Science and Technology

Using customized nanoparticles that they developed, University at Buffalo scientists have for the first time delivered genes into the brains of living mice with an efficiency that is similar to, or better than, viral vectors and with no observable toxic effect, according to a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A $1 million unitrust from Erich Bloch, B.S. '52, who has named the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) as the remainder beneficiary, will support undergraduate fellowships and graduate assistantships for the school through the Erich Bloch Scholarship & Graduate Assistantship Fund.

The new season of MTV2's video game and music program, "Video Mods" is, in part, the result of an innovative partnership between IBC Digital, the Buffalo company that produces the "mods" and the University at Buffalo's supercomputing center.

A University at Buffalo scientist created a stir in 2003 when he announced a much faster, more precise and far less expensive method of obtaining nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data to map a protein's atomic structure. In the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Thomas A. Szyperski, Ph.D., UB professor of chemistry, and a team of structural genomics scientists present a paper on how they determined the structures of eight proteins in just 10-20 days per protein.

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.