For decades, electronics have become smaller and faster year by year. This size reduction and concurrent power increase have been dependent on the electronics industry consistently finding ways to increase the number of microcomponents carried by an average microchip. Lately the pace of optimization has slowed so much that some experts think we may...

Growing up in Anaheim, California, Kayla Nguyen’s passion for physics stemmed from an enduring love for surfing and the technical aspects of skateboarding. “While working at a skate shop during my high school years, I would often disassemble and modify skateboards. I eventually developed a knack for tweaking all kinds of machines around me, try...

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is a layer of specialized endothelial cells around the brain that protects it—letting in only what is needed and keeping out what could be harmful. It crucially maintains the right ionic balance within the brain and blocks substances that would disrupt essential neural functions. In many ways, it’s a barrier betwee...

Bad habits are stubborn, and our best attempts to change our behavior often fail us. The technology sector has tried to help with a slew of apps and devices, but in many cases the use of these gadgets or programs requires as much or more effort as any other intervention. We may not even try. If we do, we may give up after a few weeks or months.Tanz...

One of the great challenges of our time is to make energy consumption carbon neutral. While alternative energy technologies such as solar and wind have come a long way, they still lag behind fossil fuels when it comes to energy density, the amount of energy stored per unit volume.“It’s difficult to imagine a sustainable energy future in which f...

In the not-so-distant future, our mirrors may recognize us. First thing in the morning, seeing our faces, they might turn on the music we like, let us know the weather, or give us reminders about the day ahead. With technology being developed at Cornell Tech, our mirrors might also screen for disease—by scanning our skin for changes that could in...

For every cup of Greek yogurt made, two cups of wastewater are produced. Companies have to dispose of this waste, called acid whey. The majority of it is handled either by trucking it to a wastewater treatment plant to process at a cost or by transporting it to farmers to use as fertilizer or in animal feed. The farmers accept the acid whey, but i...

Infertility plagues roughly 10 percent of couples, often with high costs—financial, physical, and emotional. Male infertility accounts for about half of these instances, but efforts to identify these men have fallen short.“Most men who have fertility problems pass the traditional semen analysis,” says Alexander J. Travis, Biomedical Sciences/...

What appears as a kaleidoscope of shapes and patterns to many people may be tissue from a mouse intestine, bird lung, or even a human brain to the eye trained in microscopy. With modern imaging, scientists are able to observe the cells of living tissue in high resolution.Multiphoton microscopy, also known as non-linear or two-photon microscopy, is ...

For thousands of years the dog has been humanity’s best friend. Long before we tamed the horse or invented agriculture, we domesticated the dog. As we spread throughout the world, the dog paced at our heels. And yet for all the centuries of adventure and perils we shared, much about dogs remains a mystery. How did the wolf, with its fairly unifor...

For many years, agricultural animals such as swine and poultry couldn’t digest the phosphorus found in most plant-based feeds like corn and soybean meal. That undigested phosphorus went straight into the soils. The pollution was only the first problem.To keep the animals healthy, the industry supplemented the feed with digestible inorganic phosph...

Cornell dots, or C dots—fluorescent, nanometer-sized silica particles—can safely find tumors and illuminate them. They can potentially weaken tumors or deliver therapeutic drugs. With these uses and more, C dots are proving to be vastly versatile, paradigm-shifting tools.C dots’ inventor, Ulrich B. Wiesner, Materials Science and Engineering,...

Cornell labs regularly produce new innovations in the life sciences. Some of the recently promising include a better way to sterilize medical instruments, new components that can significantly increase the capacity and power of batteries, and a computational nitrogen management tool that helps farmers decide exactly how and when to apply fertilizer...

In the 1980s, Ronald G. Crystal, chairman of Genetic Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, developed a treatment for one of the most common hereditary disorders in Caucasians: Alpha-1 Antitrypsin (A1AT) Deficiency. The inability to produce normal levels of the A1AT protein makes patients susceptible to emphysema and liver disease and is often fatal. Cr...

When Yong L. Joo, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, finished his PhD, he didn’t follow the traditional academic path—he couldn’t. As a South Korean citizen, he was required to return to Korea to fulfill his military obligation.The government gave him a choice: three years serving in the military or five years doing research in the privat...

The road is long from a breakthrough invention in a Cornell lab to a viable company based on that invention. In between, there are years of product development, business planning, and network building without any assurance the effort and cost will be rewarded. This is the world of the entrepreneur. It’s one that most Cornell researchers have litt...

We’ve all asked ourselves the question that Francis Barany, Microbiology and Immunology, Weill Cornell Medicine, is developing tools to answer. “It’s a scary question,” Barany says. “Do I have a hidden cancer within me?”It’s also a difficult question—maybe the most difficult to answer in terms of what Barany calls the cancer problem...

For decades, the integration of renewable sources into the energy landscape has been part of the world sustainability conversation. From giant windmill farms to electric cars, the most likely alternatives to the use of fossil fuels have become familiar to us. But there’s one invention that may eclipse them all and yet has gotten little press: the...

For fiber science undergraduate Sarah R. Meyers, ’16, taking part in the 2014 Cornell Fashion Collective runway show was simply a chance to show off her newly acquired fiber science skills while indulging in her love of fashion. Together with fellow fiber science students Eric P. Beaudette, ’16, and Ariana S. Levitt, ’15, Meyers envisioned cr...

The millions of acres of corn grown in the United States depend on nitrogen-rich soil. Consequently, managing nitrogen is critical to corn crop production. If there is too little nitrogen, there is less crop yield, but if there is too much nitrogen, the excess washes away and pollutes the environment.Many factors determine how much nitrogen a crop ...

On Cornell’s sprawling 900-acre New York State Agricultural Experiment Station (NYSAES) in Geneva, New York, Susan K. Brown, School of Integrative Plant Science, Horticulture and Plant Breeding and Genetics, is developing better apples. What exactly makes a great apple? For examples, just take a bite of Brown’s recent creations: SnapDragon™ a...

The digital health revolution is in full bloom. Tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all offering their own take on fitness applications and health-monitoring tools. An entire industry exists around activity trackers from Fitbit to Garmin to Jawbone.David Erickson, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is working to add another impo...

It began with a rough sketch on the back of an envelope in 2008. Matthew P. DeLisa, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, sat down with then graduate student Adam Fisher. The two jotted down a possible biological pathway for bacteria to make a specific sugar structure (a glycan) and to then transfer and attach the glycan to a protein target in ord...

On a warm spring morning, a teenager named Rachel awakes and gets ready for school. She brushes her teeth, DM’s her best friend about yesterday’s geometry assignment, and quickly swallows two little pills with a glass of water. Although the sixteen-year-old was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as a young child, today she sits down to a quick brea...