Cornell in the National News, July 14, 2005

Tuesday July 19, 2005 Category: News Permanent Link

The following is a sampling of recent major news stories, courtesy of the Cornell News Service.

Homes As Hummers

Washington Post, July 13

Editorial excerpt:

Of course, homeownership (now a record 69 percent) symbolizes success in America. The impulse to announce more success by having more home seems to span all classes. In his book “Luxury Fever,” Cornell University economist Robert Frank noted that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen built a 74,000-square-foot house. According to Frank, that roughly equaled the size of Cornell’s entire business school, with a staff of 100. Frank sees a “cascading effect” of imitation all along the social spectrum. The super-wealthy influence the wealthy, who influence the upper middle class—and so on. People constantly enlarge their notion of “what kind of a house does a person like me live in.”

This editorial also appeared in the Buffalo News on July 13.

Professor Lets Her Fingers Do the Talking

New York Times, July 11

Article about Dr. Daina Taimina, a math researcher at Cornell University who started crocheting the objects so her students could visualize something called hyperbolic space – an advanced geometric shape with constant negative curvature.

In an interview, Dr. Taimina recalled that a professor who had taught hyperbolic space for years saw one her crocheted objects and said, “Oh, so that’s how they look.” A year after she created the models, she and her husband gave a talk about them to mathematicians at a workshop at Cornell. “The second day, everyone had gone to Jo-Ann fabrics, and had yarn and crochet hooks,” said Dr. Taimina. “And these are math professors.”

Humming fish solves noisy clash—Turning down ear sensitivity could help humans retain their hearing

Nature.com, July 11

A strange kind of humming fish has evolved a clever way to avoid deafening itself with its own noise, researchers have found. Andrew Bass, a neuroscientist with a name amply suited to studying both fish and acoustics, looked at the male plainfin midshipman fish (Porichthys notatus) to study this effect.

“We never expected to see this fine temporal control that really matches to every phase of the sound,” says Bass. “That was really incredible.” The team, based at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, reports its results in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Survey: New York’s support for stem-cell research below national average

CBS-TV, New York City, July 7

Nearly half the New Yorkers polled by Cornell University researchers said they would support stem-cell research and would approve establishment of a state-funded institute dedicated to that purpose.

But the figure is far below the national average reported in other polls and suggests New York typically regarded as one of the nation’s more progressive states and a leader in scientific and medical research will lag behind in any future development of stem-cell research, said Lou Jean Fleron, director of Economic Development Initiatives for Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

“It is curious, and unfortunate,” Fleron said. “It means New York will be in the back of the pack as this technology and the jobs that will go with it flourish elsewhere.”

Ethanol and Biodiesel from Crops Not Worth the Energy

Science Daily, July 7 (story picked up by several additional outlets)

Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study.

“There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,” says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. “These strategies are not sustainable.”

Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Berkeley, conducted a detailed analysis of the energy input-yield ratios of producing ethanol from corn, switch grass and wood biomass as well as for producing biodiesel from soybean and sunflower plants. Their report is published in Natural Resources Research (Vol. 14:1, 65-76).