Cislunar Explorers, a team of Cornell University students guided by Mason Peck, a former senior official at NASA and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is attempting to boldly go where no CubeSat team has gone before: around the moon. Not only is Peck's group attempting to make a first-ever moon orbit with a satellite no bigger than a cereal box, made entirely with off-the-shelf materials, it's doing so with propell...

Two Cornell experts in AI have joined a nationwide team setting out to ensure that when computers are running the world, they will make decisions compatible with human values. "We are in a period in history when we start using these machines to make judgments," said Bart Selman, professor of computer science. "If decisions are properly structured, the horrors we've seen in the movies won't happen."

  By combining expertise in photonics - manipulating light beams in nanoscale waveguides on a chip – and materials science, Cornell researchers have laid the groundwork for a chemical sensor on a chip that could be used in small portable devices to analyse samples in a lab, monitor air and water quality in the field and perhaps even detect explosives. 

A pair of researchers at Cornell University has created an aluminum-based electrochemical cell that captures and sequesters carbon emissions while simultaneously generating a large amount of electricity. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, Wajdi Al Sadat and Lynden Archer describe the cell, how it works and why they believe it is better than other carbon-capturing cells that have been developed to date.

It seems like fairly simple physics: If you construct a barrier that's stronger than the material trying to penetrate it, the barrier should work. That is the prevailing wisdom guiding the science of high-capacity rechargeable batteries that use reactive metals as the negative electrode: The membrane that separates the two electrodes should ideally be made of something that's at least as strong as the metal itself.

A professor, a postdoctoral researcher and a graduate student hop onto a trampoline. No, it's not the opening line of a joke. It's a setup for the explanation of new Cornell-led research involving the wonder material graphene. A group led by Roberto De Alba, graduate student in physics, and Jeevak Parpia, professor and department chair of physics, has published a paper in Nature Nanotechnology regarding yet another application for the versatile, ...

At Cornell University, the Sol M. Gruner (SMG) detector group has developed and demonstrated a type of imaging electron detector that records an image frame in 1/1000 of a second, and can detect from 1 to 1,000,000 electrons per pixel. This is 1000 times the intensity range, and 100 times the speed of conventional electron microscope image sensors.

  Cornell researchers have come up with an interactive prototyping system that prints what you are designing as you design it; the designer can pause anywhere in the process to test, measure and, if necessary, make changes that will be added to the physical model still in the printer.

In the early 1970s, the Cornell team of professors David Lee and Robert Richardson first observed superfluid helium-3. For that breakthrough, the catalyst for further research into low-temperature physics, the trio was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics. Twenty years later, another Cornell-led team has made an important discovery regarding the superconductor strontium ruthenate (Sr2RuO4,or SRO), often described as a crystalline analog of sup...

Researchers from Cornell University have devised a peptidomimetic macrocyclic compound that is made from an acid-catalysed cascade reaction. Their macrocycles are tunable in their backbone, side-chain composition and sequence, and their overall structure. Using this structural versatility, Mintu Porel, Dana N. Thornlow, Ngoc N. Phan and Christopher A. Alabi designed a macrocycle that mimicked antimicrobial peptides and displayed antibacterial pro...

Imagine an aircraft that could alter its wing shape in midflight and, like a pelican, dive into the water before morphing into a submarine. Cornell University engineering professor Rob Shepherd and his group might help make that futuristic-sounding vehicle a reality. The key is a hybrid material featuring stiff metal and soft, porous rubber foam that combines the best properties of both stiffness and elasticity. The material also has the ability ...

Imagine a health care robot that could display the patient's temperature and pulse, and even reacts to a patient's mood. It sounds futuristic, but a team of Cornell graduate students, led by Rob Shepherd, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, has developed an electroluminescent "skin" that stretches to more than six times its original size while still emitting light. The discovery could lead to significant advances in healt...

Just as the single-crystal silicon wafer forever changed the nature of communication 60 years ago, a group of Cornell researchers is hoping its work with quantum dot solids - crystals made out of crystals - can help usher in the latest era in electronics. The team, led by Tobias Hanrath, associate professor in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has fashioned two-dimensional superstructures out of single-cr...