Social Sciences

It is now evident that the reports of child murder, rape, widespread looting, snipers and chaos resulting from the total breakdown of moral and legal order in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina were enormously exaggerated if true at all.

Men who smoke cigarettes may experience a significant decline in their capacity to father a child, research by a reproductive medicine specialist from the University at Buffalo has shown.

An addiction specialist at the University at Buffalo has received a $1.28 million grant from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to develop and test a new program designed to improve abstinence rates after alcohol detoxification.

The labels that teen-agers use to describe themselves and their peers provide an insight into their drug and alcohol use, according to a study at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions.

The desire to assign cosmic significance to the arrival of hurricanes Katrina and Rita is an example of humankind's ages-old need to find reason within chaos, according to University at Buffalo anthropologist Phillips Stevens Jr., Ph.D., a renowned expert on the origins, nature and meaning of cults, superstitions and cultural identities.

Effective mitigation of the drastic effects of extreme natural phenomena like hurricanes, floods, landslides and wildfires through integrated environmental management that includes the perspectives of geomorphologists and ecosystem scientists is the focus of the interdisciplinary 36th International Geomorphology Binghamton Symposium to be held Oct. 7-9 at the University at Buffalo.

Three short weeks after they fled New Orleans, many victims of Hurricane Katrina housed in shelters in Texas are having difficulties dealing emotionally with the disaster, particularly with another destructive hurricane headed toward the state where they took refuge, according to Nancy J. Smyth, Ph.D., associate professor and dean of social work at the University at Buffalo.

Aug. 29., the day that Hurricane Katrina barreled ashore on the Gulf Coast, also was the first day of class for Geology 428/528, "Preventing Geologic Disasters," at the University at Buffalo. Even though he had already prepared a semester's worth of historical examples, Michael F. Sheridan, Ph.D., UB professor of geology, decided that day to ditch much of it and to focus, instead, on Katrina as the harshest of case studies.

An innovative program that provides social services along with dental care to older adults treated in the dental clinics of the University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine has received the 2005 Geriatric Oral Health Care Award from the American Dental Association.

Neuroscientists at the University at Buffalo have shown in two recently published papers that destabilization of structures called microtubules, intracellular highways that transport receptors to their working sites in the brain, likely underlie many mental disorders and could be promising targets for intervention.