Ithaca rotary rally, grey skies, seret service resignation, Listeria , $455K awarded

Good morning☀️

We’re halfway through the week and I’m going to touch on some recent innovative inventions in New York later on in this newsletter.

If you have any Finger Lakes moments you’d like to share, send me your best photos and a short passage to JMack@gannett.com so I can share the love with other readers this Friday. Click here to sign up for more daily briefings from the Ithaca Journal.

Without further delay, here’s an update on the Ithaca Rotary club’s upcoming rally.

Ithaca Rotary rally coming August 11

The Rotary Rally begins at 1 p.m. on August 11 at the ReUse MegaCenter, and is open to the public. The club says on its website to “Look for balloons and banner,” as the registration table opens at 1 p.m.; all cars must be on the course when registration closes at 2 p.m.

Participants will follow clues in their cars along over 30 miles of country roads in and around Tompkins County, answering riddles, taking pictures, and picking up scavenger hunt items along the way.

The Rotary Rally will finish with the checkered flag at a “mystery” location for drinks, dinner and prizes including target donations to the winner's favorite local non-profit organizations .

Here’s some more of what you need to know today

• Skies looking strangely hazy?: Low-density smoke from the wildfires in Canada and the western United States covered Western and Central New York on Monday, with the smoke plume covering much of the East Coast from Massachusetts to Georgia. Track the latest wildfires and red flag warnings in the United States using a new dynamic map in this article .

• Trump assassination attempt pushes Secret Service Director to resign: Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned Tuesday after criticism from lawmakers regarding the July 13 incident, which she admitted, was the biggest security failure in decades for the agency.

• Listeria outbreak linked to deli meat occurred most in NY than any other state: People from the Midwest to the East Coast have reportedly become ill from listeria, a bacteria that causes potentially foodborne illness and is especially concerning for anyone pregnant, the CDC said.

New York nonprofit announces awards, including $65K to Cornell’s Biomedical Engineering Department

Cornell’s Biomedical Engineers, partnered with Anova Biomedical Inc., are receiving $65,000 to improve and scale up prototypes of their Elastomeric Arteriovenous Graft, a means of accessing a dialysis patient's blood for cleaning without the risks of traditional vascular access grafts.

About 800,000 patients in the U.S undergo dialysis in a given year.

New York non-profit FuzeHub, recently awarded seven collaborative projects through its Jeff Lawrence Innovation Fund , which consists of more than $1 million annually.

As part of the fund, FuzeHub offers Manufacturing Grants to New York State not-for-profit organizations, including higher education institutions, that propose innovative projects in partnership with a New York State small to medium-sized manufacturer.

“The ‘Anova graft’ will be the first vascular access to harness the body’s healing potential to transform from a synthetic implant to a fully biological conduit to revolutionize dialysis access for millions of patients,” FuzeHub said in a statement on the Cornell BioMed project, essentially explaining that Cornell is working toward creating the blueprints of new blood vessels in dialysis patients that dissipate and are absorbed naturally into the body after blood vessels are constructed by the body, rather than implanting teflon tubing to substitute as a vessel.

Fuzehub’s Commercialization Competition is coming up, with New York State companies applying now to compete for the chance for $150,000.

Learn more about the manufacturing grants and projects they support in this video from FuzeHub here.

Cornell doesn't just study human life. Click here to learn about their recent opening of a methane measurement chamber in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

That’s about all I’ve got for you today but check your inbox tomorrow for more updates and feel free to reach out to me at jmack@gannett.com regarding this newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Ithaca Journal: Ithaca rotary rally, grey skies, seret service resignation, Listeria , $455K awarded