The Essentials

Former-Cornell-student-turned-hip-hop-artist Dylan Owen’s new video features lots of campus landmarks.

The steel bridge and concrete canoe civil engineering student teams received high marks at their respective intercollegiate competitions, which were part of the American Society of Civil Engineers regional meeting at Clarkson University, April 19-21. The steel bridge team placed third overall, and the concrete canoe team placed fourth overall.

Watch a time lapse of the steel bridge team assembling their structure.

Five Cornell professors have been named to “The Best 300 Professors.” The book takes data from RateMyProfessors.com, a website on which students rank professors on helpfulness, clarity, easiness and “hotness.”

“The professors in the book are not ranked (nor are their colleges ranked in this book) but each professor profiled received high ratings from their most important audiences, beneficiaries and critics: the students they teach and inspire,” writes the publisher.

Cornell winners are Gerald Feigenson, professor of molecular biology and genetics; Karl J. Niklas, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Plant Biology; Cindy Van Es, senior lecturer in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management; George Hudler, professor of plant pathology and plant-microbe biology; and Shalom Shoer, senior lecturer in Near Eastern studies.

Street harassment has a lower negative impact on pedestrians who respond to it, according to a study by the ILR School’s new Worker Institute.

Researchers analyzed descriptions of street harassment experiences submitted to Hollaback!, which offers street harassment victims free smart phone apps to post their experiences online.

Findings include:

• Street harassment is under-researched but prevalent for many New York City residents.

• Emotional reactions to street harassment vary but any harassment – verbal, groping, assault – can produce feelings of fear, anger and shame.

• Targets who photograph the harasser or report harassment to officials appear to experience less negative emotional impact than those who don’t.

• When bystanders fail to act, their presence tended to compound targets’ negative emotional responses.

• Bystander interventions that had a positive influence on targets could be as simple as a knowing look or a supportive statement.

• When a bystander took action by confronting the harasser, harassment was more likely to stop.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, street harassment targeting women and LGBTQ people is the most pervasive form of sexual violence and the least legislated against.

 — Mary Catt

In connection with her new novel, ”The House of Velvet and Glass,” in which the sinking of the Titanic figures, Katherine Howe, a lecturer in American studies at Cornell, spoke to CBS This Morning‘s Mo Rocca April 9 about Americans’ obsession with the Titanic.

“One of the reasons is that there was as much celebrity culture in 1912 as today,” Howe wrote in a subsequent email about the interview. “[The public] just paid attention to socialites and industrialists rather than actors. The response to Titanic in 1912 was as if everyone at the Vanity Fair Oscar party was all on a boat together, which went down.”

Howe, author of the best-seller ”The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,” continued: “[The] Titanic is also about hubris and our faith in technology. We talked not only about the design of the ship, but also about the role that wireless technology played both in the rescue and in the dissemination of news while it was still happening. Titanic is really the first time that newspapers were able to learn about an event while it was still under way.”

Howe’s interview will air in the 8 a.m. hour April 13 – two days before the 100th anniversary of the ship’s sinking.

Apparently the idea of living in a simulated space capsule and pretending to be an astronaut was appealing to the 700 applicants who volunteered for a Cornell study. Only six lucky volunteers will make the cut.

The scientists, who include Jean Hunter, associate professor of biological and environmental engineering, and Bruce Halpern, professor of psychology and neurobiology and behavior, are leading a $947,000, three-year NASA study on the diets of six volunteer “astronauts” who will spend four months in 2013 on a barren lava field in Hawaii. The conditions are meant to resemble a mission to Mars, complete with simulated spacewalks and suiting up in space gear.

The study will help combat the problem of astronaut menu fatigue – a concern among space travelers, who tire of eating foods they normally enjoy but also tend to eat less, putting them at risk for nutrition deficiencies, according to Hunter.

The woman attacked by a conservative radio host as a “prostitute” and a “slut,” Sandra Fluke ’03, a third-year Georgetown law student, has received an apology.

After testifying before Congress in favor the Obama administration’s requirement that health insurance plans cover contraceptives for women, Rush Limbaugh on Feb. 29 began to unleash a three-day stream of invective on Fluke that has caused several sponsors of his program to withdraw their ads from his show.

On March 2, President Barack Obama called Fluke to express his support of her.

On March 3 Limbaugh posted a statement on his website: “My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.”

Despite his apology, an ongoing effort targeting Limbaugh’s sponsors continues.

The search for Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “The Battle of Anghiari,” known as “The Lost Leonardo,” is getting help from two Cornell materials science and engineering alumnae, and will be the subject of a National Geographic documentary airing March 18 at 9 p.m. EDT.

Samantha Stout ’10, a graduate student at Jacobs School of Engineering, University of California San Diego, and Alexandra Hubenko ‘94, assistant director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, serve on the team that’s working to uncover the painting, believed for centuries to have been either destroyed or painted over.

The project team, led by Maurizio Seracini, believes the work is hidden under later-painted frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy.

Check out the Prisoner Express art show, Monday, March 5, 7:30-9:30 p.m. at the Big Red Barn.

The exhibition of handmade artwork from prisoners nationwide was sent to Prisoner Express, a project of the Durland Alternatives Library.

Prisoner Express provides information, education and opportunities for creative self-expression via writing, drawing and study programs that are mailed to thousands of prisoners throughout the country. To say thank you, prisoners send samples of their work.

Art sold at the event’s silent auction will help the project pay for its mailings to prisoners.

– Susan Lang

Ever wonder what it was like to develop deadly germs that could kill millions of people?

“The Anthrax Diaries,” a 30-minute documentary made by two Cornell faculty members with two other colleagues, will screen at Willard Straight Theatre Monday, March 5 at 4:30 p.m. and answer this question. The film, the first part of an ongoing feature-length work, features interviews with former Soviet and American bioweapons scientists.

Despite signing a treaty prohibiting the development, production and stockpiling of biological and toxin weapons that went into force in 1975, the U.S.S.R. continued its offensive bioweapons program in secret until 1992. Today, there are still concerns about ongoing covert biological weapons activities by states and terrorist groups.

Kathleen M. Vogel, an associate professor at Cornell with a joint appointment in the Department of Science and Technology Studies and the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, will introduce the film. A discussion of the film with Vogel and Slava Paperno, director of the Russian Language Program, will follow.

Free and open to the public.