Health and Medicine

Appearances by a prominent director and an emerging director -- each of whom will introduce her film -- will be among the highlights of the eighth annual University at Buffalo Women's Film Festival, which will run on Thursdays from Feb. 5 through March 11 in the Market Arcade Film & Arts Centre, 639 Main St.

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, newly appointed Julian Park Chair in the Humanities in the Department of Comparative Literature in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, will discuss feminist theory and the militant suffrage movement at the annual UB Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender (IREWG) Distinguished Faculty Lecture.

Drivers, when you fasten your seat belt, make sure the person sitting behind you buckles up, too. It could save your life, as well as your passenger's. That's the message from research conducted by investigators at the Center for Transportation Injury Research (CenTIR), affiliated with the University of Buffalo (UB) and the Calspan UB Research Center.

Can the presence of Fido or Fluffy calm an owner's stress, as some studies have suggested? Or is the science as fuzzy as Fifi's coat? A research scientist at the University at Buffalo, reviewed the scientific evidence to date relating to pets and cardiovascular responses. Her conclusion? Your beloved cat or dog can have a positive effect on your cardiovascular health, but don't stop taking your heart medicine.

The next time you're about to pop a chunk of moldy Gorgonzola, lamb's lung, aged beef or urine-scented kidney into your mouth, consider its meaning. "Part of the experience of this sort of meal," says Carolyn Korsmeyer, professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo, "involves an awareness, however underground, of the presence of death amid the continuance of one's own life."

Just as all fats are not "bad," it's wrong to demonize all carbohydrates and to think of foods high in carbohydrates as "bad" and those low in carbohydrates as "good," according to an assistant professor of nutrition in the School of Public Health and Health Professions at the University at Buffalo.

Women tend to adapt to their husband's drinking behavior during the first year of marriage, with his drinking behavior influencing who they choose as friends and the role of drinking in their social life, according to research conducted at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions.

A standard textbook for primary or secondary school students is a robust learning tool rich with photographs, illustrations, charts, maps: visual images that bring the words to life. Textbooks for blind or visually impaired students are considerably less dynamic. But the learning status quo for these students may be changing as the result of a project completed by assistive technology experts at the University at Buffalo.

Six hundred Marines at Camp Pendleton in California will undergo two weeks of war games in the coming months armed with a new weapon: a drug designed to protect their hearing from the destructive decibels of battle, thanks to researchers at the University at Buffalo's Center for Hearing and Deafness.

A series of studies led by a University at Buffalo psychologist involving a group of Rhesus monkeys and a bottlenose dolphin suggest that some animals have functional features of, or parallels to, human conscious metacognition.