From The College of Arts and Sciences At Cornell University: “Software offers new way to listen for signals from the stars”

From The College of Arts and Sciences

At

Cornell University

5.30.23

The Breakthrough Listen Investigation for Periodic Spectral Signals (BLIPSS), led by Akshay Suresh, Cornell doctoral candidate in astronomy, is pioneering a search for periodic signals emanating from the core of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The research aims to detect repetitive patterns, a way to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) within our cosmic neighborhood.

Breakthrough Listen

_____________________________________________________________________________________
Breakthrough Listen Project

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA.

Green Bank Radio Telescope, West Virginia, USA, now the center piece of the Green Bank Observatory(US), being cut loose by the National Science Foundation(US), supported by Breakthrough Listen Project, West Virginia University, and operated by the nonprofit Associated Universities, Inc.

CSIRO-Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (AU) Parkes Observatory [ Murriyang, the traditional Indigenous name] , located 20 kilometres north of the town of Parkes, New South Wales, Australia, 414.80m above sea level.

SKA SARAO Meerkat [SKA-Mid] Telescope (SA), 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA.

Newly added

University of Arizona Veritas Four Čerenkov telescopes A novel gamma ray telescope under construction at the CfA Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (US), Mount Hopkins, Arizona (US), altitude 2,606 m 8,550 ft. A large project known as the Čerenkov Telescope Array, composed of hundreds of similar telescopes to be situated at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory [Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias ](ES) in the Canary Islands and Chile at European Southern Observatory Cerro Paranal(EU) site. The telescope on Mount Hopkins will be fitted with a prototype high-speed camera, assembled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (US) and capable of taking pictures at a billion frames per second. Credit: Vladimir Vassiliev. _____________________________________________________________________________________

The researchers developed software based on a Fast Folding Algorithm (FFA), an efficient search method offering enhanced sensitivity to periodic sequences of narrow pulses. Their paper was published May 30 in The Astronomical Journal [below].

Pulsars — rapidly rotating neutron stars that sweep beams of radio energy across the Earth — are natural astrophysical objects that generate periodic signals but humans also use directed periodic transmissions for a variety of applications, including radar.

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, discovered pulsars with radio astronomy. Jocelyn Bell at Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, University of Cambridge (UK), taken for the Daily Herald newspaper in 1968. Denied the Nobel.

Such signals would be a good way to get someone’s attention across interstellar space, standing out from the background of non-periodic signals, as well as using much less energy than a transmitter that is broadcasting continuously.

“BLIPSS is an example of cutting-edge software as a science multiplier for SETI,” said Suresh. “Our study introduces to SETI, for the first time, the Fast Folding Algorithm; our open-source software utilizes an FFA to crunch over 1.5 million time series for periodic signals in roughly 30 minutes.”

BLIPSS is a collaborative effort between Cornell, the SETI Institute, and Breakthrough Listen.

SETI Institute
About The SETI Institute
What is life? How does it begin? Are we alone? These are some of the questions we ask in our quest to learn about and share the wonders of the universe. At the SETI Institute we have a passion for discovery and for passing knowledge along as scientific ambassadors.

The SETI Institute is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit scientific research institute headquartered in Mountain View, California. We are a key research contractor to NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and we collaborate with industry partners throughout Silicon Valley and beyond.

Founded in 1984, the SETI Institute employs more than 130 scientists, educators, and administrative staff. Work at the SETI Institute is anchored by three centers: the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe (research), the Center for Education and the Center for Outreach.

The SETI Institute welcomes philanthropic support from individuals, private foundations, corporations and other groups to support our education and outreach initiatives, as well as unfunded scientific research and fieldwork.

A Special Thank You to SETI Institute Partners and Collaborators
• Campoalto, Chile, NASA Ames Research Center, NASA Headquarters, National Science Foundation, Aerojet Rocketdyne,SRI International

Frontier Development Lab Partners
• Breakthrough Prize Foundation, The European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU), Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, KBRwyle. Kx Lockheed Martin, NASA Ames Research Center, Nvidia, SpaceResources Luxembourg, XPrize
In-kind Service Providers
• Gunderson Dettmer – General legal services, Hello Pilgrim – Website Design and Development Steptoe & Johnson – IP legal services, Danielle Futselaar

SETI/Allen Telescope Array situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California, USA, Altitude 986 m (3,235 ft), the origins of the Institute’s search.

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope. (Photo by Laurie Hatch)

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Laser SETI

LaserSETI observatory installation at Haleakala Observatory in Maui, Hawai’I, aimed East.

There is also an installation at Robert Ferguson Observatory, Sonoma, CA aimed West for full coverage [no image available].

SETI Institute – 189 Bernardo Ave., Suite 100
Mountain View, CA 94043
Phone 650.961.6633 – Fax 650-961-7099
Privacy Policy – Questions and Comments

Also in the hunt, but not a part of the SETI Institute
SETI@home, a BOINC [Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing] project originated in the Space Science Lab at UC Berkeley.

The project significantly enhances the probability of capturing evidence of extraterrestrial technology by focusing on the central region of the Milky Way, known for its dense concentration of stars and potentially habitable exoplanets. The center of the Milky Way would also be an ideal place for aliens to place a beacon to contact large swaths of the Galaxy.

The team tested their algorithm on known pulsars and were able to detect periodic emission as expected. They then turned to a larger dataset of scans of the Galactic Center undertaken using the Breakthrough Listen instrument on the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia. In contrast to pulsars, which emit across a wide swath of radio frequencies, BLIPSS looked for repeating signals in a narrower range of frequencies, covering less than one-tenth of the width of an average FM radio station.

“The combination of these relatively narrow bandwidths with periodic patterns could be indicative of deliberate technological activities of intelligent civilizations,” said co-author Steve Croft, Breakthrough Listen project scientist. “Breakthrough Listen captures huge volumes of data, and Akshay’s technique provides a new method to help us search that haystack for needles that could provide tantalizing evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life forms.”

“Until now, radio SETI has primarily dedicated its efforts to the search for continuous signals,” said co-author Vishal Gajjar, a SETI Institute astronomer. “Our study sheds light on the remarkable energy efficiency of a train of pulses as a means of interstellar communication across vast distances. Notably, this study marks the first-ever comprehensive endeavor to conduct in-depth searches for these signals.”

The Astronomical Journal

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Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences is a division of Cornell University. It has been part of the university since its founding, although its name has changed over time. It grants bachelor’s degrees, and masters and doctorates through affiliation with the Cornell University Graduate School. Its major academic buildings are located on the Arts Quad and include some of the university’s oldest buildings. The college offers courses in many fields of study and is the largest college at Cornell by undergraduate enrollment.

Originally, the university’s faculty was undifferentiated, but with the founding of the Cornell Law School in 1886 and the concomitant self-segregation of the school’s lawyers, different departments and colleges formed.

Initially, the division that would become the College of Arts and Sciences was known as the Academic Department, but it was formally renamed in 1903. The College endowed the first professorships in American history, musicology, and American literature. Currently, the college teaches 4,100 undergraduates, with 600 full-time faculty members (and an unspecified number of lecturers) teaching 2,200 courses.

The Arts Quad is the site of Cornell’s original academic buildings and is home to many of the college’s programs. On the western side of the quad, at the top of Libe Slope, are Morrill Hall (completed in 1866), McGraw Hall (1872) and White Hall (1868). These simple but elegant buildings, built with native Cayuga bluestone, reflect Ezra Cornell’s utilitarianism and are known as Stone Row. The statue of Ezra Cornell, dating back to 1919, stands between Morrill and McGraw Halls. Across from this statue, in front of Goldwin Smith Hall, sits the statue of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s other co-founder and its first president.

Lincoln Hall (1888) also stands on the eastern face of the quad next to Goldwin Smith Hall. On the northern face are the domed Sibley Hall and Tjaden Hall (1883). Just off of the quad on the Slope, next to Tjaden, stands the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, designed by I. M. Pei. Stimson Hall (1902), Olin Library (1959) and Uris Library (1892), with Cornell’s landmark clocktower, McGraw Tower, stand on the southern end of the quad.

Olin Library replaced Boardman Hall (1892), the original location of the Cornell Law School. In 1992, an underground addition was made to the quad with Kroch Library, an extension of Olin Library that houses several special collections of the Cornell University Library, including the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Klarman Hall, the first new humanities building at Cornell in over 100 years, opened in 2016. Klarman houses the offices of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies. The building is connected to, and surrounded on three sides by, Goldwin Smith Hall and fronts East Avenue.

Legends and lore about the Arts Quad and its statues can be found at Cornelliana.

The College of Arts and Sciences offers both undergraduate and graduate (through the Graduate School) degrees. The only undergraduate degree is the Bachelor of Arts. However, students may enroll in the dual-degree program, which allows them to pursue programs of study in two colleges and receive two different degrees. The faculties within the college are:

Africana Studies and Research Center*
American Studies
Anthropology
Archaeology
Asian-American Studies
Asian Studies
Astronomy/Astrophysics
Biology (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences)
Biology & Society Major (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Human Ecology)
Chemistry and Chemical Biology
China and Asia-pacific Studies
Classics
Cognitive Studies
College Scholar Program (frees up to 40 selected students in each class from all degree requirements and allows them to fashion a plan of study conducive to achieving their ultimate intellectual goals; a senior thesis is required)
Comparative Literature
Computer Science (with the College of Engineering)
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Engineering)
Economics
English
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
German Studies
Government
History
History of Art
Human Biology
Independent Major
Information Science (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Engineering)
Jewish Studies
John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines
Latin American Studies
Latino Studies
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Linguistics
Mathematics
Medieval Studies
Modern European Studies Concentration
Music
Near Eastern Studies
Philosophy
Physics
Psychology
Religious Studies
Romance Studies
Russian
Science and Technology Studies
Society for the Humanities
Sociology
Theatre, Film, and Dance
Visual Studies Undergraduate Concentration

*Africana Studies was an independent center reporting directly to the Provost until July 1, 2011.

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land-grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through The State University of New York (SUNY) system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States.

Cornell is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at The California Institute of Technology and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.
In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.
As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.

From The College of Arts and Sciences And The University of Washington DiRAC Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics & Cosmology At The University of Washington : “Secrets of the stars”

From The College of Arts and Sciences

And

The University of Washington Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics & Cosmology

At

The University of Washington

5.30.23
James Urton

How University of Washington astronomers with the world’s largest telescope and a revolutionary survey of space will upend what we thought we knew about the universe.

Beneath breathtakingly crisp views of the night sky, atop Cerro Pachón, a mountain in the foothills of the Andes in northern Chile, is a nearly finished construction project that will transform how we look at the universe. Though it resembles a postmodern office building, its domed tower is the telltale sign of an astronomical observatory.

Next year, when its upward-turned eye opens to the heavens, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will form the beating heart of a revolution that is sweeping astronomy. It will impact nearly every mission, every question and every research project exploring what is “out there” beyond Earth. It could even change how we view our place within the cosmos.

The National Science Foundation NOIRLab National Optical Astronomy Observatory Vera C. Rubin Observatory [LSST] Telescope currently under construction on the El Peñón peak at Cerro Pachón Chile, a 2,682-meter-high mountain in Coquimbo Region, in northern Chile, alongside the Gemini South Telescope and Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope.

NSF NOIRLab NOAO Vera C. Rubin Observatory [LSST] Telescope currently under construction on the El Peñón peak at Cerro Pachón Chile, a 2,682-meter-high mountain in Coquimbo Region, in northern Chile, alongside the existing NSF NOIRLab NOAO AURA Gemini South Telescope and NSF NOIRLab NOAO Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope.

Vera C Rubin Observatory [LSST] Telescope base.

SLAC 3200 megapixel camera for Vera C Rubin Observatory being built at SLAC with sensor array from BNL.

Vera Rubin measuring spectra, worked on Dark Matter(Emilio Segre Visual Archives AIP SPL).

Assuming, of course, astronomers can navigate their way through the unprecedented amount of data the Rubin Observatory will gather starting in 2025 — a challenge that the University of Washington is rising to meet.

The Rubin Observatory, which features the largest mirror and digital camera ever constructed, will unleash a deluge of information about our night sky as part of the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The University of Washington was a founding member of the LSST mission, which is no ordinary stargazing venture.

Thanks to the observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope, the LSST will be the most ambitious mission ever to capture and understand the countless cosmic events that shape and reshape our universe — effectively rewriting the astronomy books we use today.

“A generation ago, a telescope might watch just a thousand stars in a single observation run,” says James Davenport, assistant professor of astronomy in the College of Arts & Sciences. “The Rubin Observatory will observe several billion objects in the sky, giving us thousands of times more data than other telescopes could capture — and that’s just in a single night.”

But data on its own can’t drive discovery. The astronomers need tools — algorithms, software and expertise — to sort through Rubin’s bounty.

“It’s like someone delivering a silo of grain and saying, ‘Here, I’ve solved your hunger problem.’ You actually haven’t yet — not until we have the means to process that grain and bake loaves,” says Mario Jurić, a UW astronomy professor. “We’ll get silos of grain each night from the Rubin Observatory, and the field of astronomy needs to figure out how to transform that into bread.”

This is where DiRAC — the UW’s Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics & Cosmology — comes in. Launched in 2017 with lead funding from the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, DiRAC is ready to help us make sense of the discoveries of Rubin and the new generation of telescopes.

Feeding astronomy’s hunger

Jurić and Davenport are the director and associate director (respectively) of DiRAC, a collaborative community of scientists, engineers and students who are crafting software that can comb through those mountains of astronomical data to help scientists understand the events and changes unfolding continuously above our heads.

Each night, the Rubin’s camera is expected to capture millions of changes in stars and other objects — too many to sort through in a lifetime.

The astronomical events the LSST will pick up are diverse. Some will be subtle, like a dim asteroid in a frigid orbit around the sun. Others will be dramatic, like a massive star at the end of its life immolating brilliantly as a supernova.

The tools DiRAC is developing for the Rubin project are equally diverse. Daily automated alerts, for example, will help scientists worldwide identify events that require immediate action — such as an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Other tools will enable longer-term studies, like tracking the behavior of a specific set of stars over time in our Milky Way galaxy.

“These are important tools to help democratize science and make it accessible,” says Jurić. “Most astronomers are not experts in writing algorithms or software to sort through large datasets. The tools we’re developing will do those jobs for them, so users can pull out the data that interests them and keep the discovery pipeline going.”

Beyond these tool-building goals, DiRAC scientists are looking forward to applying LSST data to a host of scientific mysteries.

Photo by Christopher Michel

Data on its own can’t drive discovery. Astronomers need tools — algorithms, software and expertise — to sort through Rubin’s bounty. “It’s like someone delivering a silo of grain and saying, ‘Here, I’ve solved your hunger problem.’ You actually haven’t yet — not until we have the means to process that grain and bake loaves,” says Mario Jurić, UW astronomy professor and director of DiRAC. “We’ll get silos of grain each night from the Rubin Observatory, and the field of astronomy needs to figure out how to transform that into bread.”

Finding the strange and powerful

Many of us remember making solar-system mobiles in school, with eight (or nine, depending on our age) painted balls representing the planets — but it turns out the solar system is far more crowded than we were taught.

After “first light” — when Rubin becomes operational in early 2025 — DiRAC scientists will use the data to understand our astronomical history, observe the present and predict the future, tracking and studying everything from protecting ourselves from near-Earth asteroids to the possibility of finding a Planet Nine lurking in the frozen reaches beyond our star.

Sarah Greenstreet

DiRAC researcher Sarah Greenstreet works alongside teams that are creating an automated alert system for objects in motion that could impact the Earth. She notes that asteroids and other small bodies around the sun are also windows to the past — “which can help us understand how they have moved through the solar system throughout its history.”

Other DiRAC scientists will have their gazes fixed on stars themselves. Contemporary research is challenging long-prevailing theories about how these burning furnaces form, live and die. In his own research, Davenport — who notes that he “likes weird stars” — has catalogued unexpected stellar pairings, such as a large puffy star (one that’s expanding in its twilight years) orbited by a small companion star encased in cosmic dust, or two stars whose dance around each other is twisted and turned by an unseen third companion. With the LSST watching hundreds of millions of stars each night, scientists like Davenport expect to find more of these strange systems and learn why some stars are paired up while others, like our calm sun, are not.

“A bunch of stars out there show unusual and unexpected behavior,” says Davenport. “Is it possible that they aren’t unusual at all, but are actually very common? If so, we’ll have to go back to the theories of star formation and galaxy formation and redefine what’s ‘unusual.’”

Still other DiRAC researchers have their eyes on even bigger prizes, including the powerful events — like black hole or neutron star mergers — that generate gravitational waves. The LSST mission will provide data about the highly energetic events that generate these waves, giving scientists valuable insight never before available.

DiRAC researcher Sarah Greenstreet is working on an automated alert system for objects in motion that could impact the Earth. She notes that asteroids are also windows to the past — “which can help us understand how they have moved through the solar system throughout its history.”

Looking for the unexpected

Those are just a few of the discoveries scientists expect to find. But buried within the massive datasets from LSST and the Rubin Observatory will doubtless be evidence of events, objects and phenomena that may shock and confound scientists.

Those “anticipated unknowns,” pulled from the sky above the arid Andes and then examined at a rain-washed campus half a world away, are what most excite astronomers like Davenport. “The lasting legacy of the LSST will be in the surprises buried in the datasets that we’re helping to uncover,” he says with anticipation. “Students today will be working with these data for the rest of their careers — and that is precisely how astronomy should work.”

What could we discover?

A few of the astronomical mysteries the Rubin Observatory is expected to shed light on:

The amount and location of dark matter in our galaxy; what dark energy is and how it behaves.

Messier 87*, The first image of the event horizon of a black hole. This is the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87. Image via The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration released on 10 April 2019 via National Science Foundation.

Light from black hole and neutron star mergers, which generate gravitational waves detected halfway across the visible universe.

SN 1987A remnant, imaged by ALMA. The inner region is contrasted with the outer shell, lacy white and blue circles, where the blast wave from the supernova is colliding with the envelope of gas ejected from the star prior to its powerful detonation. Image credit: ALMA / European Southern Observatory [La Observatorio Europeo Austral] [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte] (EU) / National Astronomical Observatory of Japan [国立天文台](JP) / National Radio Astronomy Observatory / Alexandra Angelich, NRAO / Associated Universities Inc / National Science Foundation.

Hundreds of supernovae each night (10–100 times more than ever seen).

Solar flare.
“Stars behaving strangely” — fading or brightening suddenly due to flare activity or interactions with a nearby star

Planet Nine, if it’s out there!

See the full article here .

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Discovery is who we are

DiRAC Mission Statement

To build the world’s most advanced datasets, algorithms, and tools and use them to explore and understand the universe.

The College of Arts & Sciences is at the heart of the University of Washington. As the UW’s largest college, Arts & Sciences produces more than half of all bachelor’s degrees on the Seattle campus. A third of our 24,000+ students are the first in their families to attend college. Faculty in our 39 academic departments are dedicated to helping students think critically, communicate clearly, and engage diverse perspectives respectfully. In Arts & Sciences, our discoveries in learning, teaching, and research engage us with our local, national and global communities — and with each other.

The University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences provides a liberal arts education of tremendous breadth and depth to more than 22,000 students while advancing research and serving as a resource for the community. The College is made up of four academic divisions: art, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences.

CORE OF THE UNIVERSITY

With more than 5,400 undergraduate courses offered in the College of Arts & Sciences annually, students can study everything from art to economics to physics. The College’s extensive academic offerings benefit the entire University community; nearly one-third of all students who take an Arts & Sciences class are pursuing a non-A&S degree.

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH

From malaria treatment to solar energy to human rights, A&S researchers are tackling many of our society’s most pressing issues. The College is home to more than 30 interdisciplinary centers and has ties to many others, enabling scholars in diverse fields to collaborate on complex research questions. A&S faculty generated about $105 million in research funds through public and private grants during the most recent fiscal year.

INTERNATIONAL EMPHASIS

The College teaches 60 languages and offers more than 100 study abroad programs in 36 countries, with dedicated centers in Rome, Italy and León, Spain. The Jackson School of International Studies provides interdisciplinary education, leading-edge research, public programs and outreach on all major world areas and critical international issues.

A REGIONAL ARTS RESOURCE

All of the University’s arts units are part of the College, including the Schools of Music, Art, and Drama, the Department of Dance, Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), the Henry Art Gallery, the Burke Museum, and Meany Center for the Performing Arts. They offer more than 300 performances, exhibits, and public programs annually. Detailed event and ticket information is available at ArtsUW.

PARTNERING WITH THE COMMUNITY

The College has developed dozens of innovative partnerships with the community. These include summer programs for K-12 teachers, guided stargazings at the Jacobsen Observatory, special Meany Center performances for K-12 classes, collaborations with community organizations through project-based courses, and more.

The University of Washington is one of the world’s preeminent public universities. Our impact on individuals, on our region, and on the world is profound — whether we are launching young people into a boundless future or confronting the grand challenges of our time through undaunted research and scholarship. Ranked number 10 in the world in Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings and educating more than 54,000 students annually, our students and faculty work together to turn ideas into impact and in the process transform lives and our world. For more about our impact on the world, every day.

So what defines us —the students, faculty and community members at the University of Washington? Above all, it’s our belief in possibility and our unshakable optimism. It’s a connection to others, both near and far. It’s a hunger that pushes us to tackle challenges and pursue progress. It’s the conviction that together we can create a world of good. Join us on the journey.

The University of Washington is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in downtown Seattle approximately a decade after the city’s founding to aid its economic development. Today, the university’s 703-acre main Seattle campus is in the University District above the Montlake Cut, within the urban Puget Sound region of the Pacific Northwest. The university has additional campuses in Tacoma and Bothell. Overall, University of Washington encompasses over 500 buildings and over 20 million gross square footage of space, including one of the largest library systems in the world with more than 26 university libraries, as well as the UW Tower, lecture halls, art centers, museums, laboratories, stadiums, and conference centers. The university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees through 140 departments in various colleges and schools, sees a total student enrollment of roughly 46,000 annually, and functions on a quarter system.

University of Washington is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation, UW spent $1.41 billion on research and development in 2018, ranking it 5th in the nation. As the flagship institution of the six public universities in Washington state, it is known for its medical, engineering and scientific research as well as its highly competitive computer science and engineering programs. Additionally, University of Washington continues to benefit from its deep historic ties and major collaborations with numerous technology giants in the region, such as Amazon, Boeing, Nintendo, and particularly Microsoft. Paul G. Allen, Bill Gates and others spent significant time at Washington computer labs for a startup venture before founding Microsoft and other ventures. The University of Washington’s 22 varsity sports teams are also highly competitive, competing as the Huskies in the Pac-12 Conference of the NCAA Division I, representing the United States at the Olympic Games, and other major competitions.

The university has been affiliated with many notable alumni and faculty, including 21 Nobel Prize laureates and numerous Pulitzer Prize winners, Fulbright Scholars, Rhodes Scholars and Marshall Scholars.

In 1854, territorial governor Isaac Stevens recommended the establishment of a university in the Washington Territory. Prominent Seattle-area residents, including Methodist preacher Daniel Bagley, saw this as a chance to add to the city’s potential and prestige. Bagley learned of a law that allowed United States territories to sell land to raise money in support of public schools. At the time, Arthur A. Denny, one of the founders of Seattle and a member of the territorial legislature, aimed to increase the city’s importance by moving the territory’s capital from Olympia to Seattle. However, Bagley eventually convinced Denny that the establishment of a university would assist more in the development of Seattle’s economy. Two universities were initially chartered, but later the decision was repealed in favor of a single university in Lewis County provided that locally donated land was available. When no site emerged, Denny successfully petitioned the legislature to reconsider Seattle as a location in 1858.

In 1861, scouting began for an appropriate 10 acres (4 ha) site in Seattle to serve as a new university campus. Arthur and Mary Denny donated eight acres, while fellow pioneers Edward Lander, and Charlie and Mary Terry, donated two acres on Denny’s Knoll in downtown Seattle. More specifically, this tract was bounded by 4th Avenue to the west, 6th Avenue to the east, Union Street to the north, and Seneca Streets to the south.

John Pike, for whom Pike Street is named, was the university’s architect and builder. It was opened on November 4, 1861, as the Territorial University of Washington. The legislature passed articles incorporating the University, and establishing its Board of Regents in 1862. The school initially struggled, closing three times: in 1863 for low enrollment, and again in 1867 and 1876 due to funds shortage. University of Washington awarded its first graduate Clara Antoinette McCarty Wilt in 1876, with a bachelor’s degree in science.

19th century relocation

By the time Washington state entered the Union in 1889, both Seattle and the University had grown substantially. University of Washington’s total undergraduate enrollment increased from 30 to nearly 300 students, and the campus’s relative isolation in downtown Seattle faced encroaching development. A special legislative committee, headed by University of Washington graduate Edmond Meany, was created to find a new campus to better serve the growing student population and faculty. The committee eventually selected a site on the northeast of downtown Seattle called Union Bay, which was the land of the Duwamish, and the legislature appropriated funds for its purchase and construction. In 1895, the University relocated to the new campus by moving into the newly built Denny Hall. The University Regents tried and failed to sell the old campus, eventually settling with leasing the area. This would later become one of the University’s most valuable pieces of real estate in modern-day Seattle, generating millions in annual revenue with what is now called the Metropolitan Tract. The original Territorial University building was torn down in 1908, and its former site now houses the Fairmont Olympic Hotel.

The sole-surviving remnants of Washington’s first building are four 24-foot (7.3 m), white, hand-fluted cedar, Ionic columns. They were salvaged by Edmond S. Meany, one of the University’s first graduates and former head of its history department. Meany and his colleague, Dean Herbert T. Condon, dubbed the columns as “Loyalty,” “Industry,” “Faith”, and “Efficiency”, or “LIFE.” The columns now stand in the Sylvan Grove Theater.

20th century expansion

Organizers of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition eyed the still largely undeveloped campus as a prime setting for their world’s fair. They came to an agreement with Washington’s Board of Regents that allowed them to use the campus grounds for the exposition, surrounding today’s Drumheller Fountain facing towards Mount Rainier. In exchange, organizers agreed Washington would take over the campus and its development after the fair’s conclusion. This arrangement led to a detailed site plan and several new buildings, prepared in part by John Charles Olmsted. The plan was later incorporated into the overall University of Washington campus master plan, permanently affecting the campus layout.

Both World Wars brought the military to campus, with certain facilities temporarily lent to the federal government. In spite of this, subsequent post-war periods were times of dramatic growth for the University. The period between the wars saw a significant expansion of the upper campus. Construction of the Liberal Arts Quadrangle, known to students as “The Quad,” began in 1916 and continued to 1939. The University’s architectural centerpiece, Suzzallo Library, was built in 1926 and expanded in 1935.

After World War II, further growth came with the G.I. Bill. Among the most important developments of this period was the opening of the School of Medicine in 1946, which is now consistently ranked as the top medical school in the United States. It would eventually lead to the University of Washington Medical Center, ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the top ten hospitals in the nation.

In 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry in the Seattle area were forced into inland internment camps as part of Executive Order 9066 following the attack on Pearl Harbor. During this difficult time, university president Lee Paul Sieg took an active and sympathetic leadership role in advocating for and facilitating the transfer of Japanese American students to universities and colleges away from the Pacific Coast to help them avoid the mass incarceration. Nevertheless, many Japanese American students and “soon-to-be” graduates were unable to transfer successfully in the short time window or receive diplomas before being incarcerated. It was only many years later that they would be recognized for their accomplishments during the University of Washington’s Long Journey Home ceremonial event that was held in May 2008.

From 1958 to 1973, the University of Washington saw a tremendous growth in student enrollment, its faculties and operating budget, and also its prestige under the leadership of Charles Odegaard. University of Washington student enrollment had more than doubled to 34,000 as the baby boom generation came of age. However, this era was also marked by high levels of student activism, as was the case at many American universities. Much of the unrest focused around civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. In response to anti-Vietnam War protests by the late 1960s, the University Safety and Security Division became the University of Washington Police Department.

Odegaard instituted a vision of building a “community of scholars”, convincing the Washington State legislatures to increase investment in the University. Washington senators, such as Henry M. Jackson and Warren G. Magnuson, also used their political clout to gather research funds for the University of Washington. The results included an increase in the operating budget from $37 million in 1958 to over $400 million in 1973, solidifying University of Washington as a top recipient of federal research funds in the United States. The establishment of technology giants such as Microsoft, Boeing and Amazon in the local area also proved to be highly influential in the University of Washington’s fortunes, not only improving graduate prospects but also helping to attract millions of dollars in university and research funding through its distinguished faculty and extensive alumni network.

21st century

In 1990, the University of Washington opened its additional campuses in Bothell and Tacoma. Although originally intended for students who have already completed two years of higher education, both schools have since become four-year universities with the authority to grant degrees. The first freshman classes at these campuses started in fall 2006. Today both Bothell and Tacoma also offer a selection of master’s degree programs.

In 2012, the University began exploring plans and governmental approval to expand the main Seattle campus, including significant increases in student housing, teaching facilities for the growing student body and faculty, as well as expanded public transit options. The University of Washington light rail station was completed in March 2015, connecting Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood to the University of Washington Husky Stadium within five minutes of rail travel time. It offers a previously unavailable option of transportation into and out of the campus, designed specifically to reduce dependence on private vehicles, bicycles and local King County buses.

University of Washington has been listed as a “Public Ivy” in Greene’s Guides since 2001, and is an elected member of the American Association of Universities. Among the faculty by 2012, there have been 151 members of American Association for the Advancement of Science, 68 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 67 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 53 members of the National Academy of Medicine, 29 winners of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, 21 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 15 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators, 15 MacArthur Fellows, 9 winners of the Gairdner Foundation International Award, 5 winners of the National Medal of Science, 7 Nobel Prize laureates, 5 winners of Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research, 4 members of the American Philosophical Society, 2 winners of the National Book Award, 2 winners of the National Medal of Arts, 2 Pulitzer Prize winners, 1 winner of the Fields Medal, and 1 member of the National Academy of Public Administration. Among UW students by 2012, there were 136 Fulbright Scholars, 35 Rhodes Scholars, 7 Marshall Scholars and 4 Gates Cambridge Scholars. UW is recognized as a top producer of Fulbright Scholars, ranking 2nd in the US in 2017.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has consistently ranked University of Washington as one of the top 20 universities worldwide every year since its first release. In 2019, University of Washington ranked 14th worldwide out of 500 by the ARWU, 26th worldwide out of 981 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and 28th worldwide out of 101 in the Times World Reputation Rankings. Meanwhile, QS World University Rankings ranked it 68th worldwide, out of over 900.

U.S. News & World Report ranked University of Washington 8th out of nearly 1,500 universities worldwide for 2021, with University of Washington’s undergraduate program tied for 58th among 389 national universities in the U.S. and tied for 19th among 209 public universities.

In 2019, it ranked 10th among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings. In 2017, the Leiden Ranking, which focuses on science and the impact of scientific publications among the world’s 500 major universities, ranked University of Washington 12th globally and 5th in the U.S.

In 2019, Kiplinger Magazine’s review of “top college values” named University of Washington 5th for in-state students and 10th for out-of-state students among U.S. public colleges, and 84th overall out of 500 schools. In the Washington Monthly National University Rankings University of Washington was ranked 15th domestically in 2018, based on its contribution to the public good as measured by social mobility, research, and promoting public service.

From The College of Arts and Sciences At Cornell University Via “The Chronicle”: “Cornell and Google first to detect key to quantum computing future”

From The College of Arts and Sciences

At

Cornell University

Via

“The Chronicle”

5.12.23
Kate Blackwood | College of Arts and Sciences

Eun-Ah Kim, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Google researchers report the first demonstration of two-dimensional particles, called “non-Abelian anyons”, that are the key ingredient for realizing topological quantum computing, a promising method of introducing fault resistance to quantum computing.

The scientists published May 11 in Nature [below]. The experiment with Google Quantum AI published [Annals of Physics (below)] in March by Kim and co-author Yuri Lensky, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics.

Theorized about for 40 years but not realized in theory or experiment until 2022 by Kim and collaborators, non-Abelian anyons can, in certain 2D systems, produce a measurable record of their movement when two of them exchange positions. They retain a sort of memory, making it possible to tell when two of them have been exchanged, despite being completely identical.

The resulting trail through space-time – known as a “braid” – could protect bits of quantum information by storing them nonlocally and could be used in a platform for protected quantum bits (qubits), Kim said.

Google experimentalists used one of their superconducting quantum processors to observe the peculiar behavior of non-Abelian anyons for the first time and demonstrated how this phenomenon could be used to perform quantum computations. Error correction systems based on qubits will be necessary for quantum computing as the field develops.

Following the protocol laid out in Kim and Lensky’s theoretical work, Google Quantum AI experimentalists created and moved non-Abelian anyons physically on a 2D grid of qubits resembling a checkerboard. To realize non-Abelian anyons, they stretched and squashed the quantum state of qubits laid out on the grid, letting the qubits form more general graphs.

Although backed by robust mathematics, Kim said, a simple geometric and creative insight is at the heart of both theory and experiment realizing non-Abelian anyons in the physical world.

“We needed to introduce a new theoretical framework relying on the mathematics of gauge theories,” Kim said, “to implement the edge-swinging moves on the device and predict quantum measurement outcomes.

“It looks simple, but the particles remember the history,” Kim said. “If you want this to be the technology of the future, you want it to be simple and straightforward.”

In a series of experiments, the Google researchers observed the behavior of these non-Abelian anyons and how they interacted with the more mundane particles in the setup. Weaving the two types of particles around each other led to bizarre phenomena; particles disappeared, reappeared and shapeshifted from one type to another, Google researchers said.

Most importantly, the researchers observed the hallmark behavior of non-Abelian anyons researchers have been seeking for years: Swapping two of them caused a measurable change in the quantum state of their system. Finally, they demonstrated how braiding non-Abelian anyons might be used in quantum computations, creating a well-known quantum entangled state called the “Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ)” state by braiding several non-Abelian anyons together.

Kim, co-chair of Cornell’s Quantum Science and Technology Radical Collaboration initiative, called this work a major advance in both condensed matter physics and quantum information science.

“Our observations represent an important milestone in the study of topological systems, and present a new platform for exploring the rich physics of non-Abelian anyons,” Kim said. “Moreover, through the future inclusion of error correction, it opens a new path towards fault-tolerant quantum computing.”

Nature

Fig. 1: Deformations of the surface code.

a, Stabilizer codes are conveniently described in a graph framework. Through deformations of the surface code graph, a square grid of qubits (crosses) can be used to realize more generalized graphs. Plaquette violations (red) correspond to stabilizers with sp = −1 and are created by local Pauli operations. In the absence of deformations, plaquette violations are constrained to move on one of the two sublattices of the dual graph in the surface code, hence the two shades of blue. b, A pair of D3Vs (yellow triangles) appears by removing an edge between two neighbouring stabilizers, S^1 and S^2, and introducing the new stabilizer, S^=S^1S^2. A D3V is moved by applying a two-qubit entangling gate, exp(π8[S^′,S^]). In the presence of bulk D3Vs, there is no consistent way of chequerboard colouring, hence the (arbitrarily chosen) grey regions. The top right shows that in a general stabilizer graph, S^p can be found from a constraint at each vertex, where {τ1, τ2} = 0.

Annals of Physics

See the full article here .

See also a previous blog post on this topic from Cornell here.

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences is a division of Cornell University. It has been part of the university since its founding, although its name has changed over time. It grants bachelor’s degrees, and masters and doctorates through affiliation with the Cornell University Graduate School. Its major academic buildings are located on the Arts Quad and include some of the university’s oldest buildings. The college offers courses in many fields of study and is the largest college at Cornell by undergraduate enrollment.

Originally, the university’s faculty was undifferentiated, but with the founding of the Cornell Law School in 1886 and the concomitant self-segregation of the school’s lawyers, different departments and colleges formed.

Initially, the division that would become the College of Arts and Sciences was known as the Academic Department, but it was formally renamed in 1903. The College endowed the first professorships in American history, musicology, and American literature. Currently, the college teaches 4,100 undergraduates, with 600 full-time faculty members (and an unspecified number of lecturers) teaching 2,200 courses.

The Arts Quad is the site of Cornell’s original academic buildings and is home to many of the college’s programs. On the western side of the quad, at the top of Libe Slope, are Morrill Hall (completed in 1866), McGraw Hall (1872) and White Hall (1868). These simple but elegant buildings, built with native Cayuga bluestone, reflect Ezra Cornell’s utilitarianism and are known as Stone Row. The statue of Ezra Cornell, dating back to 1919, stands between Morrill and McGraw Halls. Across from this statue, in front of Goldwin Smith Hall, sits the statue of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s other co-founder and its first president.

Lincoln Hall (1888) also stands on the eastern face of the quad next to Goldwin Smith Hall. On the northern face are the domed Sibley Hall and Tjaden Hall (1883). Just off of the quad on the Slope, next to Tjaden, stands the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, designed by I. M. Pei. Stimson Hall (1902), Olin Library (1959) and Uris Library (1892), with Cornell’s landmark clocktower, McGraw Tower, stand on the southern end of the quad.

Olin Library replaced Boardman Hall (1892), the original location of the Cornell Law School. In 1992, an underground addition was made to the quad with Kroch Library, an extension of Olin Library that houses several special collections of the Cornell University Library, including the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Klarman Hall, the first new humanities building at Cornell in over 100 years, opened in 2016. Klarman houses the offices of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies. The building is connected to, and surrounded on three sides by, Goldwin Smith Hall and fronts East Avenue.

Legends and lore about the Arts Quad and its statues can be found at Cornelliana.

The College of Arts and Sciences offers both undergraduate and graduate (through the Graduate School) degrees. The only undergraduate degree is the Bachelor of Arts. However, students may enroll in the dual-degree program, which allows them to pursue programs of study in two colleges and receive two different degrees. The faculties within the college are:

Africana Studies and Research Center*
American Studies
Anthropology
Archaeology
Asian-American Studies
Asian Studies
Astronomy/Astrophysics
Biology (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences)
Biology & Society Major (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Human Ecology)
Chemistry and Chemical Biology
China and Asia-pacific Studies
Classics
Cognitive Studies
College Scholar Program (frees up to 40 selected students in each class from all degree requirements and allows them to fashion a plan of study conducive to achieving their ultimate intellectual goals; a senior thesis is required)
Comparative Literature
Computer Science (with the College of Engineering)
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Engineering)
Economics
English
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
German Studies
Government
History
History of Art
Human Biology
Independent Major
Information Science (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Engineering)
Jewish Studies
John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines
Latin American Studies
Latino Studies
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Linguistics
Mathematics
Medieval Studies
Modern European Studies Concentration
Music
Near Eastern Studies
Philosophy
Physics
Psychology
Religious Studies
Romance Studies
Russian
Science and Technology Studies
Society for the Humanities
Sociology
Theatre, Film, and Dance
Visual Studies Undergraduate Concentration

*Africana Studies was an independent center reporting directly to the Provost until July 1, 2011.

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land-grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through The State University of New York (SUNY) system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States.

Cornell is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at The California Institute of Technology and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.

In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.
As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.

From The College of Arts and Sciences At Cornell University Via “The Chronicle”: “Picking up good vibrations – of proteins – at CHESS”

From The College of Arts and Sciences

At

Cornell University

Via

“The Chronicle”

5.10.23
Rick Ryan | Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-Based Sciences and Education

A new method for analyzing protein crystals – developed by Cornell researchers and given a funky two-part name – could open up applications for new drug discovery and other areas of biotechnology and biochemistry.

The development, outlined in a paper published March 3 in Nature Communications [below], provides researchers with the tools to interpret the once-discarded data from X-ray crystallography experiments – an essential method used to study the structures of proteins. This work, which builds on a study released in 2020 [Nature Communications (below)], could lead to a better understanding of a protein’s movement, structure and overall function.

As a structural biologist, Nozomi Ando, M.S. ’04, Ph.D. ’09, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, is interested in charting the motion of proteins, and their internal parts, to better understand protein function. This type of movement is well known but has been difficult to document because the standard technique for imaging proteins is X-ray crystallography, which produces essentially static snapshots.

“Because we’re studying really challenging biological systems, the group often has to pioneer new structural methods as well,” said postdoctoral researcher Steve Meisburger, Ph.D. ’14, the paper’s lead author. “One of the questions that we have been interested in since the beginning is how a protein’s subtle breathing motions direct biochemical function.”

Protein crystallography produces bright spots, known as “Bragg peaks”, from the crystals, providing high-resolution information about the shape and structure of a protein. This process also captures blurry images – patterns and clouds related to the movement and vibrations of the proteins – hidden in the background of the Bragg peaks.

These background images are typically discarded, with priority given to the bright Bragg peak imagery that is more easily analyzed.

“We know that this pattern is related to the motion of the atoms of the protein, but we haven’t been able to use that information,” said lead author Steve Meisburger, Ph.D. ’14, a former postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Nozomi Ando, M.S. ’04, Ph.D. ’09, associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences. “The information is there, but we didn’t know how to use it. Now we do.”

Meisburger worked closely with Ando to develop the robust workflow to decode the weak background signals from crystallography experiments called diffuse scattering. This allows researchers to analyze the total scattering from crystals, which depends on both the protein’s structure and the subtle blur of its movements.

Their two-part method – which the team dubbed GOODVIBES and DISCOBALL – simultaneously provides a high-resolution structure of the protein and information on its correlated atomic movements.

“GOODVIBES” analyzes the X-ray data by separating the movements – subtle vibrations – of the protein from other proteins that might be moving around it. “DISCOBALL” independently validates these movements for certain proteins directly from the data, allowing researchers to trust the results from GOODVIBES and understand what the protein might be doing.

Ando said that while the potential for using diffuse scattering has been recognized for a long time, the act of accurately measuring the subtle signal while processing the data for something useful has been very difficult to do.

“It is much more computationally intensive to analyze than trying to analyze crystallography data alone,” Ando said. “We have a lot more data to deal with in diffuse scattering, because we are looking everywhere all at once, and the signal is also very nuanced.“

The overarching goal, Ando said, is to turn GOODVIBES and DISCOBALL into a genuine structural technique that can be used by researchers at synchrotrons all over the world.

“There is a lot of interest within the structural biology and biochemistry fields to use this signal,” Ando said. “We weren’t satisfied with just understanding what’s contained in the signal; it was really important for us to make the next step of creating the tools, and making GOODVIBES and DISCOBALL available for others to use these tools and test their hypotheses.”

These methods were developed using lysozyme proteins collected at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS).

“CHESS” Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source.

The Ando group will be returning to CHESS this spring to collaborate with Meisburger, now a CHESS staff scientist, on more complex protein structures using their new method.

By isolating the internal motion signals from total scattering data of these complex proteins, researchers can learn more about how proteins move and interact with other important molecules. This information can be used to design new drugs and therapies that target specific proteins.

Experiments were performed at the Center for High Energy X-ray Sciences (CHEXS), which is supported by the National Science Foundation, and the Macromolecular Diffraction at CHESS (MacCHESS) facility, which is supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and New York State’s Empire State Development Corporation. This work was supported by grants from the NIH.

Nature Communications

Fig. 1: Workflow to measure and interpret protein correlated motion using X-ray crystallography.

First, X-ray diffraction images are acquired from protein crystals at room temperature (RT-MX). The Bragg peaks and continuous scattering are processed separately to obtain the protein structure and a three-dimensional map of diffuse scattering on an absolute intensity scale (electron units). The structure includes mean atomic positions and atomic displacement parameters (ADPs or B-factors) that quantify motion, and the pattern of diffuse scattering depends on how motions are correlated. To separate the internal and external (rigid-body) protein motions, a physical model of lattice disorder is refined to the intense diffuse halo features (GOODVIBES), and the lattice contribution to the diffuse map and variance-covariance matrix of rigid-body motion (V-Cov) are simulated. In parallel, a model-free analysis is performed to estimate displacement covariances (DISCOBALL) and validate the off-diagonal elements of the simulated lattice V-Cov (yellow shading). The lattice contribution to the diffuse map is subtracted and the residual diffuse scattering is sorted by inter-atomic vector using a Fourier transform (3D-ΔPDF). Similarly, the internal ADPs are found by subtracting the lattice contribution (diagonal blocks of V-Cov, blue shading). The internal motion signal can be interpreted by various models. To match crystal simulations, a target diffuse map can be created using GOODVIBES to add back external motions that are consistent with the specific supercell used by the simulations.

Nature Communications 2020

Fig. 1: Diffuse scattering map of triclinic lysozyme with intensities on an absolute scale of electron units (Ie).

a) Ribbon diagram of lysozyme (top) and the triclinic unit cell containing one protein (bottom). b) A highly detailed three-dimensional map of diffuse scattering was obtained. The outer sphere is drawn at 2 Å resolution. c) The total scattering is made up of three components: inelastic Compton scattering (lower left), a broad isotropic ring that dominates the diffuse signal (upper left), and variational features in the diffuse scattering (right). Intense halos are visible in the layers containing Bragg peaks (l  = 0 plane, upper right). Cloudy scattering is best visualized in the planes mid-way between the Bragg peaks (l  = 1∕2 plane, lower right).

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences is a division of Cornell University. It has been part of the university since its founding, although its name has changed over time. It grants bachelor’s degrees, and masters and doctorates through affiliation with the Cornell University Graduate School. Its major academic buildings are located on the Arts Quad and include some of the university’s oldest buildings. The college offers courses in many fields of study and is the largest college at Cornell by undergraduate enrollment.

Originally, the university’s faculty was undifferentiated, but with the founding of the Cornell Law School in 1886 and the concomitant self-segregation of the school’s lawyers, different departments and colleges formed.

Initially, the division that would become the College of Arts and Sciences was known as the Academic Department, but it was formally renamed in 1903. The College endowed the first professorships in American history, musicology, and American literature. Currently, the college teaches 4,100 undergraduates, with 600 full-time faculty members (and an unspecified number of lecturers) teaching 2,200 courses.

The Arts Quad is the site of Cornell’s original academic buildings and is home to many of the college’s programs. On the western side of the quad, at the top of Libe Slope, are Morrill Hall (completed in 1866), McGraw Hall (1872) and White Hall (1868). These simple but elegant buildings, built with native Cayuga bluestone, reflect Ezra Cornell’s utilitarianism and are known as Stone Row. The statue of Ezra Cornell, dating back to 1919, stands between Morrill and McGraw Halls. Across from this statue, in front of Goldwin Smith Hall, sits the statue of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s other co-founder and its first president.

Lincoln Hall (1888) also stands on the eastern face of the quad next to Goldwin Smith Hall. On the northern face are the domed Sibley Hall and Tjaden Hall (1883). Just off of the quad on the Slope, next to Tjaden, stands the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, designed by I. M. Pei. Stimson Hall (1902), Olin Library (1959) and Uris Library (1892), with Cornell’s landmark clocktower, McGraw Tower, stand on the southern end of the quad.

Olin Library replaced Boardman Hall (1892), the original location of the Cornell Law School. In 1992, an underground addition was made to the quad with Kroch Library, an extension of Olin Library that houses several special collections of the Cornell University Library, including the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Klarman Hall, the first new humanities building at Cornell in over 100 years, opened in 2016. Klarman houses the offices of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies. The building is connected to, and surrounded on three sides by, Goldwin Smith Hall and fronts East Avenue.

Legends and lore about the Arts Quad and its statues can be found at Cornelliana.

The College of Arts and Sciences offers both undergraduate and graduate (through the Graduate School) degrees. The only undergraduate degree is the Bachelor of Arts. However, students may enroll in the dual-degree program, which allows them to pursue programs of study in two colleges and receive two different degrees. The faculties within the college are:

Africana Studies and Research Center*
American Studies
Anthropology
Archaeology
Asian-American Studies
Asian Studies
Astronomy/Astrophysics
Biology (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences)
Biology & Society Major (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Human Ecology)
Chemistry and Chemical Biology
China and Asia-pacific Studies
Classics
Cognitive Studies
College Scholar Program (frees up to 40 selected students in each class from all degree requirements and allows them to fashion a plan of study conducive to achieving their ultimate intellectual goals; a senior thesis is required)
Comparative Literature
Computer Science (with the College of Engineering)
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Engineering)
Economics
English
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
German Studies
Government
History
History of Art
Human Biology
Independent Major
Information Science (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Engineering)
Jewish Studies
John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines
Latin American Studies
Latino Studies
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Linguistics
Mathematics
Medieval Studies
Modern European Studies Concentration
Music
Near Eastern Studies
Philosophy
Physics
Psychology
Religious Studies
Romance Studies
Russian
Science and Technology Studies
Society for the Humanities
Sociology
Theatre, Film, and Dance
Visual Studies Undergraduate Concentration

*Africana Studies was an independent center reporting directly to the Provost until July 1, 2011.

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land-grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through The State University of New York (SUNY) system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States.

Cornell is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at The California Institute of Technology and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.
In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.
As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.

From The College of Arts and Sciences At Cornell University Via “The Chronicle”: “Neutron star’s X-rays reveal ‘photon metamorphosis’”

From The College of Arts and Sciences

At

Cornell University

Via

“The Chronicle”

5.4.23
James Dean
jad534@cornell.edu

A “beautiful effect” predicted by quantum electrodynamics (QED) can explain the puzzling first observations of polarized X-rays emitted by a magnetar – a neutron star featuring a powerful magnetic field, according to a Cornell astrophysicist.

The extremely dense and hot remnant of a massive star, boasting a magnetic field 100 trillion times stronger than Earth’s, was expected to generate highly polarized X-rays, meaning that the radiation’s electromagnetic field did not vibrate randomly but had a preferred direction.

This image of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, the first object observed by NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) satellite, combines some of the first X-ray data collected by IXPE, shown in magenta, with high-energy X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, in blue. The satellite later detected polarized X-rays from 4U 0142+61, a highly magnetized neutron star located in the Cassiopeia constellation. NASA/CXC/SAO/IXPE

The National Aeronautics and Space Agency/The Italian Space Agency A.S.I. [Agenzia Spaziale Italiana] (IT) IXPE spacecraft.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Chandra X-ray telescope.

But scientists were surprised when NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) satellite last year detected that lower- and higher-energy X-rays were polarized differently, with electromagnetic fields oriented at right angles to each other.

The phenomenon can be naturally explained as a result of “photon metamorphosis” – a transformation of X-ray photons that has been theorized but never directly observed, said Dong Lai, Ph.D. ’94, the Benson Jay Simon ’59, MBA ’62, and Mary Ellen Simon, M.A. ’63, Professor of Astrophysics in the College of Arts and Sciences.

“In this observation of radiation from a faraway celestial object, we see a beautiful effect that is a manifestation of intricate, fundamental physics,” Lai said. “QED is one of the most successful physics theories, but it had not been tested in such strong magnetic field conditions.”

Lai is the author of a paper published April 18 in PNAS [below].

The research builds on calculations Lai and Wynn Ho, Ph.D. ’03, published 20 years ago [Physical Review Letters (below)], incorporating observations NASA reported last November of the magnetar 4U 0142+61, located 13,000 light-years away in the Cassiopeia constellation.

Quantum electrodynamics, which describes microscopic interactions between electrons and photons, predicts that as X-ray photons exit the neutron star’s thin atmosphere of hot, magnetized gas, or plasma, they pass through a phase called “vacuum resonance”.

There, Lai said, photons, which have no charge, can temporarily convert into pairs of “virtual” electrons and positrons that are influenced by the magnetar’s super-strong magnetic field even in vacuum, a process called “vacuum birefringence.” Combined with a related process, plasma birefringence, conditions are created for the polarity of high-energy X-rays to swing 90 degrees relative to low-energy X-rays, according to Lai’s analysis.

“You can think about the polarization as two flavors of photons,” he said. “A photon suddenly converting from one flavor to another – you don’t usually see this kind of thing. But it’s a natural consequence of the physics if you apply the theory under these extreme conditions.”

The IXPE mission did not see the polarization swing in observations of another magnetar, called 1RXS J170849.0-400910, with an even stronger magnetic field. Lai said that’s consistent with his calculations, which suggest vacuum resonance and photon metamorphosis would occur very deep inside such a neutron star.

Lai said his interpretation of IXPE’s observations of the magnetar 4U 0142+61 helped constrain its magnetic field and rotation, and suggested that its atmosphere was likely composed of partially ionized heavy elements.

Ongoing study of X-rays from some of the universe’s most extreme objects, including neutron stars and black holes, he said, enables scientists to probe the behavior of matter in conditions that can’t be replicated in labs, and adds to understanding of the universe’s beauty and diversity.

“The observations by IXPE have opened a new window for studying the surface environment of neutron stars,” Lai said. “This will lead to new insights into these enigmatic objects.”

PNAS
Physical Review Letters 2003

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences is a division of Cornell University. It has been part of the university since its founding, although its name has changed over time. It grants bachelor’s degrees, and masters and doctorates through affiliation with the Cornell University Graduate School. Its major academic buildings are located on the Arts Quad and include some of the university’s oldest buildings. The college offers courses in many fields of study and is the largest college at Cornell by undergraduate enrollment.

Originally, the university’s faculty was undifferentiated, but with the founding of the Cornell Law School in 1886 and the concomitant self-segregation of the school’s lawyers, different departments and colleges formed.

Initially, the division that would become the College of Arts and Sciences was known as the Academic Department, but it was formally renamed in 1903. The College endowed the first professorships in American history, musicology, and American literature. Currently, the college teaches 4,100 undergraduates, with 600 full-time faculty members (and an unspecified number of lecturers) teaching 2,200 courses.

The Arts Quad is the site of Cornell’s original academic buildings and is home to many of the college’s programs. On the western side of the quad, at the top of Libe Slope, are Morrill Hall (completed in 1866), McGraw Hall (1872) and White Hall (1868). These simple but elegant buildings, built with native Cayuga bluestone, reflect Ezra Cornell’s utilitarianism and are known as Stone Row. The statue of Ezra Cornell, dating back to 1919, stands between Morrill and McGraw Halls. Across from this statue, in front of Goldwin Smith Hall, sits the statue of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s other co-founder and its first president.

Lincoln Hall (1888) also stands on the eastern face of the quad next to Goldwin Smith Hall. On the northern face are the domed Sibley Hall and Tjaden Hall (1883). Just off of the quad on the Slope, next to Tjaden, stands the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, designed by I. M. Pei. Stimson Hall (1902), Olin Library (1959) and Uris Library (1892), with Cornell’s landmark clocktower, McGraw Tower, stand on the southern end of the quad.

Olin Library replaced Boardman Hall (1892), the original location of the Cornell Law School. In 1992, an underground addition was made to the quad with Kroch Library, an extension of Olin Library that houses several special collections of the Cornell University Library, including the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Klarman Hall, the first new humanities building at Cornell in over 100 years, opened in 2016. Klarman houses the offices of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies. The building is connected to, and surrounded on three sides by, Goldwin Smith Hall and fronts East Avenue.

Legends and lore about the Arts Quad and its statues can be found at Cornelliana.

The College of Arts and Sciences offers both undergraduate and graduate (through the Graduate School) degrees. The only undergraduate degree is the Bachelor of Arts. However, students may enroll in the dual-degree program, which allows them to pursue programs of study in two colleges and receive two different degrees. The faculties within the college are:

Africana Studies and Research Center*
American Studies
Anthropology
Archaeology
Asian-American Studies
Asian Studies
Astronomy/Astrophysics
Biology (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences)
Biology & Society Major (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Human Ecology)
Chemistry and Chemical Biology
China and Asia-pacific Studies
Classics
Cognitive Studies
College Scholar Program (frees up to 40 selected students in each class from all degree requirements and allows them to fashion a plan of study conducive to achieving their ultimate intellectual goals; a senior thesis is required)
Comparative Literature
Computer Science (with the College of Engineering)
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Engineering)
Economics
English
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
German Studies
Government
History
History of Art
Human Biology
Independent Major
Information Science (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Engineering)
Jewish Studies
John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines
Latin American Studies
Latino Studies
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Linguistics
Mathematics
Medieval Studies
Modern European Studies Concentration
Music
Near Eastern Studies
Philosophy
Physics
Psychology
Religious Studies
Romance Studies
Russian
Science and Technology Studies
Society for the Humanities
Sociology
Theatre, Film, and Dance
Visual Studies Undergraduate Concentration

*Africana Studies was an independent center reporting directly to the Provost until July 1, 2011.

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land-grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through The State University of New York (SUNY) system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States.

Cornell is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at The California Institute of Technology and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.
In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.
As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.

From The College of Arts and Sciences At The University of Washington : “A Green Oasis on Campus”

From The College of Arts and Sciences

At

The University of Washington

4.7.23 [Just today in social media.]
Nancy Joseph

Visitors to the UW Biology Greenhouse, surrounded by plants. The UW Biology Greenhouse offers group tours and weekly visiting hours. Photo by Nancy Joseph.

During a biology lab course held in the new UW Biology Greenhouse, Sara Stokes had an epiphany. A few weeks into the course, she was determined to become a greenhouse volunteer.

“I knew the greenhouse had to be a bigger part of my life,” says Stokes, a UW biology major with a minor in bioethics. “I absolutely fell in love with the wide diversity of plants on display and the incredible beauty of this reserve of nature, right on campus. I had to get closer.”

Greenhouse manager Katie Sadler says Stokes is not alone. Most greenhouse volunteers — there are currently 17 — discover the facility through a course or a tour and get hooked. They help greenhouse staff care for the plants, from watering to potting to plant hygiene. Joining them on the team are about a dozen docents, mostly graduate students, who lead greenhouse tours.

A few years ago, none of these opportunities were possible. The University’s previous greenhouse was dismantled in 2016, and until the new building opened in 2021, the plants lived in a temporary facility far from campus. For plant enthusiasts, it’s been a joy to see the new greenhouse flourish.

Nature – Assisted by Technology

Sadler explains that the original greenhouse, though beloved, had outlived its useful life span after 65 years. “It was falling apart,” she says. “It was literally held together with bailing wire in some instances. And the technology was becoming obsolete, though [then greenhouse manager] Doug Ewing did the very best with what he had. He was a true plant lover and very knowledgeable.”

Of course, Sadler is a devoted plant lover as well. Before coming to the UW, she managed greenhouse facilities at the University of Kansas for 29 years. But managing the UW collection was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. “It was a dream come true to move out here and into a larger plant collection,” she says.

Greenhouse manager Katie Sadler coordinated moving plants into the new UW Biology Greenhouse in 2021. Photo by Mark Stone.

Sadler arrived in 2021, just six weeks before the plants were scheduled to move from their temporary home to the new facility. By her fifth day on the job, she was immersed in move logistics. “It was crazy,” she recalls. “It’s still insanely busy, actually. We’ve hit the ground running and we’ve been running ever since, but in a great way.”

The state-of-the-art greenhouse is attached to the new Life Sciences Building and borders the Burke Gilman trail. It houses more than 5,500 plants from diverse habitats, from Costa Rican rainforests to Pacific Northwest mountains to the Namib desert, where the two-leafed welwitschia on display can live up to 1,000 years. The facility is ADA-accessible, with state-of-the-art systems that control temperature and humidity. Foggers, shades, and lamps can be set to mimic specific growing environments.

“There’s also the option to water with the push of a button,” Sadler says, “but we hand-water the plants since they all have different watering needs.”

The facility is 20,000 square feet, with nine greenhouse rooms. Several rooms are set up for research or teaching — both of which are central to the mission of the greenhouse. Students visit the greenhouse through classes ranging from plant ecology to art to engineering. The remaining rooms house the diverse plant collection.

Stokes’ favorite space is the “Tree of Life” room at the east end of the building, designed with guidance from museum studies graduate student Sihan Wang. Through explanatory signage and a chronological arrangement of plants, the room tells the story of plant evolution. It also highlights plants of economic importance, including citrus, cotton, tobacco, coffee, bananas, and black pepper. “It’s a striking diversity of plants in such close proximity,” Stokes says. “It’s truly awe-inspiring to see the history of nature unfold in front of you.”

Outside of the UW Biology Greenhouse, with pedestrian walking on Burke Gilman Trail beside it. The 20,000 square foot greenhouse is attached to the UW Life Sciences Building, beside the Burke Gilman Trail. Photo by Nancy Joseph.

Upcoming greenhouse projects include the training of docents to lead tours of the UW Medicinal Herb Garden, a 112-year-old garden not far from the building. Managed by Keith Possee as a greenhouse/landscape partnership, the 2.5 acre garden meanders near Stevens Way and features more than 1,000 species of plants used by contemporary medicine and in traditional Native American methods.

Welcoming the Public

Though the new greenhouse has been hosting biology lab classes and individual research projects since it opened, preparing for other visitors has taken longer. Last December, the facility finally opened to the general public, with regular visiting hours on Thursdays and Saturdays. At other times, docents lead greenhouse tours — currently free thanks to donor support — for larger groups. The response has been overwhelming, with hundreds of visitors each week and more than 65 tours booked over the most recent three-month period.

close-up photos of four plants in the UW Biology Greenhouse Climate control in the greenhouse allows plants from varied habitats to thrive. Photos by Mark Stone.

Biology graduate student Andrew Hempton has led about a dozen tours so far, for groups ranging from elementary school students to gardening clubs. “I enjoy sharing my love of plants and seeing the realization of the utter strangeness and uniqueness of plants dawning on folks who come in ‘plant blind,’” he says. “Besides, I wanted a good excuse to be hanging around the rooms, snooping on a daily basis.”

Hanging around greenhouses is nothing new for Hempton. During his years as a UW undergraduate (BS, Plant Biology, 2014), he worked in a faculty research lab that required regular visits to the former greenhouse. And while the new facility benefits from more space and new technology, he remembers the old building fondly. “The older greenhouse had the benefit of that ‘lived-in’ feel, built up over decades of use,” he says.

Given a little time, the new facility will likely take on its own lived-in personality. It’s already magical for Stokes, who swears by “plant therapy” visits as a way to de-stress.

“It’s meditative to be able to tune everything else out for a while and just focus on keeping the plants happy,” she says. “If I’m ever stressed about schoolwork, I can take a few hours off to be surrounded by plants and I’m right as rain.”

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.
Stem Education Coalition

Discovery is who we are

The College of Arts & Sciences is at the heart of the University of Washington. As the UW’s largest college, Arts & Sciences produces more than half of all bachelor’s degrees on the Seattle campus. A third of our 24,000+ students are the first in their families to attend college. Faculty in our 39 academic departments are dedicated to helping students think critically, communicate clearly, and engage diverse perspectives respectfully. In Arts & Sciences, our discoveries in learning, teaching, and research engage us with our local, national and global communities — and with each other.

The University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences provides a liberal arts education of tremendous breadth and depth to more than 22,000 students while advancing research and serving as a resource for the community. The College is made up of four academic divisions: art, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences.

CORE OF THE UNIVERSITY

With more than 5,400 undergraduate courses offered in the College of Arts & Sciences annually, students can study everything from art to economics to physics. The College’s extensive academic offerings benefit the entire University community; nearly one-third of all students who take an Arts & Sciences class are pursuing a non-A&S degree.

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH

From malaria treatment to solar energy to human rights, A&S researchers are tackling many of our society’s most pressing issues. The College is home to more than 30 interdisciplinary centers and has ties to many others, enabling scholars in diverse fields to collaborate on complex research questions. A&S faculty generated about $105 million in research funds through public and private grants during the most recent fiscal year.

INTERNATIONAL EMPHASIS

The College teaches 60 languages and offers more than 100 study abroad programs in 36 countries, with dedicated centers in Rome, Italy and León, Spain. The Jackson School of International Studies provides interdisciplinary education, leading-edge research, public programs and outreach on all major world areas and critical international issues.

A REGIONAL ARTS RESOURCE

All of the University’s arts units are part of the College, including the Schools of Music, Art, and Drama, the Department of Dance, Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), the Henry Art Gallery, the Burke Museum, and Meany Center for the Performing Arts. They offer more than 300 performances, exhibits, and public programs annually. Detailed event and ticket information is available at ArtsUW.

PARTNERING WITH THE COMMUNITY

The College has developed dozens of innovative partnerships with the community. These include summer programs for K-12 teachers, guided stargazings at the Jacobsen Observatory, special Meany Center performances for K-12 classes, collaborations with community organizations through project-based courses, and more.

The University of Washington is one of the world’s preeminent public universities. Our impact on individuals, on our region, and on the world is profound — whether we are launching young people into a boundless future or confronting the grand challenges of our time through undaunted research and scholarship. Ranked number 10 in the world in Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings and educating more than 54,000 students annually, our students and faculty work together to turn ideas into impact and in the process transform lives and our world. For more about our impact on the world, every day.

So what defines us —the students, faculty and community members at the University of Washington? Above all, it’s our belief in possibility and our unshakable optimism. It’s a connection to others, both near and far. It’s a hunger that pushes us to tackle challenges and pursue progress. It’s the conviction that together we can create a world of good. Join us on the journey.

The University of Washington is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in downtown Seattle approximately a decade after the city’s founding to aid its economic development. Today, the university’s 703-acre main Seattle campus is in the University District above the Montlake Cut, within the urban Puget Sound region of the Pacific Northwest. The university has additional campuses in Tacoma and Bothell. Overall, University of Washington encompasses over 500 buildings and over 20 million gross square footage of space, including one of the largest library systems in the world with more than 26 university libraries, as well as the UW Tower, lecture halls, art centers, museums, laboratories, stadiums, and conference centers. The university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees through 140 departments in various colleges and schools, sees a total student enrollment of roughly 46,000 annually, and functions on a quarter system.

University of Washington is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation, UW spent $1.41 billion on research and development in 2018, ranking it 5th in the nation. As the flagship institution of the six public universities in Washington state, it is known for its medical, engineering and scientific research as well as its highly competitive computer science and engineering programs. Additionally, University of Washington continues to benefit from its deep historic ties and major collaborations with numerous technology giants in the region, such as Amazon, Boeing, Nintendo, and particularly Microsoft. Paul G. Allen, Bill Gates and others spent significant time at Washington computer labs for a startup venture before founding Microsoft and other ventures. The University of Washington’s 22 varsity sports teams are also highly competitive, competing as the Huskies in the Pac-12 Conference of the NCAA Division I, representing the United States at the Olympic Games, and other major competitions.

The university has been affiliated with many notable alumni and faculty, including 21 Nobel Prize laureates and numerous Pulitzer Prize winners, Fulbright Scholars, Rhodes Scholars and Marshall Scholars.

In 1854, territorial governor Isaac Stevens recommended the establishment of a university in the Washington Territory. Prominent Seattle-area residents, including Methodist preacher Daniel Bagley, saw this as a chance to add to the city’s potential and prestige. Bagley learned of a law that allowed United States territories to sell land to raise money in support of public schools. At the time, Arthur A. Denny, one of the founders of Seattle and a member of the territorial legislature, aimed to increase the city’s importance by moving the territory’s capital from Olympia to Seattle. However, Bagley eventually convinced Denny that the establishment of a university would assist more in the development of Seattle’s economy. Two universities were initially chartered, but later the decision was repealed in favor of a single university in Lewis County provided that locally donated land was available. When no site emerged, Denny successfully petitioned the legislature to reconsider Seattle as a location in 1858.

In 1861, scouting began for an appropriate 10 acres (4 ha) site in Seattle to serve as a new university campus. Arthur and Mary Denny donated eight acres, while fellow pioneers Edward Lander, and Charlie and Mary Terry, donated two acres on Denny’s Knoll in downtown Seattle. More specifically, this tract was bounded by 4th Avenue to the west, 6th Avenue to the east, Union Street to the north, and Seneca Streets to the south.

John Pike, for whom Pike Street is named, was the university’s architect and builder. It was opened on November 4, 1861, as the Territorial University of Washington. The legislature passed articles incorporating the University, and establishing its Board of Regents in 1862. The school initially struggled, closing three times: in 1863 for low enrollment, and again in 1867 and 1876 due to funds shortage. University of Washington awarded its first graduate Clara Antoinette McCarty Wilt in 1876, with a bachelor’s degree in science.

19th century relocation

By the time Washington state entered the Union in 1889, both Seattle and the University had grown substantially. University of Washington’s total undergraduate enrollment increased from 30 to nearly 300 students, and the campus’s relative isolation in downtown Seattle faced encroaching development. A special legislative committee, headed by University of Washington graduate Edmond Meany, was created to find a new campus to better serve the growing student population and faculty. The committee eventually selected a site on the northeast of downtown Seattle called Union Bay, which was the land of the Duwamish, and the legislature appropriated funds for its purchase and construction. In 1895, the University relocated to the new campus by moving into the newly built Denny Hall. The University Regents tried and failed to sell the old campus, eventually settling with leasing the area. This would later become one of the University’s most valuable pieces of real estate in modern-day Seattle, generating millions in annual revenue with what is now called the Metropolitan Tract. The original Territorial University building was torn down in 1908, and its former site now houses the Fairmont Olympic Hotel.

The sole-surviving remnants of Washington’s first building are four 24-foot (7.3 m), white, hand-fluted cedar, Ionic columns. They were salvaged by Edmond S. Meany, one of the University’s first graduates and former head of its history department. Meany and his colleague, Dean Herbert T. Condon, dubbed the columns as “Loyalty,” “Industry,” “Faith”, and “Efficiency”, or “LIFE.” The columns now stand in the Sylvan Grove Theater.

20th century expansion

Organizers of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition eyed the still largely undeveloped campus as a prime setting for their world’s fair. They came to an agreement with Washington’s Board of Regents that allowed them to use the campus grounds for the exposition, surrounding today’s Drumheller Fountain facing towards Mount Rainier. In exchange, organizers agreed Washington would take over the campus and its development after the fair’s conclusion. This arrangement led to a detailed site plan and several new buildings, prepared in part by John Charles Olmsted. The plan was later incorporated into the overall University of Washington campus master plan, permanently affecting the campus layout.

Both World Wars brought the military to campus, with certain facilities temporarily lent to the federal government. In spite of this, subsequent post-war periods were times of dramatic growth for the University. The period between the wars saw a significant expansion of the upper campus. Construction of the Liberal Arts Quadrangle, known to students as “The Quad,” began in 1916 and continued to 1939. The University’s architectural centerpiece, Suzzallo Library, was built in 1926 and expanded in 1935.

After World War II, further growth came with the G.I. Bill. Among the most important developments of this period was the opening of the School of Medicine in 1946, which is now consistently ranked as the top medical school in the United States. It would eventually lead to the University of Washington Medical Center, ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the top ten hospitals in the nation.

In 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry in the Seattle area were forced into inland internment camps as part of Executive Order 9066 following the attack on Pearl Harbor. During this difficult time, university president Lee Paul Sieg took an active and sympathetic leadership role in advocating for and facilitating the transfer of Japanese American students to universities and colleges away from the Pacific Coast to help them avoid the mass incarceration. Nevertheless, many Japanese American students and “soon-to-be” graduates were unable to transfer successfully in the short time window or receive diplomas before being incarcerated. It was only many years later that they would be recognized for their accomplishments during the University of Washington’s Long Journey Home ceremonial event that was held in May 2008.

From 1958 to 1973, the University of Washington saw a tremendous growth in student enrollment, its faculties and operating budget, and also its prestige under the leadership of Charles Odegaard. University of Washington student enrollment had more than doubled to 34,000 as the baby boom generation came of age. However, this era was also marked by high levels of student activism, as was the case at many American universities. Much of the unrest focused around civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. In response to anti-Vietnam War protests by the late 1960s, the University Safety and Security Division became the University of Washington Police Department.

Odegaard instituted a vision of building a “community of scholars”, convincing the Washington State legislatures to increase investment in the University. Washington senators, such as Henry M. Jackson and Warren G. Magnuson, also used their political clout to gather research funds for the University of Washington. The results included an increase in the operating budget from $37 million in 1958 to over $400 million in 1973, solidifying University of Washington as a top recipient of federal research funds in the United States. The establishment of technology giants such as Microsoft, Boeing and Amazon in the local area also proved to be highly influential in the University of Washington’s fortunes, not only improving graduate prospects but also helping to attract millions of dollars in university and research funding through its distinguished faculty and extensive alumni network.

21st century

In 1990, the University of Washington opened its additional campuses in Bothell and Tacoma. Although originally intended for students who have already completed two years of higher education, both schools have since become four-year universities with the authority to grant degrees. The first freshman classes at these campuses started in fall 2006. Today both Bothell and Tacoma also offer a selection of master’s degree programs.

In 2012, the University began exploring plans and governmental approval to expand the main Seattle campus, including significant increases in student housing, teaching facilities for the growing student body and faculty, as well as expanded public transit options. The University of Washington light rail station was completed in March 2015, connecting Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood to the University of Washington Husky Stadium within five minutes of rail travel time. It offers a previously unavailable option of transportation into and out of the campus, designed specifically to reduce dependence on private vehicles, bicycles and local King County buses.

University of Washington has been listed as a “Public Ivy” in Greene’s Guides since 2001, and is an elected member of the American Association of Universities. Among the faculty by 2012, there have been 151 members of American Association for the Advancement of Science, 68 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 67 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 53 members of the National Academy of Medicine, 29 winners of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, 21 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 15 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators, 15 MacArthur Fellows, 9 winners of the Gairdner Foundation International Award, 5 winners of the National Medal of Science, 7 Nobel Prize laureates, 5 winners of Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research, 4 members of the American Philosophical Society, 2 winners of the National Book Award, 2 winners of the National Medal of Arts, 2 Pulitzer Prize winners, 1 winner of the Fields Medal, and 1 member of the National Academy of Public Administration. Among UW students by 2012, there were 136 Fulbright Scholars, 35 Rhodes Scholars, 7 Marshall Scholars and 4 Gates Cambridge Scholars. UW is recognized as a top producer of Fulbright Scholars, ranking 2nd in the US in 2017.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has consistently ranked University of Washington as one of the top 20 universities worldwide every year since its first release. In 2019, University of Washington ranked 14th worldwide out of 500 by the ARWU, 26th worldwide out of 981 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and 28th worldwide out of 101 in the Times World Reputation Rankings. Meanwhile, QS World University Rankings ranked it 68th worldwide, out of over 900.

U.S. News & World Report ranked University of Washington 8th out of nearly 1,500 universities worldwide for 2021, with University of Washington’s undergraduate program tied for 58th among 389 national universities in the U.S. and tied for 19th among 209 public universities.

In 2019, it ranked 10th among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings. In 2017, the Leiden Ranking, which focuses on science and the impact of scientific publications among the world’s 500 major universities, ranked University of Washington 12th globally and 5th in the U.S.

In 2019, Kiplinger Magazine’s review of “top college values” named University of Washington 5th for in-state students and 10th for out-of-state students among U.S. public colleges, and 84th overall out of 500 schools. In the Washington Monthly National University Rankings University of Washington was ranked 15th domestically in 2018, based on its contribution to the public good as measured by social mobility, research, and promoting public service.

From The College of Arts and Sciences At Cornell University Via “The Chronicle”: “Massive Caribbean sea urchin die-off caused by parasite”

From The College of Arts and Sciences

At

Cornell University

Via

“The Chronicle”

4.19.23
Krishna Ramanujan
ksr32@cornell.edu

In a study led by Cornell microbiology professor Ian Hewson, scientists have discovered that a parasite is behind a severe die-off of long-spined sea urchins across the Caribbean Sea, which has had devastating consequences for coral reefs and surrounding marine ecosystems.
Credit: Noël Heaney/Cornell University.

Scientists have discovered that a parasite is behind a severe die-off of long-spined sea urchins across the Caribbean Sea, which has had devastating consequences for coral reefs and surrounding marine ecosystems.

The long-spined sea urchins (Diadema antillarum) serve as vital herbivores that graze on algae, which if left unchecked will outcompete corals for resources and space and blanket them, block light and kill them. By feeding on algae, the sea urchins are essential to maintaining coral health and balance in the marine ecosystem.

Diadema mortalities were first reported in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands in late January 2022. By late March, the condition was found across the Lesser Antilles, Jamaica and the Mexican Caribbean. And by June of last year, it had been detected in most of the Greater Antilles, Florida and Curacao.

Prior to an experiment designed to verify the source of infections, a healthy sea urchin was swabbed to ensure it had never been exposed to the ciliate parasite. Credit: Mya Breitbart/College of Marine Science.

Scientists have been trying to identify the cause of the mysterious illness, which has led to declines of between 85% and 95% compared to pre-mortality numbers in affected areas. When sea urchins die, they lose their spines and detach from their anchors.

Now, an international team of 42 scientists has identified the culprit as Philaster apodigitiformis, a unicellular eukaryote that is part of a group of 8,000 species called ciliates. P. apodigitiformis is a known parasite in fish.

“Rarely are we afforded the opportunity to understand marine disease events in this detail, where we can actually work out a cause of it,” said marine ecologist Ian Hewson, professor of microbiology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and lead author of the study, published online April 19 in Science Advances [below].

Fig. 1. Progression of abnormal condition affecting D. antillarum.
(A to D) Grossly normal specimens (A) exhibit upright posture and typically shelter beneath rock/coral (photo taken in Pope Point, St. John, April 2022). At condition onset, specimens fall over or stand on spines and exhibit drooping spines (B) (photo taken in Saba, Caribbean Netherlands, April 2022). Advanced stages present as spine loss with elevated predation by fish (C) (photo taken in Aruba, August 2022) and, eventually, death. These signs were also observed in specimens that were experimentally challenged with the Philaster culture FWC2 in aquaria (D). Photo credits: (A) and (D) I. Hewson, (B) A. Hylkema, and (C) D. Behringer.

Though scientists do not yet know how to treat P. apodigitiformis infections, discovering the parasite’s identity may help them design strategies for maintaining health in Diadema sea urchins that are being raised for restocking efforts across the region, Hewson said.

“Knowing the pathogen’s identity may also help mitigate risk to untouched Diadema through such things as boat traffic, dive gear, or other ways it may be moved around,” he added.

In the early 1980s, long-spined sea urchins were almost completely wiped out in the Caribbean by an unknown cause, leading to around 98% declines from previous numbers. Thirty years later, their populations rebounded, but only by an estimated 12% from their pre-epidemic numbers. That die-off led to rapid degradation of many coral reefs across the region that persist today, with some coral species becoming extremely rare. The cause of the early 1980s outbreak was never determined, though Hewson and colleagues may now investigate whether P. apodigitiformis can be detected in Diadema museum samples from that time and region.

In the current study, the research team collected three types of Diadema samples, which included: visually abnormal, infected individuals; healthy individuals from the same site; and completely healthy individuals from an unaffected area, which acted as a control for comparison.

Rapid sample collection from 23 sites was made possible by the Atlantic and Gulf Rapid Reef Assessment program, a network that helped Hewson collaborate with scientists from the Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences in the Caribbean Netherlands, and the University of the Virgin Islands, among others.

Collaborators prepared tissue samples and delivered them to Hewson’s lab at Cornell, a complicated process involving customs and border regulations. Hewson and colleagues then ran tests to identify viral or bacterial pathogens in the tissues using state-of-the-art molecular biological and veterinary pathological techniques, but results were inconclusive.

“They initially did not show any sort of unusual or candidate microorganisms at all,” Hewson said. “We were a bit at a dead end.”

It was then that Hewson decided to investigate genomic signals of eukaryotic microorganisms, such as fungi, ciliates and dinoflagellates. “Immediately when I did that, I had an enormous signal of this scuticociliate Philaster,” Hewson said.

He ran to the labs and pulled out fluid samples from Diadema that people in the field had collected, and put those under the microscope.

“I saw this ciliate was actually very, very abundant,” he said. “That was the big ‘aha’ moment.” The ciliates were not present in samples from the control sites, he said.

While P. apodigitiformis has been known to infect fish, this is the first time it has been associated with mass mortality in an invertebrate.

Hewson, a faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and co-authors Mya Breitbart, a biological oceanographer at the University of South Florida, and Christina Kellogg, a microbiologist at the U.S. Geological Survey St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center in Florida, designed an experiment to test Koch’s Postulates – the gold standard test for proving beyond doubt that a microorganism is associated with a condition.

Using fresh samples collected from infected Diadema from the Florida Keys and aquacultured Diadema (which had never been exposed to any pathogens) obtained from The Florida Aquarium’s Center for Conservation, the researchers infected the aquarium Diadema with ciliates isolated from the body fluid of infected Florida sea urchins.

“Animals that were treated with the ciliate became sick and died in 60% of the cases,” Hewson said. They were then able to isolate and identify the very same P. apodigitiformis ciliate from those newly diseased animals, proving it was responsible for the disease.

“Almost never are we able in a wildlife setting, at least in marine habitats, to prove that a microorganism is actually responsible for disease,” Hewson said.

Funders for the study include the National Science Foundation; the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainable Futures; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

Science Advances
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Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences is a division of Cornell University. It has been part of the university since its founding, although its name has changed over time. It grants bachelor’s degrees, and masters and doctorates through affiliation with the Cornell University Graduate School. Its major academic buildings are located on the Arts Quad and include some of the university’s oldest buildings. The college offers courses in many fields of study and is the largest college at Cornell by undergraduate enrollment.

Originally, the university’s faculty was undifferentiated, but with the founding of the Cornell Law School in 1886 and the concomitant self-segregation of the school’s lawyers, different departments and colleges formed.

Initially, the division that would become the College of Arts and Sciences was known as the Academic Department, but it was formally renamed in 1903. The College endowed the first professorships in American history, musicology, and American literature. Currently, the college teaches 4,100 undergraduates, with 600 full-time faculty members (and an unspecified number of lecturers) teaching 2,200 courses.

The Arts Quad is the site of Cornell’s original academic buildings and is home to many of the college’s programs. On the western side of the quad, at the top of Libe Slope, are Morrill Hall (completed in 1866), McGraw Hall (1872) and White Hall (1868). These simple but elegant buildings, built with native Cayuga bluestone, reflect Ezra Cornell’s utilitarianism and are known as Stone Row. The statue of Ezra Cornell, dating back to 1919, stands between Morrill and McGraw Halls. Across from this statue, in front of Goldwin Smith Hall, sits the statue of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s other co-founder and its first president.

Lincoln Hall (1888) also stands on the eastern face of the quad next to Goldwin Smith Hall. On the northern face are the domed Sibley Hall and Tjaden Hall (1883). Just off of the quad on the Slope, next to Tjaden, stands the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, designed by I. M. Pei. Stimson Hall (1902), Olin Library (1959) and Uris Library (1892), with Cornell’s landmark clocktower, McGraw Tower, stand on the southern end of the quad.

Olin Library replaced Boardman Hall (1892), the original location of the Cornell Law School. In 1992, an underground addition was made to the quad with Kroch Library, an extension of Olin Library that houses several special collections of the Cornell University Library, including the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Klarman Hall, the first new humanities building at Cornell in over 100 years, opened in 2016. Klarman houses the offices of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies. The building is connected to, and surrounded on three sides by, Goldwin Smith Hall and fronts East Avenue.

Legends and lore about the Arts Quad and its statues can be found at Cornelliana.

The College of Arts and Sciences offers both undergraduate and graduate (through the Graduate School) degrees. The only undergraduate degree is the Bachelor of Arts. However, students may enroll in the dual-degree program, which allows them to pursue programs of study in two colleges and receive two different degrees. The faculties within the college are:

Africana Studies and Research Center*
American Studies
Anthropology
Archaeology
Asian-American Studies
Asian Studies
Astronomy/Astrophysics
Biology (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences)
Biology & Society Major (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Human Ecology)
Chemistry and Chemical Biology
China and Asia-pacific Studies
Classics
Cognitive Studies
College Scholar Program (frees up to 40 selected students in each class from all degree requirements and allows them to fashion a plan of study conducive to achieving their ultimate intellectual goals; a senior thesis is required)
Comparative Literature
Computer Science (with the College of Engineering)
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Engineering)
Economics
English
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
German Studies
Government
History
History of Art
Human Biology
Independent Major
Information Science (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Engineering)
Jewish Studies
John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines
Latin American Studies
Latino Studies
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Linguistics
Mathematics
Medieval Studies
Modern European Studies Concentration
Music
Near Eastern Studies
Philosophy
Physics
Psychology
Religious Studies
Romance Studies
Russian
Science and Technology Studies
Society for the Humanities
Sociology
Theatre, Film, and Dance
Visual Studies Undergraduate Concentration

*Africana Studies was an independent center reporting directly to the Provost until July 1, 2011.

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land-grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through The State University of New York (SUNY) system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States.

Cornell is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at The California Institute of Technology and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.
In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.
As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.

From The College of Arts and Sciences At Cornell University Via “The Chronicle”: “Physicists take step toward fault-tolerant quantum computing”

From The College of Arts and Sciences

At

Cornell University

Via

“The Chronicle”

4.12.23
Kate Blackwood | College of Arts and Sciences
cunews@cornell.edu

Media Contact
Becka Bowyer
rpb224@cornell.edu
607-220-4185

Some classical computers have error correction built into their memories based on bits; quantum computers, to be workable in the future, will need error correction mechanisms, too, based on the vastly more sensitive qubits.

Cornell researchers have recently taken a step toward fault-tolerant quantum computing: they constructed a simple model containing exotic particles called “non-Abelian anyons”, compact and practical enough to run on modern quantum hardware.

Non-abelian anyons exchanging places and their braiding trajectories. A clockwise swap.

Realizing these particles, which can only exist in two dimensions, is a move towards implementing it in the real world.

Thanks to some creative thinking, Yuri Lensky, a former Bethe/Wilkins/Kavli Institute at Cornell (KIC) postdoctoral fellow in physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), collaborating with Eun-Ah Kim, professor of physics (A&S), came up with a simple “recipe” that could be used for robustly computing with non-Abelian anyons, including specific instructions for executing the effect experimentally on devices available today.

Their paper, written in collaboration with theorists at Google Quantum AI, is published March 24 in Annals of Physics [below].

Google Quantum AI researchers, together with Lensky and Kim, have proved the theory with a successful experiment as reported in a preprint publication on the research-sharing platform arXiv.

“This two-dimensional state is interesting both from a quantum condensed matter physics perspective – it has some novel properties that are very special to 2D physics – and from a quantum information perspective,” Lensky said. “It’s something truly quantum, but it’s also potentially useful for quantum computation. It protects bits of quantum information by storing them non-locally, and our protocol allows us to compute with these bits.”

Kim explained the principle that animates non-Abelian anyons by holding out two identical one-pound barbells. When she crosses her arms, the identical barbells change positions, but as objects defined by classical physics, their state remains the same. They are interchangeable.

If those barbells represent two identical quantum particles, remarkably in certain 2D systems their trails through space-time can produce a measurable record of the change (picture the crossed arms.) This process of exchange is called a braid, after the shapes of the particle trails.

“Quantum mechanically, when you move one particle around the other,” Kim said, holding one weight still and moving the other in a circle around it, “the wave function, which is a solution to the Schrödinger equation describing quantum mechanical motion, can be multiplied by a phase factor or it can become something that’s very different.”

When the wave function gains a global sign that can only be observed through interferometry, a measurement of the interference of waves, that’s called an “Abelian anyon”. When the wave function becomes measurably different, it’s a non-Abelian anyon, she said.

Non-Abelian anyons could be harnessed to create qubits defined not on a single particle, but on a pair of identical quantum particles: nonlocally encoded.

“If I put the qubit shared between these particles in a zero state and move them apart, then whatever happens locally to one of these anyons, the zero state will remain. The qubit set to zero is safe from corruption,” Kim said. “Non-Abelian anyons could be used in a platform for protected qubits.”

But while physicists have theorized about these exotic particles for years – Alexei Kitaev proposed operating on protected bits of quantum memory by braiding non-Abelian anyons back around 2001, Lensky said – they have never been observed in a physical system before now.

When Google Quantum AI developed the quantum processor platform capabilities to realize the surface code and braiding of Abelian anyons in a physical system, Lensky said, “This was [our] inspiration to look for a way to realize the physics of non-Abelian anyons as soon as possible.”

“We knew they had the working ingredients, but they didn’t have a recipe,” Kim said. “We figured out how to move these non-Abelian anyons, then we told the experimentalists what to do. It was possible because Yuri and I were thinking in a flexible, creative and open-minded way.”

Past theoretical research identified non-Abelian properties, but came up short on how to move them, a necessary step. A key insight from Lensky and Kim was to give up the regularity of a grid and arrange qubits in an almost hand-drawn manner but backed up by robust mathematics.

“After this simple geometric insight, using gauge theory, we were able to come up with the protocol of taking this picture and implementing it on a chip in a robust and efficient way,” Kim said. “With this 10-qubit system, we were able to encode multiple non-Abelian anyons, and therefore multiple logical information-carrying qubits, and a precise recipe for what the experimentalists need to do every step of the way.”

“Although the focus of the theory and experiment is simply to realize non-Abelian anyons in the real world, this can also be viewed as a first small step towards implementing computation by braiding,” Lensky said.

This research was supported by an A&S New Frontier Grant; an Ewha Frontier 10-10 Research Grant; the Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics; and the National Science Foundation.

Annals of Physics

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences is a division of Cornell University. It has been part of the university since its founding, although its name has changed over time. It grants bachelor’s degrees, and masters and doctorates through affiliation with the Cornell University Graduate School. Its major academic buildings are located on the Arts Quad and include some of the university’s oldest buildings. The college offers courses in many fields of study and is the largest college at Cornell by undergraduate enrollment.

Originally, the university’s faculty was undifferentiated, but with the founding of the Cornell Law School in 1886 and the concomitant self-segregation of the school’s lawyers, different departments and colleges formed.

Initially, the division that would become the College of Arts and Sciences was known as the Academic Department, but it was formally renamed in 1903. The College endowed the first professorships in American history, musicology, and American literature. Currently, the college teaches 4,100 undergraduates, with 600 full-time faculty members (and an unspecified number of lecturers) teaching 2,200 courses.

The Arts Quad is the site of Cornell’s original academic buildings and is home to many of the college’s programs. On the western side of the quad, at the top of Libe Slope, are Morrill Hall (completed in 1866), McGraw Hall (1872) and White Hall (1868). These simple but elegant buildings, built with native Cayuga bluestone, reflect Ezra Cornell’s utilitarianism and are known as Stone Row. The statue of Ezra Cornell, dating back to 1919, stands between Morrill and McGraw Halls. Across from this statue, in front of Goldwin Smith Hall, sits the statue of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s other co-founder and its first president.

Lincoln Hall (1888) also stands on the eastern face of the quad next to Goldwin Smith Hall. On the northern face are the domed Sibley Hall and Tjaden Hall (1883). Just off of the quad on the Slope, next to Tjaden, stands the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, designed by I. M. Pei. Stimson Hall (1902), Olin Library (1959) and Uris Library (1892), with Cornell’s landmark clocktower, McGraw Tower, stand on the southern end of the quad.

Olin Library replaced Boardman Hall (1892), the original location of the Cornell Law School. In 1992, an underground addition was made to the quad with Kroch Library, an extension of Olin Library that houses several special collections of the Cornell University Library, including the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Klarman Hall, the first new humanities building at Cornell in over 100 years, opened in 2016. Klarman houses the offices of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies. The building is connected to, and surrounded on three sides by, Goldwin Smith Hall and fronts East Avenue.

Legends and lore about the Arts Quad and its statues can be found at Cornelliana.

The College of Arts and Sciences offers both undergraduate and graduate (through the Graduate School) degrees. The only undergraduate degree is the Bachelor of Arts. However, students may enroll in the dual-degree program, which allows them to pursue programs of study in two colleges and receive two different degrees. The faculties within the college are:

Africana Studies and Research Center*
American Studies
Anthropology
Archaeology
Asian-American Studies
Asian Studies
Astronomy/Astrophysics
Biology (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences)
Biology & Society Major (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Human Ecology)
Chemistry and Chemical Biology
China and Asia-pacific Studies
Classics
Cognitive Studies
College Scholar Program (frees up to 40 selected students in each class from all degree requirements and allows them to fashion a plan of study conducive to achieving their ultimate intellectual goals; a senior thesis is required)
Comparative Literature
Computer Science (with the College of Engineering)
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Engineering)
Economics
English
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
German Studies
Government
History
History of Art
Human Biology
Independent Major
Information Science (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Engineering)
Jewish Studies
John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines
Latin American Studies
Latino Studies
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Linguistics
Mathematics
Medieval Studies
Modern European Studies Concentration
Music
Near Eastern Studies
Philosophy
Physics
Psychology
Religious Studies
Romance Studies
Russian
Science and Technology Studies
Society for the Humanities
Sociology
Theatre, Film, and Dance
Visual Studies Undergraduate Concentration

*Africana Studies was an independent center reporting directly to the Provost until July 1, 2011.

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land-grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through The State University of New York (SUNY) system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States.

Cornell is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at The California Institute of Technology and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.
In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.
As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.

From The College of Arts and Sciences At Cornell University Via “The Chronicle”: “JWST confirms giant planet atmospheres vary widely”

From The College of Arts and Sciences

At

Cornell University

Via

“The Chronicle”

3.27.23

Kate Blackwood | College of Arts and Sciences

Gas giants orbiting our sun show a clear pattern; the more massive the planet, the lower the percentage of “heavy” elements (anything other than hydrogen and helium) in the planet’s atmosphere. But out in the galaxy, the atmospheric compositions of giant planets do not fit the solar system trend, an international team of astronomers has found.

National Aeronautics Space Agency/European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganization](EU)/ Canadian Space Agency [Agence Spatiale Canadienne](CA) James Webb Infrared Space Telescope annotated, finally launched December 25, 2021, ten years late.

Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the researchers discovered that the atmosphere of exoplanet HD149026b, a “hot jupiter” orbiting a star comparable to our sun, is super-abundant in the heavier elements carbon and oxygen – far above what scientists would expect for a planet of its mass. In addition, the diagnostic carbon-to-oxygen ratio of HD149026b, also known as “Smertrios,” is elevated relative to our solar system.

A ‘hot Jupiter’ called HD 149026b, is about 3 times hotter than the rocky surface of Venus, the hottest planet in our solar system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

These findings, published in Nature [below] on March 27 are an important first step toward obtaining similar measurements for a large sample of exoplanets in order to search for statistical trends, the researchers said. They also provide insight into planet formation.

“It appears that every giant planet is different, and we’re starting to see those differences thanks to JWST,” said Jonathan Lunine, the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences and a co-author of the study. “In this paper, we have determined how many molecules there are relative to the primary component of the gas, which is hydrogen, the most common element in the universe. That tells us quite a lot about how this planet formed.”

The giant planets of our solar system exhibit a nearly perfect correlation between both overall composition and atmospheric composition and mass, said Jacob Bean, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago and lead author of the paper. Extrasolar planets show a much greater diversity of overall compositions, but scientists didn’t know how varied their atmospheric compositions were, until this analysis of HD149026b.

“We have shown definitively that the atmospheric compositions of giant extrasolar planets do not follow the same trend that is so clear in the solar system planets,” Bean said. “Giant extrasolar planets show a wide diversity in atmospheric compositions in addition to their wide diversity of overall compositions.”

Smertrios, for one, is super-enriched compared to its mass, Lunine said: “It’s the mass of Saturn, but its atmosphere seems to have as much as 27 times the amount of heavy elements relative to its hydrogen and helium that we find in Saturn.”

This ratio, called “metallicity” (even though it includes many elements that are not metals) is useful for comparing a planet to its home star, or to other planets in its system, Lunine said. Smertrios is the only planet known in this particular planetary system.

Another key measurement is the ratio of carbon to oxygen in a planet’s atmosphere, which reveals the “recipe” of original solids in a planetary system, Lunine said. For Smertrios, it’s about 0.84 – higher than in our solar system. In our sun, it’s a bit more than one carbon for every two oxygen atoms (0.55).

“Together, these observations paint a picture of a planet-forming disk with abundant solids that were carbon-rich,” Lunine said. “HD149026b acquired large amounts of this material as it formed.”

While an abundance of carbon might seem favorable for chances of life, a high carbon to oxygen ratio actually means less water on a planet or in a planetary system – a problem for life as we know it.

Smertrios is an interesting first case of atmospheric composition for this particular study, said Lunine, who has plans in place to observe five more giant exoplanets in the coming year using JWST. Many more observations are needed before astronomers can discover any patterns among giant planets or in systems with multiple giant planets or terrestrial planets to the compositional diversity astronomers are beginning to document.

“The origin of this diversity is a fundamental mystery in our understanding of planet formation,” Bean said. “Our hope is that further atmospheric observations of extrasolar planets with JWST will quantify this diversity better and yield constraints on more complex trends that might exist.”

The study was supported by NASA and the University of Chicago.

Nature

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences is a division of Cornell University. It has been part of the university since its founding, although its name has changed over time. It grants bachelor’s degrees, and masters and doctorates through affiliation with the Cornell University Graduate School. Its major academic buildings are located on the Arts Quad and include some of the university’s oldest buildings. The college offers courses in many fields of study and is the largest college at Cornell by undergraduate enrollment.

Originally, the university’s faculty was undifferentiated, but with the founding of the Cornell Law School in 1886 and the concomitant self-segregation of the school’s lawyers, different departments and colleges formed.

Initially, the division that would become the College of Arts and Sciences was known as the Academic Department, but it was formally renamed in 1903. The College endowed the first professorships in American history, musicology, and American literature. Currently, the college teaches 4,100 undergraduates, with 600 full-time faculty members (and an unspecified number of lecturers) teaching 2,200 courses.

The Arts Quad is the site of Cornell’s original academic buildings and is home to many of the college’s programs. On the western side of the quad, at the top of Libe Slope, are Morrill Hall (completed in 1866), McGraw Hall (1872) and White Hall (1868). These simple but elegant buildings, built with native Cayuga bluestone, reflect Ezra Cornell’s utilitarianism and are known as Stone Row. The statue of Ezra Cornell, dating back to 1919, stands between Morrill and McGraw Halls. Across from this statue, in front of Goldwin Smith Hall, sits the statue of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s other co-founder and its first president.

Lincoln Hall (1888) also stands on the eastern face of the quad next to Goldwin Smith Hall. On the northern face are the domed Sibley Hall and Tjaden Hall (1883). Just off of the quad on the Slope, next to Tjaden, stands the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, designed by I. M. Pei. Stimson Hall (1902), Olin Library (1959) and Uris Library (1892), with Cornell’s landmark clocktower, McGraw Tower, stand on the southern end of the quad.

Olin Library replaced Boardman Hall (1892), the original location of the Cornell Law School. In 1992, an underground addition was made to the quad with Kroch Library, an extension of Olin Library that houses several special collections of the Cornell University Library, including the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Klarman Hall, the first new humanities building at Cornell in over 100 years, opened in 2016. Klarman houses the offices of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies. The building is connected to, and surrounded on three sides by, Goldwin Smith Hall and fronts East Avenue.

Legends and lore about the Arts Quad and its statues can be found at Cornelliana.

The College of Arts and Sciences offers both undergraduate and graduate (through the Graduate School) degrees. The only undergraduate degree is the Bachelor of Arts. However, students may enroll in the dual-degree program, which allows them to pursue programs of study in two colleges and receive two different degrees. The faculties within the college are:

Africana Studies and Research Center*
American Studies
Anthropology
Archaeology
Asian-American Studies
Asian Studies
Astronomy/Astrophysics
Biology (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences)
Biology & Society Major (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Human Ecology)
Chemistry and Chemical Biology
China and Asia-pacific Studies
Classics
Cognitive Studies
College Scholar Program (frees up to 40 selected students in each class from all degree requirements and allows them to fashion a plan of study conducive to achieving their ultimate intellectual goals; a senior thesis is required)
Comparative Literature
Computer Science (with the College of Engineering)
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Engineering)
Economics
English
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
German Studies
Government
History
History of Art
Human Biology
Independent Major
Information Science (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Engineering)
Jewish Studies
John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines
Latin American Studies
Latino Studies
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Linguistics
Mathematics
Medieval Studies
Modern European Studies Concentration
Music
Near Eastern Studies
Philosophy
Physics
Psychology
Religious Studies
Romance Studies
Russian
Science and Technology Studies
Society for the Humanities
Sociology
Theatre, Film, and Dance
Visual Studies Undergraduate Concentration

*Africana Studies was an independent center reporting directly to the Provost until July 1, 2011.

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land-grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through The State University of New York (SUNY) system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States.

Cornell is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at The California Institute of Technology and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.
In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.
As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.

From The Kavli Institute At Cornell University Via “The Chronicle”: “Semiconductor lattice marries electrons and magnetic moments”

From The Kavli Institute

And

The College of Arts and Sciences

And

The College of Engineering

At

Cornell University

Via

“The Chronicle”

3.21.23
David Nutt
dn234@cornell.edu

A model system created by stacking a pair of monolayer semiconductors is giving physicists a simpler way to study confounding quantum behavior, from heavy fermions to exotic quantum phase transitions.

The group’s paper is published March 15 in Nature [below]. The lead author is postdoctoral fellow Wenjin Zhao in the Kavli Institute at Cornell.

The project was led by Kin Fai Mak, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Jie Shan, professor of applied and engineering physics in Cornell Engineering and in A&S, the paper’s co-senior authors. Both researchers are members of the Kavli Institute; they came to Cornell through the provost’s Nanoscale Science and Microsystems Engineering (NEXT Nano) initiative .

A transmission electron microscope image shows the moiré lattice of molybdenum ditelluride and tungsten diselenide.
Yu-Tsun Shao and David Muller/Provided.

The team set out to address what is known as the Kondo effect, named after Japanese theoretical physicist Jun Kondo. About six decades ago, experimental physicists discovered that by taking a metal and substituting even a small number of atoms with magnetic impurities, they could scatter the material’s conduction electrons and radically alter its resistivity.

That phenomenon puzzled physicists, but Kondo explained it with a model that showed how conduction electrons can “screen” the magnetic impurities, such that the electron spin pairs with the spin of a magnetic impurity in opposite directions, forming a singlet.

While the Kondo impurity problem is now well understood, the Kondo lattice problem – one with a regular lattice of magnetic moments instead of random magnetic impurities – is much more complicated and continues to stump physicists. Experimental studies of the Kondo lattice problem usually involve intermetallic compounds of rare earth elements, but these materials have their own limitations.

“When you move all the way down to the bottom of the Periodic Table, you end up with something like 70 electrons in an atom,” Mak said. “The electronic structure of the material becomes so complicated. It is very difficult to describe what’s going on even without Kondo interactions.”

The researchers simulated the Kondo lattice by stacking ultrathin monolayers of two semiconductors: molybdenum ditelluride, tuned to a Mott insulating state, and tungsten diselenide, which was doped with itinerant conduction electrons. These materials are much simpler than bulky intermetallic compounds, and they are stacked with a clever twist. By rotating the layers at a 180-degree angle, their overlap results in a moiré lattice pattern that traps individual electrons in tiny slots, similar to eggs in an egg carton.

This configuration avoids the complication of dozens of electrons jumbling together in the rare earth elements. And instead of requiring chemistry to prepare the regular array of magnetic moments in the intermetallic compounds, the simplified Kondo lattice only needs a battery. When a voltage is applied just right, the material is ordered into forming a lattice of spins, and when one dials to a different voltage, the spins are quenched, producing a continuously tunable system.

“Everything becomes much simpler and much more controllable,” Mak said.

The researchers were able to continuously tune the electron mass and density of the spins, which cannot be done in a conventional material, and in the process they observed that the electrons dressed with the spin lattice can become 10 to 20 times heavier than the “bare” electrons, depending on the voltage applied.

The tunability can also induce quantum phase transitions whereby heavy electrons turn into light electrons with, in between, the possible emergence of a “strange” metal phase, in which electrical resistance increases linearly with temperature. The realization of this type of transition could be particularly useful for understanding the high-temperature superconducting phenomenology in copper oxides.

“Our results could provide a laboratory benchmark for theorists,” Mak said. “In condensed matter physics, theorists are trying to deal with the complicated problem of a trillion interacting electrons. It would be great if they don’t have to worry about other complications, such as chemistry and material science, in real materials. So they often study these materials with a ‘spherical cow’ Kondo lattice model. In the real world you cannot create a spherical cow, but in our material now we’ve created one for the Kondo lattice.”

Co-authors include doctoral students Bowen Shen and Zui Tao; postdoctoral researchers Kaifei Kang and Zhongdong Han; and researchers from the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan.

The research was primarily supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Nature

See the full article here.

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Cornell University College of Engineering is a division of Cornell University that was founded in 1870 as the Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanic Arts. It is one of four private undergraduate colleges at Cornell that are not statutory colleges.

It currently grants bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in a variety of engineering and applied science fields, and is the third largest undergraduate college at Cornell by student enrollment. The college offers over 450 engineering courses, and has an annual research budget exceeding US$112 million.

The College of Engineering was founded in 1870 as the Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanic Arts. The program was housed in Sibley Hall on what has since become the Arts Quad, both of which are named for Hiram Sibley, the original benefactor whose contributions were used to establish the program. The college took its current name in 1919 when the Sibley College merged with the College of Civil Engineering. It was housed in Sibley, Lincoln, Franklin, Rand, and Morse Halls. In the 1950s the college moved to the southern end of Cornell’s campus.

The college is known for a number of firsts. In 1889, the college took over electrical engineering from the Department of Physics, establishing the first department in the United States in this field. The college awarded the nation’s first doctorates in both electrical engineering and industrial engineering. The Department of Computer Science, established in 1965 jointly under the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences, is also one of the oldest in the country.

For many years, the college offered a five-year undergraduate degree program. However, in the 1960s, the course was shortened to four years for a B.S. degree with an optional fifth year leading to a masters of engineering degree. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Cornell offered a Master of Nuclear Engineering program, with graduates gaining employment in the nuclear industry. However, after the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, employment opportunities in that field dimmed and the program was dropped. Cornell continued to operate its on-campus nuclear reactor as a research facility following the close of the program. For most of Cornell’s history, Geology was taught in the College of Arts and Sciences. However, in the 1970s, the department was shifted to the engineering college and Snee Hall was built to house the program. After World War II, the Graduate School of Aerospace Engineering was founded as a separate academic unit, but later merged into the engineering college.

Cornell Engineering is home to many teams that compete in student design competitions and other engineering competitions. Presently, there are teams that compete in the Baja SAE, Automotive X-Prize (see Cornell 100+ MPG Team), UNP Satellite Program, DARPA Grand Challenge, AUVSI Unmanned Aerial Systems and Underwater Vehicle Competition, Formula SAE, RoboCup, Solar Decathlon, Genetically Engineered Machines, and others.

Cornell’s College of Engineering is currently ranked 12th nationally by U.S. News and World Report, making it ranked 1st among engineering schools/programs in the Ivy League. The engineering physics program at Cornell was ranked as being No. 1 by U.S. News and World Report in 2008. Cornell’s operations research and industrial engineering program ranked fourth in nation, along with the master’s program in financial engineering. Cornell’s computer science program ranks among the top five in the world, and it ranks fourth in the quality of graduate education.

The college is a leader in nanotechnology. In a survey done by a nanotechnology magazine Cornell University was ranked as being the best at nanotechnology commercialization, 2nd best in terms of nanotechnology facilities, the 4th best at nanotechnology research and the 10th best at nanotechnology industrial outreach.

Departments and schools

With about 3,000 undergraduates and 1,300 graduate students, the college is the third-largest undergraduate college at Cornell by student enrollment. It is divided into twelve departments and schools:

School of Applied and Engineering Physics
Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering
Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering
Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
School of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Department of Computer Science
Department of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
School of Operations Research and Information Engineering
Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics
Department of Systems Engineering

Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences is a division of Cornell University. It has been part of the university since its founding, although its name has changed over time. It grants bachelor’s degrees, and masters and doctorates through affiliation with the Cornell University Graduate School. Its major academic buildings are located on the Arts Quad and include some of the university’s oldest buildings. The college offers courses in many fields of study and is the largest college at Cornell by undergraduate enrollment.

Originally, the university’s faculty was undifferentiated, but with the founding of the Cornell Law School in 1886 and the concomitant self-segregation of the school’s lawyers, different departments and colleges formed.

Initially, the division that would become the College of Arts and Sciences was known as the Academic Department, but it was formally renamed in 1903. The College endowed the first professorships in American history, musicology, and American literature. Currently, the college teaches 4,100 undergraduates, with 600 full-time faculty members (and an unspecified number of lecturers) teaching 2,200 courses.

The Arts Quad is the site of Cornell’s original academic buildings and is home to many of the college’s programs. On the western side of the quad, at the top of Libe Slope, are Morrill Hall (completed in 1866), McGraw Hall (1872) and White Hall (1868). These simple but elegant buildings, built with native Cayuga bluestone, reflect Ezra Cornell’s utilitarianism and are known as Stone Row. The statue of Ezra Cornell, dating back to 1919, stands between Morrill and McGraw Halls. Across from this statue, in front of Goldwin Smith Hall, sits the statue of Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s other co-founder and its first president.

Lincoln Hall (1888) also stands on the eastern face of the quad next to Goldwin Smith Hall. On the northern face are the domed Sibley Hall and Tjaden Hall (1883). Just off of the quad on the Slope, next to Tjaden, stands the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, designed by I. M. Pei. Stimson Hall (1902), Olin Library (1959) and Uris Library (1892), with Cornell’s landmark clocktower, McGraw Tower, stand on the southern end of the quad.

Olin Library replaced Boardman Hall (1892), the original location of the Cornell Law School. In 1992, an underground addition was made to the quad with Kroch Library, an extension of Olin Library that houses several special collections of the Cornell University Library, including the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Klarman Hall, the first new humanities building at Cornell in over 100 years, opened in 2016. Klarman houses the offices of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies. The building is connected to, and surrounded on three sides by, Goldwin Smith Hall and fronts East Avenue.

Legends and lore about the Arts Quad and its statues can be found at Cornelliana.

The College of Arts and Sciences offers both undergraduate and graduate (through the Graduate School) degrees. The only undergraduate degree is the Bachelor of Arts. However, students may enroll in the dual-degree program, which allows them to pursue programs of study in two colleges and receive two different degrees. The faculties within the college are:

Africana Studies and Research Center*
American Studies
Anthropology
Archaeology
Asian-American Studies
Asian Studies
Astronomy/Astrophysics
Biology (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences)
Biology & Society Major (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Human Ecology)
Chemistry and Chemical Biology
China and Asia-pacific Studies
Classics
Cognitive Studies
College Scholar Program (frees up to 40 selected students in each class from all degree requirements and allows them to fashion a plan of study conducive to achieving their ultimate intellectual goals; a senior thesis is required)
Comparative Literature
Computer Science (with the College of Engineering)
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (with the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Engineering)
Economics
English
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
German Studies
Government
History
History of Art
Human Biology
Independent Major
Information Science (with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Engineering)
Jewish Studies
John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines
Latin American Studies
Latino Studies
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Linguistics
Mathematics
Medieval Studies
Modern European Studies Concentration
Music
Near Eastern Studies
Philosophy
Physics
Psychology
Religious Studies
Romance Studies
Russian
Science and Technology Studies
Society for the Humanities
Sociology
Theatre, Film, and Dance
Visual Studies Undergraduate Concentration

*Africana Studies was an independent center reporting directly to the Provost until July 1, 2011.

The Kavli Institute at Cornell (KIC) is devoted to the development and utilization of next-generation tools for exploring the nanoscale world.

KIC creates new techniques to image and dynamically control nanoscale systems and uses these techniques to push the frontiers of nanoscale science. KIC’s measurement-oriented mission complements the existing strengths at Cornell in nanofabrication (CNF, NNIN), nanoscale materials (CCMR), and mission-oriented centers (CNS, CABES, CESI, NBTC).

Open to all members of the Cornell nano community, KIC funds small, innovative teams to develop cross-cutting approaches to science at the boundaries of nanoscale imaging, manipulation, and control. These come in two types: Fellow Projects and Instrumentation Projects. They will typically involve faculty both within and outside KIC. High-risk and high-reward projects are strongly encouraged.

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through The State University of New York (SUNY) system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States.

Cornell is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation , accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico(US) until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.

In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider (JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider (JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the The European Organization for Nuclear Research [La Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear][Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire] [Europäische Organisation für Kernforschung](CH)[CERN] Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.

The Kavli Institute at Cornell (KIC) is devoted to the development and utilization of next-generation tools for exploring the nanoscale world.

As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.