Science and Technology

Hardboiled Beltway insiders probably think they know all there is about just how "virtual" reality can get. But on July 12 on the third floor of the Cannon Building on Capitol Hill, members of Congress got the chance to truly experience virtual worlds, courtesy of a University at Buffalo exhibit on virtual reality.

The New York State Department of Education has approved the University at Buffalo's new bachelor of science degree in environmental engineering, the first and only one of its kind at a public institution in the state.

After years of limited access on the part of students, higher education in the Caribbean received a major boost this summer when the University at Buffalo put the region's first distance-learning WebBoard online at the University of the West Indies (UWI).

Withdrawal from cocaine is no picnic, but a study by a researcher at the University at Buffalo has shown that it may not involve the wrenching ups and downs and intense cravings that specialists in the field have considered the norm.

A researcher at the University at Buffalo has developed and patented a new hybrid glass material that could replace traditional silica materials for the analytical-separations columns that are ubiquitous throughout the chemical, pharmaceutical, environmental and biotech industries.

University at Buffalo researchers are developing a system that will allow physicians to use a new form of virtual reality to store information about what they feel during an exam. That information then will be accessible to the examining physician at a later time or to consulting physicians at another location, allowing them to experience the exam as though they had performed it themselves.

Deborah K. W. Walters, Ph.D., and Joseph A. Gardella, Jr., Ph.D., of the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) have been awarded a $150,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to develop a community-linked interdisciplinary research (CLIR) program for undergraduate students at UB.

An advanced-certificate program in computational science designed to train science-and-engineering graduate students at the University at Buffalo in scientific computing has been approved by the New York State Education Department and the Chancellor of the State University of New York.

There's a new invader in Lake Erie, though you wouldn't know it to look at it. It's a hybridized water flea, a result of an invader European species mating with the native species, and it may be replacing the native water-flea species in Lake Erie, according to a UB professor who has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study animal hybridization.

The American Society of Civil Engineers has chosen George C. Lee, Ph.D., Samuel P. Capen Professor of Engineering at the University at Buffalo and director of the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering (MCEER) at UB, to receive the prestigious Nathan M. Newmark Medal for 2000.