Health and Medicine

Neuroscientists from the University at Buffalo have described for the first time how rotenone, an environmental toxin linked specifically to Parkinson's disease, selectively destroys the neurons that produce dopamine, the neurotransmitter critical to body movement and muscle control.

Thanks to creative designers and engineers, as well as inventors with disabilities determined to live independently or simply to have fun, devices that make nearly any activity of daily living easier now are available on the market. Many of these devices, including those that were developed at the University at Buffalo's Center for Assistive Technology (CAT), are on display in a model home newly installed in the Western New York Independent Living Project, Inc.

Heroin addicts trying to kick the habit often profoundly grieve their lost "relationship" with the needles they use to inject the drug, according to a new study by a University at Buffalo doctoral student.

In a scholarly assessment of the 2004 presidential election, University at Buffalo political science professor and election forecaster James E. Campbell, Ph.D., makes several observations about what trends may influence the 2008 contest.

The first comprehensive study of the location of unemployed men in metropolitan areas, has found that jobless black men occupy a uniquely disadvantageous "ecological niche" that severely limits their potential for future employment.

Before you slip into those jeans made in Swaziland, consider that working conditions in overseas sweatshops have not only helped destroy the U.S. garment industry, but have turned textile workers overseas into the "new slaves" of globalized industrialism.

The late Henry A. Panasci, Jr., a University at Buffalo graduate who co-founded the Fay's drugstore chain, then turned it into a multifaceted billion-dollar corporation, will receive an honorary doctoral degree from the UB School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences during its annual white coat ceremony to be held at 1 p.m. on Aug. 25.

The School of Nursing at the University at Buffalo will incorporate specialized training in addictive disorders and mental-health conditions into its family nurse practitioner program this fall, making it one of the first nursing schools to offer such training for primary-care nurses.

Gail Seigel, Ph.D., assistant professor of ophthalmology and physiology and biophysics in the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, has received a $50,000 Sybil B. Harrington Scholar Award from Research to Prevent Blindness to support her research into diseases of the eye.

A team from the UB School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences is one of three finalists in the National Community Pharmacists Association's Pruitt-Schutte Student Business Plan Competition.