Cornell in the National News, December 12, 2005
Monday December 12, 2005 Category: News Permanent Link
The following comes courtesy of the Press Office, who welcomes your feedback. Please send questions and comments to Nicola Pytell. The following is a sampling of recent major news stories featuring Cornell:
‘Elvis’ Woodpecker Draws Searchers to Arkansas
Reuters (picked up by ABC News), December 11
It has starred in a video, been widely recorded and graced the cover of a prestigious magazine.
But to dispel any doubt the ivory-billed woodpecker—the Elvis of the bird world—is back from extinction, searchers are combing a corner of Arkansas in an intensive six-month hunt.
The last reliable sighting before Sparling’s was in 1944, and most ornithologists had considered it extinct. Since Sparling shared his experience, experts from Cornell University and elsewhere have seen the bird too. There have been several photographs and multiple audio recordings of the elusive woodpeckers.
Monkey Business
Current magazine (a publication of Newsweek), December 6
For students who doubt the validity of evolution, college science class can be daunting. What happens when beliefs and schoolwork collide?
Following University of Idaho President Tim White’s statement that only evolution theory should be taught in his school’s bio-physical science courses, the interim president of Cornell University, Hunter R. Rawlings III, used his October State of the University address to condemn intelligent design for “put[ting] rational thought under attack.” He went on to deride it as “a religious belief masquerading as science.”
Hannah Maxson, a junior at Cornell University majoring in chemistry and mathematics, disagrees with her school’s policy. “I don’t think [intelligent design] belongs in a humanities course. I think it does belong in a science course,” she says. Maxson is the founder of Cornell’s Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Club, a new student organization dedicated to discussing the “holes” in evolution and researching other theories of origin.
Cornell prof, lab on front line of bird flu
Syracuse Post Standard, December 5
If avian flu ever arrives in this country, one of the hot spots will be the live bird markets in New York City where thousands of chickens, ducks and other birds arrive from all over the Eastern United States. In such an environment, viruses could spread quickly.
About 18 months ago, Cornell University’s Animal Health Diagnostic Center began testing samples from the markets that used to go to the federal lab in Ames, Iowa. So far, tests have found evidence of the benign versions of avian flu, but not the dangerous variety found in Asia.
That work, led by Edward Dubovi, director of the virology diagnostic laboratory at Cornell, is just one of the efforts Cornell scientists are involved in to deal with bird flu.
Mothers’ Flight From Job Force Questioned
New York Times (Registration required), December 2
Francine D. Blau, a professor of labor economics at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, doubts that the decline in working women denotes an opt-out revolution by mothers. But the data are hard to sort out.
“It’s credible,” Ms. Blau said, that the participation of women in the work force is “entering into a period of slower growth, which might reflect the very high rates that we’ve attained. But it’s also possible that it is due to general economic conditions.”
Experts Warn of Possible Bird Flu Outbreak in Humans
Voice of America, December 1
Doctor Alfonso Torres, at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, said problems exist worldwide in addressing the bird flu virus, including with health infrastructure, research funding, and base monitoring and surveillance of the virus.
“Many countries and even many states in the U.S. do not have proper laws, or if the laws are there, they are not enforced properly,” Dr. Torres says. “So we want to establish quarantine procedures, mandatory testing and the like, but many times we cannot do that because there is no enforcement of these regulations.”
Study: AIDS Drugs Also Help Haitians
Associated Press (picked up by CBS News), December 1
A study of AIDS patients in Haiti who were sick, poor and hungry found that they did just as well as Americans do when given standard AIDS drugs.
The largest study of AIDS treatment in a developing country, released on World AIDS Day, supports the idea of expanding treatment in poor nations, the researchers said.
“There’s lots of challenges, but they can be overcome,” said the senior author, Dr. Daniel Fitzgerald of Cornell University’s Weill Medical College in New York.
After a year of treatment at a clinic in Haiti, 87 percent of the adults and 98 percent of the children in the study were still alive, comparable to the one-year survival rate for U.S. patients, according to the researchers. Without treatment, less than a third of AIDS patients live for a year in developing countries like Haiti, they said.
Janitors’ Drive in Texas Gives Hope to Unions
New York Times, November 28
“This could be important to build momentum in the South, but it’s still an incredibly hard task to organize” there, said Richard W. Hurd, a professor of labor relations at Cornell. “One big problem is there’s not a base of union members in the South to use to do organizing. And employers in the South have demonstrated a very strong antiunion bias and a willingness to go to great lengths to avoid unionization.”
Students join debate on intelligent design—Campus clubs set up to defend concept
Chicago Tribune, November 25
Dappled with autumn leaves, the manicured campus of an Ivy League university in upstate New York may seem far from the cornfields of Kansas or the rural towns of central Pennsylvania, but it represents the newest of these battlefields in the growing culture war over the teaching of evolution.
The national spotlight recently has focused on school boards in Kansas, Pennsylvania and elsewhere that are grappling with calls for including intelligent design, a concept critical of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, in science curricula. But a significant new front in this cultural conflict is opening in the halls of American higher education, spearheaded by science students skeptical of evolution and intrigued by intelligent design.
One of them is Hannah Maxson. A math and chemistry major at Cornell University, she founded an Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Club here this fall.
On LI, Albany ranks high
Newsday, November 24
Albany has an image problem upstate, but not on Long Island.
The recently released Empire State Poll, conducted February 7 through March 24 of 1,602 adults, shows residents of Nassau and Suffolk counties giving state government an overall “high” rating.
This compares with the overall “low” and “medium” ratings among 18 and 16 upstate counties, respectively. Results from nine additional upstate counties were incomplete.
The split reflects a perception among upstaters that elected officials from metropolitan New York “control everything” in Albany, said Michael Hattery of Cornell University’s Local Government Program.
The poll, devised by Cornell, also shows upstate residents’ concern that the economic recovery has passed them by and negative publicity surrounding 20 years of late state budgets, Hattery said.
Comfort food a reward for men, guilty trap for women
Associated Press (story picked up nationwide by myriad media outlets, such as Newsday), November 17
Comfort food for women often means snuggling up with tub of mint chocolate ice cream to wallow in their blues. But for men, comfort foods serve as a reward when life is looking rosy.
Just what triggers people to turn to “comfort foods”—and which foods they pick—often depends on whether you’re asking a man or a woman, according to a new study by Cornell University researchers.
“Comfort foods don’t have to be high in fat and sugar. Comfort foods can be healthy,” said Jordan LeBel, a Cornell professor and lead author on the study. “This shows we can re-educate people so that comfort foods aren’t always about negative emotions.”
