From Red Lines to Ant Trails: How History Shapes Urban Nature

Sylvana Ross

September 18th from 10:30-11:30am- In Person & Zoom

Description: Cities are more than just buildings and roads—they’re human-made ecosystems. We’ve designed these ecosystems with highways, malls, schools, parking lots, and expanses of pavement, which shape the lives of the animals that live alongside us. From birds that sing louder to be heard over traffic, to lizards with longer limbs for climbing walls, to coyotes navigating neighborhoods, city wildlife is adapting in surprising ways. But U.S. cities were also built with deep racial prejudice, including the practice of redlining, where neighborhoods were graded and segregated by race. These patterns still shape communities today, with formerly redlined neighborhoods experiencing more concrete, hotter temperatures, and greater pollution. In this talk, I’ll also share my research on the odorous house ant, a common urban insect, and how ants from different neighborhoods handle heat stress. Together, we’ll explore how history, ecology, and community science can help us understand the legacy of racism on urban nature—and what this means for future policy and city design.

Bio: Sylvana Ross graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a bachelor’s degree in biology, where she studied mate choice and visual systems in jumping spiders. After graduation, she started teaching environmental after-school programs and saw firsthand the empathy students had for the world they were growing up in. She joined Queen City Pollinator Project in February 2020 and became a science educator and beekeeper, teaching lower-income communities about pollinators in urban ecosystems and the evolutionary mysteries that are unraveling within their city. Currently, she is in her fourth year of her PhD in Dr. Corrie Moreau’s lab in the Entomology Department at Cornell University. Her research focuses on how urban environments shape insect evolution, specifically how racial segregation and city design affect ant populations. She hopes her work not only helps protect urban ecosystems but also inspires equitable environmental policies and encourages more diverse and creative minds to find a place in science.

Gravitational waves are the new window on the universe: insights on supermassive black holes, element formation, and a few other things.

James (Jim) Cordes- Feldstein Professor of Astronomy, Cornell University

October 16th from 10:30-11:30am- In Person & Zoom

Description: Gravitational waves are incredibly weak ripples in spacetime. Predicted by Einstein, their existence was demonstrated indirectly only in the 1980s and were directly detected in 2015 with terrestrial laser detectors (the LIGO facility). I will quickly summarize LIGO results on mergers of black holes and neutron stars. Then I will focus on a more recent discovery based on the monitoring of neutron stars (pulsars) in the Milky Way using radio telescopes. This represents a very different kind of detector that is on the scale of our own galaxy. In 2023, a North American collaboration involving Cornell reported gravitational waves originating from the most massive black holes in the universe with a billion times the mass of the Sun and having wavelengths measured in light years. The 15 years of data used to make this discovery are being extended into the indefinite future. This requires new radio telescopes, one of which is of primary interest to Cornell and will come on line by the end of this decade.

Bio: Jim Cordes is the George Feldstein Professor of Astronomy at Cornell. His work concentrates on turbulence in the interstellar medium, neutron stars and black holes, and gravitational waves. He has worked extensively on fast radio bursts, an engimatic phenomenon of cosmological origin. In recent years data analysis in these areas has made increasing use of machine learning and neural networks. He came to Cornell in 1979 as an assistant professor and made use of the Arecibo Observatory for more than 40 years in studies of neutron stars and other objects. His Ph.D. in applied physics is from the UC San Diego and his B.Sc. is in electrical engineering from UC Santa Barbara. Before Cornell he was a post-doc at U. Mass Amherst with Joseph Taylor in the years immediately after the discovery of the binary pulsar that led to the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for Hulse and Taylor. He was PI of the U.S. technology development project for the Square Kilometer Array in the early 2000s and he is a Co-PI on the NSF-funded Physics Frontiers Center for NANOGrav (the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves). To distract himself from the funding frustrations and rabbit holes of astronomy, he greatly enjoys street, landscape, and bird photography (and even occasional astro-photography).