As departments across the University make cuts to their annual budgets to offset a $200 million budget shortfall, Weill Cornell Medical College is reaching deep into its pockets to scrounge more than $2.6 million — a sum that the University truly does not have to spare.

This exorbitant payment will be handed over to the U.S. government in order to resolve charges brought against the medical college for filing fraudulent claims in order to secure millions of federal research money from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense. Unfortunately, this incident was not an isolated one for Cornell. The University has spent millions in the past to cover up similar charges of fraud surrounding research funding.

Weill Cornell Medical College has agreed to pay over $2.6 million to settle civil charges that Cornell defrauded the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense as it sought more than $14 million in federal research grants, Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin announced earlier this month.

The settlement resolves the charges that the government had brought against Cornell for filing false claims for federal research grant money. Cornell knowingly made false records and false statements in order to get fraudulent claims paid or approved by the federal government in connection with NIH and Department of Defense grants, according to the government’s complaint.

A new study by researchers in the Department of Public Health at Weill Cornell Medical College found that one in seven U.S. teens are Vitamin D deficient.

“Vitamin D is necessary for optimal calcium absorption,” stated Prof. Sandy Saintonge, clinical pediatrics and clinical public health, who performed the study alongside Prof. Heejung Bang, biostatistics and epidemiology, and Prof. Linda M. Gerber, epidemiology and ethnic disparities in disease outcomes, at Weill Cornell Medical College’s Department of Public Health .

Congress passed the $409.6 billion omnibus appropriations bill last night, approving a number of earmarked spending projects that will be attached to next year’s fiscal budget. The bill — which President Barack Obama is expected to sign into law today, according to Politico — allocates a number of earmarks for Cornell research.

Among them, Cornell hopes receive $2.2 million to begin construction on a Grape Genetics Research Center in Geneva. As of last night, however, the electronic system that charts which projects are included in the bill had not been updated, according to Stephen Johnson, Cornell’s vice president for government and community relations.

“We’re hopeful that [the projects] are in there, but reluctant to say until we can verify,” he said.

Last week, lawmakers gathered in Albany to meet with New York Gov. David Patterson in response to his new budget that failed to include funding for research programs that were funded last year. One noticeable absence was $450,000 in funding towards Cornell’s Program on Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors. According to Newsday, without these same funds that the program received last year, the researchers would be forced to discontinue their work. The proposal also did not include the $300,000 for a hotline for breast cancer patients and their families based out of Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y.

Although Cornell’s extensive review of its budget includes cuts in all academic colleges, the leaders of Cornell’s research programs feel confident that the research programs will continue to expand, and in the long-run, maintain Cornell’s position as one of the top research institutions in the world.

In the last decade, Cornell has worked to improve its research programs. Today, the University sponsors over 100 interdisciplinary institutes located in Ithaca, New York State, and abroad. However, with the University’s proposed budget cuts, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, which runs most of these institutes and programs, will be tested to maintain the high quality of research at Cornell.

About $6 billion is spent yearly by the U.S. government to subsidize corn ethanol. Around 1700 gallons of water are consumed for every gallon of corn ethanol produced. Corn is the number one cause of soil erosion in the United States and its overdependence on nitrogenous fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides is the prime reason of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet, corn ethanol produces only 1.3 percent of nation’s total oil consumption, which, according to Prof. David Pimentel, entomology, defeats the purpose of energy sustainability.

Have you ever wandered through the aisles of a grocery store and noticed the variety of peppers available — everything from sweet bell peppers to spicy hot jalapeño peppers? Until recently, much of that variety has been exaggerated and poorly understood. But this is due to change, as Prof. Steven Tanksley, plant breeding and genetics, and his collaborators at DNA LandMarks publish the first completed pepper genome sequence online.

Tanksley and DNA LandMarks — a genomics unit of the Plant Science division of the BASF Group — started their collaboration five years ago when DNA LandMarks provided Tanksley with its private library of pepper genetic markers.

Scientists have recently discovered one of the largest single-celled organisms in the seafloor of the Bahamas. Why should you care? Because it's providing new insights into evolutionary history.

The creature is called Gromia sphaerica, a distant relative of the amoeba. It is only one cell and yet it's the size of a grape. It looks like a mud-covered blob or, as the researchers termed it, a "doo-doo ball." They move by rolling about on the ocean floor.

When the weather drops and the lights go up, it’s a sign that Christmas is around the corner. But those engaging in the holiday light tradition should worry about more than just watching where they step while scaling the roof to hang the season emblems. According to one Cornell researcher, many light sets contain high levels of lead.

Prof. Joseph Laquatra, design and environmental analysis, headed the study, which found that some lead levels in Christmas light sets exceed limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development on floors and windowsills.