Science and Technology

Noted structural engineer Jane Wernick, best known in the United States for the Millennium Wheel -- the 40-story Ferris wheel that is not only an engineering feat of no small proportions, but a new landmark on the London skyline -- will speak at the University at Buffalo on April 12 as part of the 2003-04 lecture series sponsored by the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning.

Switzerland is widely recognized as one of today's most important centers of modern architectural thought and Peter Zumthor, the 2004 Will and Nan Clarkson Visiting Chair in Architecture at the University at Buffalo, has produced works that are among his nation's major achievements.

Sarah Goldhagen, author of an influential and myth-busting book on Louis Kahn, one of the most important architects to emerge in the decades after World War II, will present the final talk in the 2003-04 Lecture Series of the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning.

It's bad enough that fossils, buried deep in layers of rock for thousands or millions of years, may be damaged or missing pieces, but what really challenges paleontologists, according to University at Buffalo researchers, is the amount of deformation that most fossils exhibit. That's why a UB researcher and her colleagues are working on a computational method to morph fossils back to their original shapes by calculating and excising the deformation.

Lions may get all the good press about being "king of the jungle," but the modern animal that has no predators in the wild, except for man, is the rhinoceros and that probably was the case as long as nine million years ago, recent University at Buffalo research demonstrates.

"Self-Googling" -- searching for your own name on the popular Google search engine -- may seem like an innocuous act of vanity, but a University at Buffalo communications professor recommends it as a shrewd form of "personal brand management" in the digital age.

Donald J. Jacobs, founder and director of Center for Applied Technologies in Education at the University at Buffalo and chair of the education policy group Education Innovation Consortium, has been appointed to co-chair the University of the State of New York (USNY) Technology Policy and Practices Council.

"Brain exercises" originally developed for the rehabilitation of head-injury patients improve the cognitive functioning of individuals in substance-abuse treatment and their commitment to the treatment program, according to research conducted at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions (RIA).

Two members of a University at Buffalo research team that is developing the first interactive, computational tool kit designed to model the behavior of ancient beasts have had a chance to explore the entertainment value of their work for the Discovery Channel's new "Animal Face-Off" series.

Investigations into lava lakes on the surface of Io, the intensely volcanic moon that orbits Jupiter, may provide clues to what Earth looked like in its earliest phases, according to researchers at the University at Buffalo and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.