2009Across the globe, plant breeders seek genetically modified plants to increase crop yield, build up disease resistance and delay crop ripening. Meanwhile, national governments and activist groups question the safety of these crops. Read More
U. Florida Prof Sheds Light on Plant Medicine
February 25th, 2009“Plant medicine encompasses the study of plant health problems of all types including prevention, diagnosis, management and local and international production for the next generation,” Bob McGovern ’83 said during a lecture on the “University of Florida Plant Medicine Program: Changing the Paradigm for the Plant Health,” in the Plant Science Building, last week. Read More
Professors: Concept of 'Race' Biologically Moot
February 18th, 2009On February 10th, a panel of scientists discussed the issue of race in the context of biology. While Obama's election is evidence that race is alive and well as a social construct, they said, but to biologists the idea is extinct. Read More
The Scientist: T. Colin Campbell
February 18th, 2009Self-described heretic in the nutrition community T. Colin Campbell doesn't get invited to a lot of dinner parties, at least by those in the food industry. His decades of research link diet and health with a prolific body of evidence that implicates the consumption of animal protein with heart disease and cancer. Read More
Evolution and Creationism Clash in Classroom
February 18th, 2009David Campbell '77 has enlisted the help of Mickey Mouse in his battle for evolution education in the American South. Speaking to a crowd in Goldwin Smith's Lewis Auditorium last Wednesday, he looked to the future of science education in skeptical classroom environments. Read More
Physicist Reconciles Science and Faith
February 11th, 2009Albert Einstein believed in a static universe. On a grand scale, the universe looked essentially the same 14 billion years ago, and would look essentially the same for the next 14 billion years. Then Einstein’s very own theory of general relativity led physicists to hypothesize a beginning — the Big Bang. The result proved the universe was not static, but very much dynamic. It was “an instance of creation in the equations of a hard-core scientist,” Prof. Sylvester James Gates, professor of physics at the University of Maryland, said Read More
The Scientist: David Pimentel
February 11th, 2009About $6 billion is spent yearly by the U.S. government to susidize corn ethanol. Around 1700 gallons of water are consumed for every gallon of corn ethanol produced. Corn is the number one cause of soil erosion in the United States and its overdependence on nitrogenous fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides is the prime reason of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet, corn ethanol produces only 1.3 percent of nation’s total oil consumption, which, according to Prof. David Pimentel, entomology, defeats the purpose of energy sustainability. Read More
Science Departments React Differently to Budget Constraints
February 11th, 2009From unlocking nature’s fundamental principles through elementary particle physics to unzipping DNA to understand the way living cells function, research at Cornell spans across every science department and almost every scientific topic. Scientific research requires equipment, raw materials and people. To obtain these, however, researchers need one thing: funding. According to an annual report put out by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, researchers at Cornell, not including Weill Medical College, spent about $470 million in the 2008 fiscal year. Read More
Prof Sequences Pepper Genome
February 11th, 2009Have you ever wandered through the aisles of a grocery store and noticed the variety of peppers available — everything from sweet bell peppers to spicy hot jalapeño peppers? Until recently, much of that variety has been exaggerated and poorly understood. But this is due to change, as Prof. Steven Tanksley, plant breeding and genetics, and his collaborators at DNA LandMarks publish the first completed pepper genome sequence online. Read More
Climate in Crisis
February 4th, 2009Prof. Walter Wolfe, horticulture, like many scientists who study climate change, thought there would be more time. “I always thought it would be more toward the end of my career that we saw signs of global warming,” he said. But as the science of climate change becomes increasingly complex, these early signs may raise more questions than they answer. Read More