Science and Technology

Funded by the National Science Foundation, University at Buffalo researchers are taking a major step toward boosting online access to documents written in ancient Sanskrit, modern Hindi and dozens of Indian and South Asian languages that are based on the beautiful, intricate symbols of the Devanagari script.

When engineers conduct research on groundwater, the water that flows beneath Earth's surface, they usually think of "large-scale" as one watershed -- an area of land where all of the water on it or under it drains into the same place, such as a lake and its tributaries. Using a 300-node Dell high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) in the Center for Computational Research (CCR) at the University at Buffalo, researcjers are working to turn that definition on its head.

Today's most exciting science is being done at the interfaces of established disciplines, but sometimes the difficulties of communicating across those disciplines thwarts the collaborations that are so crucial to success in these new fields. The publication of "Introduction to Biophotonics" by Paras Prasad, Ph.D., provides researchers from a broad range of backgrounds with one, user-friendly foundation for advancing the science of biophotonics.

News of Saturday's space shuttle tragedy was especially upsetting to students who belong to the University at Buffalo's chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a nationwide association of students and professionals with career interests in space flight and exploration.

A simpler and more reliable manufacturing method has allowed two materials researchers from the University at Buffalo to produce nanoscale magnetic sensors that could increase the storage capacity of hard disk drives by a factor of 1,000.

The difference in weight between two passenger vehicles, it turns out, is not the only "killer" factor in a head-on collision. Researchers in the University at Buffalo's Center for Transportation Injury Research have found that even when a passenger car weighs more than an SUV, passengers in the car remain at higher risk of dying in a head-on collision than passengers in the SUV.

The University at Buffalo's Poetry/Rare Books Collection has received the first grant to be awarded to the university from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has given $170,000 to support development of an online scholarly edition of James Joyce's novel "Ulysses."

University at Buffalo scientists have discovered a promising new drug lead that works by inhibiting the sophisticated bacterial communication system called quorum sensing.

Research by a University at Buffalo planetary geologist suggests that generally accepted estimates about the geologic age of surfaces on Mars -- which influence theories about its history and whether or not it once sustained life -- could be way off.

As the world moves into the information age, the international telecommunications network has become denser, more centralized and more highly integrated -- signs that point to globalization and an increase in Western cultural and economic influence. A study by an internationally recognized communication expert at the University at Buffalo, however, suggests that the decades-long tendency toward Internet dominance by the United States, Canada and Western Europe may be changing as the regions of the world begin to cluster into mutual-interest groups.