Physicist Ernest Rutherford once explained the surprise results of his famed gold foil experiment to be “as if you fired a 15-inch naval shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.”

 On Friday September 2, Prof. Randy Wayne, plant biology, argued Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity to be an unrealistic physics model.

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On Nov. 4, Roots and Shoots – a student group that centered on environmental education – hosted a lecture on the interconnections between climate change, women’s rights and political issues as part of their Environmental Justice and Film Speaker Series. 

Did you spot a huge blow-up canvas duck on Ho Plaza this Tuesday? It was the Society for Natural Resource Conservation (SNRC) raising awareness about the beginning of their PVC-free campaign. 

This is a follow-up to a sun article that ran on Sept. 8, entitled, “The Mysterious Collapse of the American Honeybee.” It’s based on a story reported in the NY Times.

Each year for the past four years, 20 to 40 percent of US honeybee colonies simply disappeared – a phenomenon that became known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). In a major breakthrough, Army scientists in Maryland and bee entomologists in Montana jointly discovered a perfect correlation between diseased colonies and the presence of a virus and the fungus, Nosema ceranae.

Cannibalistic, predatory and voracious: three words about spiders are enough to make anyone suffer from arachnophobia.  Cornell’s resident “spider lady”, Prof. Linda Rayor, entomology, actually finds them quite lovable.  She considers herself an “arachnophile” - or spider lover.

Prof. Juan Hinestroza, fiber science and apparel design, hatched the idea of textile nanotechnology while reading about the 50-year cycles of technological advancements: textiles, railroads, cars, computers, and most recently, nanotechnology. The prospect of merging two revolutions separated by 200 years intrigued him, and he works to generate "revolutionary" fabrics.

The world's reserve of fossil fuels will eventually be exhausted, and the use of oil from the Middle East will not be able to support the world. According to Prof. Frank DiSalvo, chemistry, sun is perhaps one of the best sources of energy that humans can depend on in the future.