Science and Technology

Have you ever wondered what the wheelchair symbol that you see on parking spaces and public bathroom doors actually means? That symbol is the International Symbol of Accessibility, and the Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access (IDEA Center), a major international research center in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, is working to improve the design and its world-wide comprehension and recognition.

It's only fitting that the world's greatest rock 'n' roll group has a supercomputer named after it. "U2" has been selected by the University at Buffalo's Center for Computational Research (CCR) as the name of its newest and most powerful supercomputer, a 1,668-processor Dell high-performance cluster that will be used to support university research ranging from genomics, to groundwater modeling to the monitoring of human-rights abuses.

In response to the soaring demand for computational power by the hundreds of researchers who depend on it, the University at Buffalo has expanded the computing capacity of the Center for Computational Research in its New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences with the installation of a new Dell high-performance computing cluster.

For any institution that is home to even a single winner in the international "protein structure Olympics," winning a top spot means automatic bragging rights. This year, three of the 17 winning predictor teams in the Sixth Community Wide Experiment on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP), were from the University at Buffalo.

Jim D. Atwood, professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry in the University at Buffalo's College of Arts and Sciences, has received the 2005 Jacob F. Schoellkopf Medal recognizing achievement in chemical technology.

Size doesn't matter, at least not the size of the eyespots on a male butterfly's wings when female butterflies consider potential mates. Instead, females are attracted to the "sparkle" created by the ultraviolet reflectivity of the pupils, the white circles at the center of eyespots, according to new research from University at Buffalo biologists.

The streams of Western New York are a workshop this summer for biologists, ecologists, engineers and environmental planners who want to learn techniques for restoring inland waterways to their natural state.

IT Fair 2005, focusing on the myriad new technologies and innovations that UB faculty, staff and students have developed to meet challenges ranging from cyber security to online instruction, will be held June 28 and 29 in the Center for the Arts on the UB North Campus.

The University at Buffalo's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the schools of engineering at the State University of New York (SUNY) university centers at Stony Brook and Binghamton together are creating the world's first fully online bachelor's-degree program in electrical engineering.

By harnessing the power of computational techniques initially developed on academic supercomputers, urban planners, engineers and even litigators are creating vivid animations of urban life to solve problems ranging from urban sprawl to traffic jams to site selection.