Science and Technology

Yves-Alain Bois, PhD, 2010 Clarkson Chair in Architecture in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, will present the 2010 Clarkson Lecture in Architecture April 7 at 5:30 p.m. in 301 Crosby Hall, UB South Campus.

Diébédo Francis Kéré, an award-winning architect from Burkina Faso whose practice is dedicated to sustainable architecture, will deliver the 2010 Birdair Lecture at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning March 26 at 5:30 p.m. in 301 Crosby Hall on UB's South Campus.

Since 2004, University at Buffalo anthropologist Ezra Zubrow has worked intensively with teams of scientists in the Arctic regions of St. James Bay, Quebec, and northern Finland, to understand how humans living 4,000 to 6,000 years ago reacted to climate changes. Their findings will tell governments, scientists and NGOs how relationships between human beings and their environments may change in decades to come as a result of global warming.

The University at Buffalo engineer who developed the world's first apparatus designed to realistically test how building contents, architectural components and equipment (called nonstructural components) fare during earthquakes will leave for Chile on March 5 on a week-long reconnaissance mission to see firsthand what kind of damage hospitals and tall, engineered buildings sustained during Saturday's powerful, 8.8 magnitude earthquake.

A collaboration between the Center for Robotic Surgery at Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the University at Buffalo's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has produced one of the world's first simulators that closely approximates the "touch and feel" of the da Vinci robotic surgical system.

Luis A. Colon, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry at the University at Buffalo, is receiving the 2009 AAAS Mentor Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

More than 55 percent of multiple sclerosis patients participating in the initial phase of the first randomized clinical study to determine if persons with MS exhibit narrowing of the extracranial veins, causing restriction of normal outflow of blood from the brain, were found to have the abnormality.

Diamonds and gold may make some hearts flutter on Valentine's Day, but in a University at Buffalo laboratory, silver nanoparticles are being designed to do just the opposite.

In the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, University at Buffalo geography students are participating in a global effort to enhance the international response and recovery effort by helping to assess damage, using images hosted by Google Earth and the Virtual Disaster Viewer, which shares imagery of disasters from various sources.

A memorial bench designed and built by students in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, will be presented at 8 p.m. tomorrow (Thursday, Feb. 4, 2010) to the Buffalo Fire Department in honor of firefighters Charles "Chip" McCarthy and Jonathan Croom who died Aug. 24 in a Genesee Street fire.