Science and Technology

The University at Buffalo has earned full accreditation from the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AAHRPP), a highly prestigious, national organization that assures the ethics of research on human subjects.

President Barack Obama announced yesterday that Esther S. Takeuchi, Ph.D., Greatbatch Professor in Power Sources Research in the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has been awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest honor awarded in the U.S. for technological achievement.

Against the backdrop of last week's Congressional hearing into the future of forensic science, researchers from the University at Buffalo's Laboratory for Forensic Odontology Research in the School of Dental Medicine, have published a landmark paper on the controversial topic of bitemark analysis.

"Toward the Sentient City" is an exhibition two years in the making that originated among University at Buffalo architects and will give you a whiff of the future, with its smart dust, text messages to fish and devices that provide electricity then sort of "eat" the carbon dioxide it produces.

J. David Smith, Ph.D., a comparative psychologist at the University at Buffalo who has conducted extensive studies in animal cognition, says there is growing evidence that animals share functional parallels with human conscious metacognition -- that is, they may share humans' ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate their states of mind.

Driver education classes should be teaching young drivers that all kinds of mobile phones, both conventional and hands-free, are a dangerous distraction, says a University at Buffalo researcher, who studies driving behaviors.

"Frank Lloyd Wright's Buffalo Venture: From the Larkin Building to Broadacre City," is an exhibition focused on the context in which Buffalo became a locus for Wright's architectural activities in the first decades of the 20th century. It will be presented by the University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery Oct. 2 to Dec. 30.

It takes just seconds for tall buildings to collapse during powerful earthquakes. Knowing precisely what's happening in those seconds can help engineers design buildings that are less prone to sustaining that kind of damage. But the nature of collapse is not well understood. That's why researchers at the University at Buffalo and Japan's Kyoto University teamed up recently to try an innovative "hybrid" approach to testing that may provide a safer, far less expensive way to learn about how and why full-scale buildings collapse.

Chemists at the University at Buffalo have used rational drug design to synthesize small, cell-permeable molecules that are effective in vitro against two common types of myotonic muscular dystrophy, a result that has implications for potentially curing muscular dystrophy, as well as other diseases.

Couples struggling with fertility problems have a new option for assessing their ability to have a child with the start-up of a new Buffalo-based company called LifeCell Dx, Inc. (LCDX).