The mice could remember new experiences that would normally be forgotten – a finding with important implications for treating Alzheimer’s disease.
Jackson Phillips/Provided
The Pacific tailed frog tadpole is lungless and sucker mouthed and is found in the Pacific Northwest in clear, cold mountain streams where they cling to rocks.
Ecology and evolutionary biology
Tadpole species that lost their lungs through evolution never re-evolve them, even when environmental change would make it advantageous.
Molecular biology and genetics
A new study provides an example of asymmetry, a pattern found throughout biology where a pair of organs or appendages that mirror each other have different proportions and may have different functions.
Provided
Thomas A. Lewis
Cornell leadership
A professor of religious studies at Brown, Lewis will also hold a faculty appointment as a professor of religious studies and German studies in the 鶹Ƶ and 鶹Ƶ.
Marina Raspopova/Unsplash
Ecology and evolutionary biology
Through intensive breeding, humans have pushed breeds such as pug dogs and Persian cats to evolve with very similar skulls and “smushed” faces, so they’re more similar to each other than they are to most other dogs or cats.
Ecology and evolutionary biology
Sparks was honored for his distinguished contributions to the fields of ecology and environmental science.
Marco Bianchetti/Unsplash
Molecular biology and genetics
The study found that key CD8+ T cells showed signs of constant stimulation that lead to an exhausted state, a condition that is well-studied in cancer.
Milad Fakurian/Unsplash
Neurobiology and Behavior
A classic psychedelic was found to activate a cell type in the brain of mice and rats that silences other neighboring neurons, providing insight into how such drugs reduce anxiety.
Neurobiology and Behavior
The study answers how people can keep learning new things for a lifetime without using up all of their neurons.
Глеб Коровко/Pexels
Molecular biology and genetics
Fruit flies, which humans have inadvertently spread around the globe, arrived in China roughly 4,000 years ago.
Neurobiology and Behavior
The finding has important implications for one day treating memory and learning issues found in dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Neurobiology and Behavior
When a lonely and thirsty male zebra finch encountered a female, his thirst waned and he instead focused his attention on her, a shift reflected in the dopamine system.
Noël Heaney/Cornell University
Ben Cosgrove, associate professor of biomedical engineering
“This one gene controls a switch between two alternative cell fates," said Professor Leslie Babonis.
A seminal fluid protein transferred from male to female fruit flies during mating changes the expression of genes related to the fly’s circadian clock, Cornell research has found.
A seminal fluid protein transferred from male to female fruit flies during mating changes the expression of genes related to the fly’s circadian clock, Cornell research has found.
Peter Lepage, the Tisch Family Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Physics, is among four Cornell faculty to be honored this year.
Junpeng Lai/Binghamton University
An orb-weaver spider perched in the hub of its wheel-shaped web. The “claw” at the tip of each leg is “hooked” gently onto strategically placed strands of web silk and positioned to “listen” to the miniscule vibrations induced by sound waves that pass through the web.
A study of orb weaver spiders finds their massive webs act as auditory arrays that capture sounds, possibly giving spiders advanced warning of incoming prey or predators.
Scott Pitnick/Syracuse University
Fruit fly sperm with heads labelled with a red or a green fluorescent protein, swimming inside a female fruit fly’s reproductive tract.
Long considered exclusively male, a new study revealed that by four days after a sperm enters a female fruit fly, close to 20% of its proteins are female-derived.
Matthew Meiselman/Provided
Dorsal neurons (green) express AstC peptide (magenta) in the female fly brain.
Assistant professors Pamela Chang, Antonio Fernandez-Ruiz, Daniel Halpern-Leistner and Peter McMahon have won 2022 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Bringing researchers together – not only across disciplines but across the 200-plus miles separating Ithaca from New York City – is the aim of academic integration, which promotes, builds and enhances collaborative research across Cornell’s campuses.
Kellogg Lab provided
A cryo-electron microscopy image of TnsC filaments.
Little is known about how higher cortical areas in the brain develop after the primary areas are in place. A new study by Cornell and Yale researchers, including professor emerita of psychology Barbara Finlay, uses computer modeling to show that the development and evolution of secondary visual cortical areas can be explained by the same process.
Scientists have known that females of many species eat more to meet the demands of reproduction, and that females undergo widespread physiological and behavioral changes after mating. The mechanisms of these changes, however, are not well understood.
Scientists have detected signs of a frog listed extinct and not seen since 1968, using an innovative technique to locate declining and missing species in two regions of Brazil.
Antonie Blackler, professor emeritus of zoology and an expert on developmental biology, died June 3 in Ithaca. He was 88. He was known for groundbreaking fundamental work on the origin of sex cells in vertebrates. His experiments with African claw-toed frogs yielded important insights into the development and reproduction of amphibian embryos, with implications for other animals and humans.
Gene drives use genetic engineering to create a desired mutation in a few individuals that then spreads via mating throughout a population in fewer than 10 generations.
With the recent emergence of the coronavirus from China’s Hubei province, another “virus” has the potential to spread, a Cornell faculty member said Tuesday at a wide-ranging panel discussion on the outbreak.
The second annual Intercampus Cancer Symposium, Oct. 11 at the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine, will highlight the wide range of cancer research taking place at Cornell’s Ithaca campus and at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.
Tyler Barr learned about leadership under pressure while attending a summer program at officer candidate school as a midshipman in the Marine Corps ROTC program at Cornell.He called it “by far the most difficult six weeks of our lives,” as he recounted sleeping and eating very little while being pushed to his physical limits.
Two operations research and information engineers, two electrical engineers and two mathematicians from Cornell have received National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program awards. Over the next five years, each researcher will receive up to $500,000 “to build a firm scientific footing for solving challenges and scaling new heights for the nation, as well as serve as academic role models in research and education,” according to the NSF website.
A project to develop topical therapies for skin diseases associated with DNA damage and another to investigate bone-binding polymers to relieve bone-on-bone pain for those with severe osteoarthritis are two of nine projects awarded 2018-19 Center for Advanced Technology (CAT) grants.CAT is housed in Cornell’s Institute of Biotechnology.
Cornell researchers have discovered there is a division of labor among immune cells that fight invading pathogens in the body.The study, published June 14 in the journal Cell, finds for the first time that fetal immune cells are present in adults and have specialized roles during infection. In fact, the first immune cells made in early life are fast-acting first responders to microbes in adulthood.
As the Cornell Institute of Host-Microbe Interactions and Disease(CIHMID) wraps up its first year, the launch of its Undergraduate Research Experience (URE) proved to be a highlight, say institute leaders.
Genes in an area of the brain that is relatively similar in fish, humans and all vertebrates appear to regulate how organisms coordinate and shift their behaviors, according to a new Cornell study.
President Martha E. Pollack has committed the university to a new multi-institution initiative to make public data pertaining to career outcomes for life sciences doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers.
When honeybee colonies get larger, common sense suggests it would be noisier with more bees buzzing around.But a study recently published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiologyreports that bigger honeybee colonies actually have quieter combs than smaller ones.
Maren Vitousek, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, has received a two-year, $500,000 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award to study links between stress, social connectedness, health and future performance. The DARPA Young Faculty Award program provides funding, mentoring and industry and Department of Defense contacts to awardees early in their careers.
Reducing antibiotic resistance in animals and developing a lubricating formula in joints for people suffering from arthritis are two of seven projects that received Center for Advanced Technology (CAT) annual grants.
What began as a Twitter joke between two researchers has turned into a four-year, $2.5 million National Science Foundation grant to take 3-D digital scans of 20,000 museum vertebrate specimens and make them available to everyone online.Cornell’s Museum of Vertebrates, with 1.3 million fish specimens, 27,000 reptiles and amphibians (called herps), and 57,000 bird and 23,000 mammal specimens, is one of 16 institutions involved and promises to feature prominently in the project.
“How do we reconcile stable truth with multiple understandings of truth?” Bruce Lewenstein, professor of science communication, posed that question during an academic symposium, “Universities and the Search for Truth,” held Aug. 24 in Bailey Hall. The event was part of the celebration of Martha E. Pollack’s inauguration as Cornell’s 14th president.
The spread of mosquito-borne viruses, including dengue, chikungunya and Zika, has created a public health crisis that poses risks to nearly 4 billion people living in 120 countries.
Very little is known about the wiring of nerve cells in the brain that allow a fish, or any animal, to make fundamental choices to move to the left or to the right. A study of zebrafish larvae published Aug. 9 in the journal eLife for the first time reveals a circuit that determines the direction of a lightning-quick turn to escape a predator.
When it comes to the birds and the bees, frogs are remarkably diverse: They do it in water, on land and on leaves.Researchers have assumed that natural selection drove frogs to take the evolutionary step to reproduce on land as a way for parents to avoid aquatic predators who feed on the eggs and tadpoles.
In recent years, Cornell has amassed an impressive stable of experts in an emerging field for modern times: The ecology and evolution of infectious disease.
Four Cornell faculty members. including two from the 鶹Ƶ & 鶹Ƶ, are among 213 national and international scholars, artists, philanthropists and business leaders elected new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and 鶹Ƶ.
Some populations of frogs are rapidly adapting to a fungal pathogen calledBatrachochrytrium dendrobatridis (Bd) that has decimated many populations for close to half a century and causes the disease chytridiomycosis, according to a new study.
Over the past decades, millions of managed colonies of honeybees have died from varroa mites that transmit deadly viruses, yet wild colonies survive.Cornell researchers describe – in the March 11 issue of the journal PLoS One –experiments that help reveal how wild colonies endure mites and pathogens.
Three young Cornell researchers have won National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Awards. Part of the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, the awards provide up to $1.5 million over five years for innovative, high-impact projects.
The idea of introducing a novel gene into a few individuals that then spreads through an entire population sounds like a premise for science fiction. And yet fiction can be prophetic.Cornell researchers have used mathematical models to illuminate the promises – and potential problems – of a new genome editing mechanism, called a gene drive.
William Provine, the Andrew H. and James L. Tisch Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Cornell, died Sept. 1 due to complications from a brain tumor at his home in Horseheads, New York. He was 73.Provine, a professor of the history of biology in the departments of History and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, was born Feb. 19, 1942, in Nashville, Tennessee.
