Science and Technology

Three 1999 graduates of the UB School of Architecture and Planning are turning heads in Buffalo City Hall with their resourceful building designs and progressive plans to create a new district in an underutilized area of South Buffalo.

Male and female black-throated blue warblers, a bird species common in the northeast U.S., have a reputation for practicing monogamy and sharing in the raising of their young. However, the mere presence of a fertile female in the nest next door can be enough to cause a male to stray, leaving his female mate unguarded, according to a paper scheduled for publication in the July issue of Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists' Union, authored by a doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo and an assistant professor of biological sciences.

Although they won't be making movies, a select group of local high-school students attending a summer program at the University at Buffalo Center for Computational Research will be doing their homework on an SGI, Inc. Origin2000 Server, similar to the one used in the creation of "Toy Story" and "Antz."

The Center for Computational Research at the University at Buffalo and Sun Microsystems have launched a research partnership aimed at developing a network of high-end workstations that will deliver the power of a supercomputer at a fraction of the cost.

You think finding a place to park down here is hard. Try finding a place to land on Mars. That's what a group of leading planetary geologists tried to decide June 22-23 when they met at the University at Buffalo for the Mars Surveyor 2001 Landing Site Workshop.

What does Niagara Falls have in common with the planet Mars? Quite a lot, geologically speaking. In fact, on June 25-26, a group of leading planetary geologists will visit Buffalo and Niagara Falls to better understand the geology of Mars.

One aspect of the rich and complex history of human knowledge -- its recording, transmission and preservation -- has been altered irrevocably by the advancement of information technology. But the replacement of a libraries' millions of bound volumes by electronic versions is no more than a twinkle in the eye of someone who is not a librarian, University at Buffalo librarians say.

"Friends don't let friends -- or their spouses or children -- drive unbelted." That should be the theme of a public-education campaign aimed at increasing seatbelt use, according to an industrial engineer who recently completed a study on the subject while pursuing graduate work at the University at Buffalo.

In our collective exuberance over the astonishing explosion in the field of information technology during the past two decades, we may overlook something just as important -- the investigation of its meaning. This observation by the faculty and graduate students who comprise the University at Buffalo's Critical and Cultural Studies in Information Technologies group has led to the development of a new array of courses exploring the forces shaping technology and its uses that is among the first of its kind in the nation.

A Chemical Engineering Symposium in honor of Eli Ruckenstein, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the University at Buffalo Department of Chemical Engineering and 1998 winner of the prestigious National Medal of Science, will be held June 18-19 at UB.