On Cornell Engineering Week: Dividing up a bundle of items fairly can be very tricky, especially for families.

Paul Gölz, assistant professor of operations research and information engineering, looks to mathematics for help.

Paul Gölz is an assistant professor at Cornell University. He studies the algorithms and mathematics of democracy and fairness, and how these fields can inform AI development.

Picture three siblings dividing an inheritance. One is fond of a piece of art, the others could both use the car, everyone wants the dining table, … and suddenly they’re fighting over how to split the goods. Whether you’re splitting an estate or Halloween candy, mathematics can help by making precise when a division is “fair” and by creating procedures that find one.

Ideally, we’d like a division that is envy-free, which means that no sibling prefers another sibling’s bundle of items over their own. But perfect envy-freeness isn’t always possible—say if everyone wants the car.

So, researchers in the area of fair division developed a more flexible standard of fairness, which allows for some envy, but only a small amount: your envy for another’s bundle should disappear if you could remove just one item from it. This axiom works well because it’s always achievable when dividing items across individuals.

But here is a twist: what if the siblings have spouses? A division that seems fair to the siblings could still leave a spouse thinking their household got shortchanged, based on how the spouse values the items. Can we divide them so that the siblings and their spouses find the allocation fair?

For two couples, we prove that the answer is yes; such a division always exists. But add another couple, and sometimes no division will satisfy everyone. That’s the bad news.

The good news? We developed an algorithm that works for any number of couples, which guarantees a different fairness axiom called proportionality: every person feels that their group received at least their fair share of the total value, give or take a few items. This algorithm offers a mathematically fair way to divide goods among households or other groups of people—and hopefully to avoid an argument.

Read More:Fair Division Among Couples and Small Groups

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On Cornell Engineering Week: What can the natural world tell us about computers?

Hunter Adams, assistant teaching professor of electrical and computer engineering, examines what we can learn from nature.

Hunter Adams is an assistant teaching professor at Cornell University’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. As a former Cornell student with degrees in physics and aerospace engineering, he worked in the Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics before joining the Space Systems Design Studio where he managed a team of engineers constructing a spacecraft called Violet. As a faculty member, Adams enjoys working with students and collaborating with researchers in a range of disciplines, including plant sciences, veterinary science, electrical engineering, ornithology, and computer science.

Let me ask you a deceptively difficult question: What is a computer?We can all point to examples of computers. Things like laptops, cell phones, slide rules, and calculators. But what is the property that all these items share which makes them computers? Are there other objects, objects that we don’t typically think of as “computers,” which share this property?Here’s a definition: a computer is anything which usefully transforms one quantity into another quantity. All of the engineered systems that I’ve just listed share this property, but so do many natural systems that we don’t typically think of as computers!We could point to lots of examples. Want to find the shortest path through a complicated environment? No need to build a computer or write a program, just re- create that environment around an ant colony and allow them to find the path for you! Want to classify objects moving through a forest? The woodland creatures react in different ways to different sorts of intrusions. Use the birds, bees, and megafauna as a giant neural net that performs classification by way of their unique responses to cars, people, drones, or whatever else.These and other natural systems are modeled by equations, and the goal of many scientists is to find these equations. But any system that can be modeled by an equation can also be used as a special-purpose computer for solving that equation! Natural computing does not use math to model nature, it uses nature to do math, and to store and process data!The supercomputers of the future will not be constructed at the cost of nature, but will include nature. In addition to giving us access to lots more compute, this has the potential to guarantee nature’s preservation. As soon as healthy forests generate more dollars than lumber, we won’t need fences around our forests. The economic value of the forest, and of all other natural systems, may lay in its ability to process, store, and move data.Maybe, we can save the planet by turning it into a computer.

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On Cornell Engineering Week: There are still mysteries to uncover about the bones in our body.

Eve Donnelly, associate professor of materials science and engineering, looks into some to find out.

Eve Donnelly is an associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University, where her research focuses on the microscopic structure and composition of connective tissues, especially bone, determine their strength, resilience, and susceptibility to fracture. Her work focuses on how the organic and inorganic components of bone interact to create its mechanical properties, and how those interactions change in disease. The long-term goal of her research is to integrate materials science with orthopedic medicine to uncover the mechanisms behind pathologic fractures.

We tend to think we’ve got bones all figured out. They hold us up, protect our organs, and – as we have learned from a young age – they get stronger with calcium, vitamin D, and exercise. But there is still a lot we don’t understand about what makes bones truly strong and healthy.Take Type 2 diabetes, for example. People with this condition tend to have denser bones than average. One would think that would make them less likely to break. Yet, paradoxically, people with diabetes are more likely to have fractures.In my lab, we study why. It turns out that having more bone isn’t the same as having better bone. Healthy bone is a natural composite, part mineral for strength, part collagen for flexibility. In diabetes, excess sugar in the bloodstream can stick to the collagen and form unwanted crosslinks that make the tissue more brittle.We used high-resolution imaging and other techniques to look deep inside diabetic bone and found that it has more of the harmful crosslinks and less renewal of old bone by the bone cells, which could allow it to develop tiny cracks that build up over time. So even when the bone looks fine on a density scan, it’s more fragile than it seems.This research helps explain why current diagnostic tools, which focus mainly on bone density, can fail to predict fracture risk in people with diabetes. By uncovering how sugar compounds alter bone material, we can work toward better screening methods, and therapies that promote bone quality, not just density.Bones may look simple on the surface, but they’re remarkable, living materials that hold mysteries we’re only beginning to unravel. And each new discovery brings us closer to understanding how to keep our bones healthy and resilient for a lifetime.

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On Cornell Engineering Week: A solution to heating our homes more efficiently may be right under our feet.

Chloe Arson, professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, digs down to explore.

Chloé Arson is a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University with expertise is damage and healing rock mechanics, micro-macro modeling of porous media, and computational geomechanics. Her research group develops numerical tools to assess the performance and environmental impacts of underground storage and rock fracturing, explain the formation of soil by rock weathering, and design sustainable bio-inspired geotechnical systems. Arson’s latest line of research investigates the use of artificial intelligence to optimize subsurface exploration and enhance multi-scale geomechanical models.

You may be familiar with homes being conditioned by geothermal energy, using shallow heat pumps that circulate pipes a few hundred feet underground to warm buildings in winter and cool them in summer. But that’s just scratching the surface.

Deeper underground, the Earth gets hotter – a steady rise called the geothermal gradient. Those higher temperatures open up new possibilities for supplying heat to multiple buildings or even industrial facilities – things shallow geothermal systems can’t do. That’s where deep geothermal systems come in. Heat is harvested by drilling kilometers down and circulating fluid through fractures in the hot rock. When the subsurface is not permeable enough to circulate the fluid, it is possible to build an Enhanced Geothermal System, or EGS for short. “Enhanced” means that the rock is stimulated to open or create fractures prior to operations. The EGS technology makes it possible to harvest heat nearly anywhere.

In Utah and Nevada, two-mile-deep enhanced geothermal systems have produced electricity. In the eastern U.S., the rocks are about three times less hot at similar depth, which is not economically practical for power generation, but is ideal for heating buildings directly. Cornell University recently drilled a two-mile-deep borehole to assess the feasibility of EGS for direct heat production, but many challenges to deploying this type of system still exist.

The economic potential for direct heat-generating enhanced geothermal systems is on the order of 320 gigawatt-thermal units in the United States, enough to heat about 45 million households. Clean, renewable heat is beneath our feet. The challenge now is to build the infrastructure.

Read More:Earth Source Heat - Cornell University

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On Cornell Engineering Week: We still have much to unravel about menopause.

Nozomi Nishimura, associate professor of biomedical engineering, says science can help.

Nozomi Nishimura is an associate professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University and director of the Menopause Health Engineering initiative, which aims to unravel the science of menopause. Her research expands the use of in vivo imaging techniques to study a variety of disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, cardiac disease and cancer metastasis. Her lab’s strategy is to develop novel tools to image the contribution of multiple physiological systems to diseases, including multiphoton microscopy to image cell dynamics and femtosecond laser ablation and quantitative analysis to dissect function in living systems.

Despite decades of biomedical progress, we still don’t fully understand what happens in the body during menopause, or how its hormonal changes cascade through biological systems like the brain, heart, bones, and metabolic network. The result is that billions of people will experience symptoms and health risks that science can describe, but not yet predict or prevent.That’s because menopause isn’t a single switch that flips. It’s a systems-level process. As estrogen levels fall, the effects ripple across nearly every organ, influencing metabolism, inflammation, cognition, and even the mechanical properties of tissue. Osteoporosis, for example, is one potential outcome related to menopause, and is tied not only to bone health, but muscle and metabolic health. It also plays a significant role in breast cancer risk and progression.Understanding intertwined problems like menopause and multi-organ diseases requires integrative, cross-disciplinary science. The Menopause Health Engineering initiative is bringing together experts from engineering, medicine, and life sciences to create computational models, imaging tools, and “body-on-a-chip” platforms that will reveal how menopause reshapes the body over time.The research initiative aims to inspire a broader movement: to treat menopause not as a medical afterthought, but as a rich, untapped domain for discovery. By elevating menopause research to a national scientific priority, we could transform not just women’s health, but our understanding of human resilience and longevity itself. Menopause isn’t the end of biology – it’s a key to unlocking it.

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What does the fairy tale of the princess and the pea have to teach us about our cells?

Amit Pathak, professor of mechanical engineer and materials science at Washington University in St. Louis, feels the way through the research.

Amit Pathak is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on mechanobiology, exploring how cells sense and respond to mechanical properties of their environment, with applications in cancer metastasis, wound healing, and tissue engineering.

While diseases are traditionally defined by genetic alterations in cells, our bodies undergo mechanical changes as well. In my lab, we study mechanobiology, which asks: how do cells respond to the physical world around them?Over the last two decades, scientists have learned that cells aren’t just passive blobs. They actually sense the stiffness of the surfaces they stick to. This sensing—called mechanotransduction—guides how cells move, grow, and even turn into diseased versions of themselves.In a recent study, we found something surprising. Groups of epithelial cells—the kind that line your organs—can feel through layers of fibrous collagen up to 100 microns deep. It’s a bit like the fairy tale of the princess and the pea. She could feel a tiny pea under a pile of mattresses. In real life, it’s like the difference between sleeping on a mattress on the floor versus one on a bed frame—you feel the support differently. The epithelial cell clusters in our experiments did something similar: they push and pull on their surroundings to “feel” what’s beneath. Depending on the stiffness of their distant layers, which could be soft tissue, a hard tumor, or bone in the body, cells change how they move. This is an emergent property of cell collectives, because single cells can only sense a few microns deep. Based on this work, we suspect there may be specific regulatory proteins that help cells sense distant, disease-like environments—ones we may have overlooked. This kind of long-distance sensing could reveal new targets for cancer therapy.That’s the core mission of my lab: to understand whether and how cells can sense distant environments—ones they’ve encountered before, or ones they’re moving toward. If true, this could mean that mechanical memory shapes how cancer spreads or how healthy cells respond to nearby tumors.

Read More:

[PNAS] - Emergent depth-mechanosensing of epithelial collectives regulates cell clustering and dispersal on layered matrices

Cellular Mechanobiology Laboratory

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On this Student Spotlight: How rich and poor navigated Industrial Manchester may be different from what was previously thought.

Emily Chung, PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, looks through records to shed more light on the history.

Emily is a PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge, in the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. She holds a Bachelor’s of Architecture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a master’s in Economic and Social History from Cambridge. Her doctoral research studies residential segregation and urban reform in 19th century Manchester, using census microdata alongside cartographic and qualitative primary sources to reconstruct experiences of life in the industrial city. Her recent paper, published in The Historical Journal, explores questions of proximity and segregation in 1840s Manchester.

Few cities were affected by the Industrial Revolution as quickly and dramatically as Manchester, which went from little more than a village in 1750 to the third largest city in Britain a century later. By the 1840s, the pressures of this growth was reflected in widespread overcrowding, disease, and severe social fragmentation. The image that has survived of industrial Manchester is one where rich and poor rarely, if ever, interacted and it has been assumed that this was the cause of residential segregation, keeping different classes to separate parts of the city. Looking more closely at census data from 1851, however, my research reveals the opposite was true: not only did doctors, engineers, and lawyers live in the same neighbourhoods as the poorest factory labourers, but they even shared the same buildings! Reviewing qualitative primary sources from this period, written by social investigators and observers like Friedrich Engels, Leon Faucher and James Kay-Shuttleworth, I find different explanations for mechanisms of segregation. Here, differences in daily and weekly routines associated with work, consumer practices, and approaches to leisure meant that individuals of very different classes rarely occupied the same spaces, and when they did, it was often at different times. Long industrial workdays, for example, were such that by the time middle-class shopkeepers, teachers, and accountants hit the streets, working-class labourers were long tucked away in factories. Throughout the week, the middle classes and domestics visited markets and grocers for freshly delivered produce, but the poor were forced to wait for their wages to be disbursed on Saturday evenings, by which point only the worst products were left and the wealthier long gone. Even on Sundays, the universal day off, classes self-segregated with the rich attending church and the poor gathering in pubs. Understanding the nuances of segregation remains of key importance today as many cities still struggle with the issue, and the case of Manchester shows that housing is but one of many factors which shape inequality and exclusion in urban space.

Read More:

[Cambridge Core] - Proximity and Segregation in Industrial Manchester

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How can we drive down real estate prices across the country?

John Hatfield, Century Club Professor of Finance at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, looks into one possible avenue.

John Hatfield’s work in matching theory has facilitated the design of many real-world mechanisms, including FCC spectrum auctions, kidney paired donation, and the redesign of the U.S. Army’s branching mechanisms for assigning cadets. Hatfield also works at the intersection of the theory of industrial organization and the field of law and economics, which has advanced our understanding of anticompetitive practices in real estate agency and other markets.

In October 2023, a Missouri jury found that the National Association of Realtors and large real estate brokerages such as RE/MAX and Keller Williams “knowingly and voluntarily” worked together to keep real estate commissions high, resulting in a billion-dollar verdict. In the United States, real estate commissions comprise 5 to 6 percent of the purchase price of a home; in other countries, such as England, they only comprise one-and-a-half to two percent.In the U.S., real estate commissions for both the buyer’s and the seller’s agents are typically paid by the seller. The seller, upon listing the house for sale, offers a “cooperating commission” to the buyer agent representing the purchaser of the home.Our work shows that this has led to “steering.” Buyer agents steer clients to see homes offering higher commissions for the buyer agent, not necessarily the best homes for the buyer. This induces most sellers to all offer the same commission to buyers’ agents — 3 percent here in Austin. Sellers who offer a lower rate can expect less interest from homebuyers, as evidenced by fewer views on web portals such as Redfin. Their homes can then take 15 to 30 percent longer to sell and are more likely to not sell at all — a substantial risk for many families, who cannot afford to move until their old home is sold.Sellers thus feel compelled to offer high cooperating commissions to buyer agents to ensure that their home is seen by buyers — three quarters or more of sellers do this in the areas we study. And this keeps real estate commissions artificially high, costing a typical home seller thousands of dollars. And it leads to some sellers not moving at all, passing up on better opportunities for themselves and their families.The Department of Justice has suggested that we “decouple” the amount a buyer’s agent is paid from any decision by the seller. Instead, a buyer would negotiate directly with his agent over the agent’s compensation. Under that system, buyer agents would no longer have any reason to steer their clients.Unfortunately, the current settlement does not decouple buyer agent compensation and so far does not seem to be lowering agent commissions. Promoting real competition between agents in this market would drive down the cost of buying and selling a home and benefit consumers across America.

Read More:

[Iowa] - Et Tu, Agent? Commission-Based Steering in Residential Real Estate

SYSTEMATIC NATIONAL EVIDENCE OF STEERING BY REAL ESTATE AGENTS

[Wiley Online Library] - Collusion in Brokered Markets

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How can we transform cervical cancer screening for the better?

Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Malcolm Gillis university professor, professor of bioengineering and co-director of Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies, says it could only take an hour.

Rebecca Richards-Kortum is a biomedical engineer guided by the belief that all people deserve access to lifesaving technologies. She is known for improving access to lifesaving health technologies that address cancer, premature birth, sickle cell disease, and malaria. Technologies from her lab have been deployed to over 45 countries, providing a lifesaving impact to millions. Her lab’s current research includes developing systems for improving tumor removal accuracy, slide-free pathology, AI-assisted microendoscopy for early cancer detection, and HPV DNA nucleic acid test for cervical cancer screening.Richards-Kortum is the Rice University Malcolm Gillis University Professor of Bioengineering, Co-Director of the Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies, and Co-Chair of NEST360. Richards-Kortum was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow for her research in developing point-of-care devices for low-resource settings. She is one of five eminent U.S. scientists selected to serve the U.S. Department of State as a U.S. Science Envoy for Health Security. In 2023, Richards-Kortum was awarded the IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology.

Cervical cancer is one of the most preventable diseases in the world, yet it still claims more than 350,000 women’s lives every year. Most of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, where access to regular screening is limited.We wanted to change that. Our team, which includes researchers from Rice University, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and partners in Mozambique, set out to develop a simple, affordable test for human papillomavirus, or HPV, the virus responsible for nearly all cases of cervical cancer.What we created is a one-hour, low-cost HPV test that doesn’t require a specialized laboratory. That means women can be screened and treated during the same clinic visit—something global health experts say could save countless lives.Here’s how it works. The test uses a method called loop-mediated isothermal amplification, or LAMP, to detect HPV DNA. It runs at a single temperature and doesn’t need the complicated DNA extraction step most other tests require. A swab sample is added to the test solution, incubated for about 45 minutes in a portable heater, and then read by fluorescence.Our test detects three of the most dangerous HPV types—16, 18, and 45—which together cause about 75% of all cervical cancers. It costs less than $8 per test and can run on a battery-powered device, making it ideal for clinics without reliable electricity.In clinical trials, the test matched lab results 100% of the time in Houston and 93% in Mozambique.We’re now working to expand the test to cover more HPV types and to make it even easier to use in the field. Our goal is simple: a complete, field-ready kit that helps every woman, everywhere, access fast, accurate screening—and moves us closer to eliminating cervical cancer for good.

Read More:[Rice] - New one-hour, low-cost HPV test could transform cervical cancer screening in Africa and beyond

[Nature] - One-hour extraction-free loop-mediated isothermal amplification HPV DNA assay for point-of-care testing in Maputo, Mozambique

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Economics is everywhere, including art.

Alexandra Nica, director of the undergraduate program and professor of instruction in the department of economics at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa, takes a closer look.

Alexandra Nica is director of the undergraduate program and professor of instruction in the Department of Economics at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business. She earned her MA and PhD from the University of Iowa and her BA from the University of Transylvania in Romania.

Did Jackson Pollock ever think much about economics? Probably not, but economics students think about Jackson Pollock.

I teach the intermediate macroeconomics class at Tippie and not long ago I noticed that my students struggled to give concise analysis of graphs and data because they were unable to visualize what they looked like. I realized they needed to learn to slow down and look closer at details to help them make more sense of the whole.

I also knew that art was one tool I could use to help them. As a concert pianist myself, I know how art helps with visualization because art rewards those who looks closely at the details. So I brought my students to the university’s renowned Stanley Museum of Art, where docents helped them dive deep into some of the works in our extensive collection.

They closely examined paintings by Joan Miro and Katja Farin. They looked at sculpture from Elizabeth Catlett and pieces from the museum’s extensive collection of African art. They began to see things they didn’t expect and realized that close looking is as effective in finding meaning in one of Pollock’s abstract expressionist masterpieces as in a chart tracking US GDP.

The experience showed the value of creativity in moving past a basic reading and providing concise summaries, especially when looking at graphs. Students learned they can tease out meaning from economic data using an artist’s tools to see that things aren’t always as simple as they seem. As a result, they now write clearer paragraphs with better in-depth analysis than before, even when the graphs are more complicated. This will be important for their careers, when their bosses will expect a concise, three-sentence summary of what a visual says and what it actually means.

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