Environment and Sustainability

Lights are shining more brightly on the University at Buffalo's North (Amherst) Campus this winter because the university has swapped some conventional lamps for LEDs, light-emitting diodes.

Snow that blows and drifts across roadways has long troubled road maintenance crews and commuters alike, creating treacherous driving conditions and requiring additional maintenance resources to mitigate the problem. Now, a University at Buffalo engineer has led the development of "SnowMan," a user-friendly, desktop software package that puts cost-effective solutions to the snow drift problem at the fingertips of highway designers and road maintenance personnel.

Starting this week, students in three dining centers on the University at Buffalo North (Amherst) Campus will be carrying individual plates -- not trays -- to their tables as part of UB's effort to go "trayless."

In the world of supercomputers, practical considerations like energy consumption have traditionally been overshadowed by the emphasis on high performance. But as energy costs have increased, computational scientists at the University at Buffalo's Center for Computational Research (CCR) have found a way to do more cutting-edge science while consuming less power.

A new transportation research specialization at the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences will provide New York State's government agencies and municipalities with access to innovative technologies and systems that address critical transportation issues facing the region and the nation.

In less than a year, the University at Buffalo -- along with hundreds of other colleges and universities nationwide -- will publicly release an institutional action plan describing how UB will go "climate-neutral," reducing or offsetting all of its greenhouse gas emissions. Development and release of the plan is required of all signatories of the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, which UB President John B. Simpson signed in March 2007.

People who live in flood-prone areas naturally aren't thrilled about the uncertainty they must cope with each hurricane season, but research conducted by a University at Buffalo engineer is based on the idea that a better understanding of this uncertainty is key to helping mitigate damage from floods.

Thirty years after a federal emergency was declared at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, Western New York still grapples with an environmental burden from inherited and ongoing pollution, according to the Regional Institute's latest policy brief, "Thirty Years from Love Canal."

University at Buffalo architect Annette LeCuyer's recent research is on a remarkable material that is changing the way architects and engineers think about building performance. The material, ETFE, is being showcased at the Beijing Olympics as the material used to construct the National Aquatics Center.

Bloodsucking pests like bat fleas and bat flies may not sound very appealing to the rest of us, but to University at Buffalo biologist Katharina Dittmar de la Cruz, Ph.D., they are among the most successful creatures evolution has ever produced.