Climate change and flagging investment in research and development has U.S. agriculture facing its first productivity slowdown in decades. Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, associate professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University, explains what is needed to reverse course: a level of public R&D spending growth that hasn’t been seen in the U.S. since the years following World War I and World War II.

Academia can be a very siloed place, but Itai Cohen, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has managed to work on an incredibly eclectic range of projects, from studying the neuroscience behind insect flight, to making origami-like solar materials that wrap buildings, to creating tiny diffractive microrobots that can probe the microscopic world. He reflects on where his diverse interests and collaborations have led him, and the role that fear played in the evolution of his scientific trajectory.
Read about the tiniest walking robot and its micro-measurements.

As social media platforms deployed psychological “inoculation” on a large scale, hoping to help people spot techniques common to misinformation, Gordon Pennycook, associate professor and Himan Brown Faculty Fellow in the Department of Psychology and College of Arts and Sciences, had doubts about its effectiveness. He discusses new research identifying a way to strengthen inoculations, and why he began studying misinformation.
Read more about it.