Environment and Sustainability

Experts in environmental health from around the globe will convene in Buffalo for 10 days in August to present the latest research in the field and to assess the worldwide disease burden caused by environmental problems.

Employees should be skeptical of any report boasting that their health as a group is better than that of the general population, an occupational epidemiologist at the University at Buffalo warns. Such a comparison always will make the group and the company look good, said Gregg S. Wilkinson, Ph.D., a professor in the UB Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, because of an innate bias called the "healthy worker effect."

Women who regularly eat fish from Lake Ontario, known to be contaminated with PCBs and other hormone-disrupting chemicals, may be about 25 percent less likely to become pregnant than women who do not, researchers from the University at Buffalo have found.

The tragic aspects of Love Canal are always at the forefront of our memory of that disaster, but a newly-opened collection of archival materials provides conclusive evidence that what happened in that community should be a source of enormous pride for the Western New York region.

A researcher at the University at Buffalo has developed and patented a new hybrid glass material that could replace traditional silica materials for the analytical-separations columns that are ubiquitous throughout the chemical, pharmaceutical, environmental and biotech industries.

There's a new invader in Lake Erie, though you wouldn't know it to look at it. It's a hybridized water flea, a result of an invader European species mating with the native species, and it may be replacing the native water-flea species in Lake Erie, according to a UB professor who has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study animal hybridization.

The cleanest, meanest, most economical snowmobile machine isn't yet available in a store near you. It's at the University at Buffalo, thanks to a team of engineering students who recently beat competitors from six other schools at the Inaugural Clean Snowmobile Challenge held in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Armed with small chemical sensors, knowledge of analytical chemistry techniques and serious dedication, undergraduate students in chemistry Professor Joseph A. Gardella's class at the University at Buffalo are on a mission: They are using science and communication skills to help bridge the gap between government and residents of a Buffalo subdivision that is a contaminated former brownfield.

Was there ever life on Mars? That question may one day be answered in part by research now being conducted by a University at Buffalo geologist who studies volcanoes on earth.

Mention New York State's Finger Lakes region or its Southern Tier, and most people don't automatically think of earthquake country. But these upstate areas may be about to gain a reputation for greater seismic potential, according to recent research by a team of University at Buffalo geologists.