Give My Regards To. . .
These Cornellians in the News
Junot Díaz, MFA '95, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Prize for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Michael Latham, professor emeritus of nutritional sciences, given the Award of Merit from the United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition. Latham was director of Cornell's Program in International Nutrition for twenty-five years.
Rafael Pass, assistant professor of computer science, winner of a five-year, $450,000 Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation, for research on making Internet business transactions more secure.
Assistant professors of electrical and computer engineering Ehsan Afshari, Sunil Bhave, and Farhan Rana, each given a 2008 Young Faculty Award and a $150,000 grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop "innovative, speculative, and high-risk research ideas."
First-year pre-medical student Maen Abou Ziki, winner of an Adelphic Award from Cornell's John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. He is the first student at Weill Cornell Medical College-Qatar to win a Cornell campus prize.
College Television Emmy Award winners Alex Krivicich '08 (Producers' Choice award), Justin Lerner '02 (Best Director award and second prize for drama), and Reed VanDyk '07 (first prize for comedy).
R&D
More information on campus research is available at www.news.cornell.edu
Although the two lightest metals in the universe have an inherent antipathy to each other, they bind at high density and pressure. The work on lithium and beryllium by Ji Feng, PhD '07, and colleagues appeared in Nature.
Horticulture professor Mark Bridgen has developed a new hybrid of the Inca lily. Called Mauve Majesty, the pinkish-purple perennial can last two weeks in a vase or bloom all summer in northern states. The plant is available through catalogs and nurseries.
Toxic chemicals originating in the home are ending up in farmland, parks, forests, and yards—via household drains. Microbiology professor Anthony Hay says sewer sludge often contains low concentrations of chemicals from personal-care products and medications.
The pitch of a male loon's yodel may determine whether he remains with a mate, suggests a study by Cornell and Chapman University researchers. Loons of either sex intrude on other mate pairs, displacing the bird of the same sex. The study revealed that the lower a male loon's song, the more likely it is to defeat the intruder.
Children may be more reliable witnesses in court cases than previously thought. Human development professors Valerie Reyna and Chuck Brainerd found that while adult memories rely on a part of the brain that records the meaning of events, children's depend on a part that records what actually happened.
A Cornell robot set an unofficial world record in April by walking 5.6 miles around the Barton Hall track. The goal of the research, says professor Andy Ruina, was to advance robotics while learning more about the mechanics of walking.
It may not be a small world, after all—at least on the Internet. Computer science professor Jon Kleinberg '93 studied two e-mail chain letters, finding that rather than reaching many recipients quickly, they tended to travel in long, straight lines. This left hundreds of degrees of separation, rather than the fabled six.
Entomologists have identified a mechanism that could help prevent mosquitos from biting humans and spreading dengue fever. Professor Laura Harrington and colleagues found that proteins transferred during mating suppress the female's appetite for mammalian blood.
Coffee may hold the key to preventing multiple sclerosis. Immunologists found that mice given the caffeine equivalent of six to eight cups a day were protected from developing an MS-like disease.