Science and Technology

Each year, American drivers waste an estimated 3.7 billion hours, or the equivalent of five days, sitting in traffic, burning 2.3 billion gallons of fuel. Students at the University at Buffalo will soon be learning how to reduce that waste, creating less congestion and cleaner air, thanks to an IBM grant to Adel Sadek, PhD, UB associate professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering.

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has selected Michel Bruneau, PhD, professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering at the University at Buffalo and former director and deputy director of UB's MCEER, as the recipient of the 2011 George Winter Award.

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has chosen Andrei M. Reinhorn, PhD, Clifford C. Furnas Professor of Structural Engineering at the University at Buffalo, to receive the 2011 Nathan M. Newmark Medal.

The iSciWNY workforce development program, created by the University at Buffalo's New York Center for Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences and Educational Opportunity Center (EOC), is collaborating with the West Seneca Central School District to create a first-of-its-kind academy that links high school students with potential employers in Western New York's growing life sciences industry.

Freshman architecture students from the University at Buffalo have designed and are building a 96-foot-long string of wooden micro-dwellings that will open to the public later this month at Griffis Sculpture Park. Assembly of "The Living Wall" will conclude the week of April 25. The UB School of Architecture and Planning is inviting the public as well as students, professors and critics to attend an opening reception and dedication ceremony for "The Living Wall" at 1 p.m. on April 29 at the main entrance of the Griffis Sculpture Park, 6902 Mill Valley Road, East Otto in Cattaraugus County.

Puneet Singla, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University at Buffalo, was recently chosen to receive a prestigious Air Force Office of Scientific Research award to develop more robust mathematical models to assess space situational awareness. The highly competitive Young Investigators Research Program award will fund Singla's research into "Information Collection and Fusion for Space Situational Awareness."

That's the mind-boggling concept at the heart of a theory that University at Buffalo physicist Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues proposed in 2010.

A new study from the University at Buffalo contradicts the dark flow theory, showing that exploding stars in different parts of the universe do not appear to be moving in sync. Working with data on 557 such stars, called supernovae, UB scientists deduced that while the supernovae closest to Earth all shared a common motion in one direction, supernovae further out were heading somewhere else. An article announcing the research results will appear in a forthcoming edition of the peer-reviewed Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

An electrical engineer at the University at Buffalo, who previously demonstrated experimentally the "rainbow trapping effect" -- a phenomenon that could boost optical data storage and communications -- is now working to capture all the colors of the rainbow.

New materials science research from the University at Buffalo could hasten the creation of "smart" windows that reflect heat from the sun on hot summer days but let in the heat in colder weather. The findings concern a unique class of synthetic chemical compounds that are transparent to infrared light at lower temperatures, but undergo a phase transition to begin reflecting infrared when they heat up past a certain point. An article detailing some of these discoveries appears today (April 7) on the cover of the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.