At the most recent gathering of the Great New York State Fair in Syracuse, the Cornell University Solar Decathlon team demonstrated the fruits of their delicate labor: an eco-friendly, eye-catching, energy-efficient dream home. The stories of rural America are growing into the achievements of modern man.

Society teaches us that science has no limits; that you and I can be whatever we want to be, do whatever we want to do, and that scientists are nothing but an utter bouquet of bright minds moving from grass to grace, sharing their knowledge with all and sundry, passing on the ‘Universalistic’ torch inscribed with the message: all is possible in the name of science.

Research. Quick, what associations did you make? I’d venture to guess that either a beaker or a pipette crossed your mind, however briefly. According to Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, “ Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.” Szent-Gyorgyi’s definition, not specific to any particular field of study, implies extended creative thought on a particular subject. “Research” for many, however, suggests little about creativity.

Hunger and malnutrition are ancient problems. So much has been said and written on the subject of feeding the 6.7 billion people on Earth that the discussion has progressed from an instinctual question of “what’s for dinner” into an unwieldy, amorphous cloud of questions — about nutrition, about politics, about the environment — for which there seem to be no easy answers.

At a time when Ann Coulter ’84 and Keith Olbermann’79 are butting heads over the legitimacy of the Ag School and the value of a communication degree, it seems appropriate for scientists to ask: Are there any facts in Ms. Coulter’s claims? I invite you to look at another side (maybe, the third) of the coin, what we call the narrative of science: Imagine Cornell without Agriculture, without the Life Sciences, without Communication (especially, in the life sciences)…

Economists are scientists. They take data. They run statistical tests. Then, they boil down human behavior to elegant mathematical models: G+I+Xn+C =GDP, MRS=-p1/p2 etc. However, as sophisticated as these models may be, they don’t always work in practice.

Abubakar Jalloh takes a look at the origins of Daily Sun Science.

A little mystery returned to the world this week, while scientists and citizens alike rushed to bring back images from the frontiers of deep space and the natural world. Astronomers got a glimpse of some of the oldest light in the Universe using the European Space Agency's Planck telescope, while the residents of Australia's biggest city got a glimpse of what it might be like to live in a dust bowl when a deep orange cloud darkened the sky in Sydney on Tuesday.