Health and Medicine

University at Buffalo biophysicists studying the motility of cells have shown that simple cells react in less than a millisecond to changes in membrane voltage, a property scientists have thought was confined to highly specialized cells such as the cochlear outer hair cells responsible for hearing.

Women with a history of problem drinking exhibited significant increases in abstinence and light-drinking days, and decreases in heavy drinking, after participating in a 10-week program at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions.

The image of an airplane flying into the second tower of the World Trade Center and exploding in flames, played over and over on television following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, will remain in America's collective consciousness for a long time. For all, that image forever will represent a national tragedy. But for some, there will be a more profound personal effect, according to a University at Buffalo expert in psychological trauma.

The World Trade Center twin towers should be rebuilt as a "focal sign for American resolve, for the ability of a democratic society to suffer injury and heal," according to an urban sociologist at the University at Buffalo.

The proposed federal takeover of airport security ultimately could permit longer and more careful screening of passengers and their baggage, according to a University at Buffalo professor who serves on a Federal Aviation Administration panel that studies research and development needs in aviation security.

A review and analysis of 26 studies of physical activity levels of children, completed by University at Buffalo researchers, has found that children accumulate more physical activity than previously thought.

A major emphasis on improving intelligence-gathering -- including having the FBI and CIA work in tandem -- must be a key piece of the U.S. retaliation against terrorists for last week's attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, according to a University at Buffalo professor who is a former editor of the journal Armed Forces & Society. "If President Bush looks only to the military, which seems to be both his initial inclination, and what the American public wants him to do, he will get incomplete and misleading information about what's important," said Claude E. Welch, Jr., Ph.D., SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the UB Department of Political Science.

Deborah Waldrop, Ph.D., University at Buffalo assistant professor of social work, was social work director at Oklahoma City's St. Anthony Hospital on April 19, 1995, when a truck bomb exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Located roughly five blocks from the disaster, St. Anthony was on the front line of rescue efforts and Waldrop learned first-hand the devastating impact such a tragedy has on rescue workers responding to disasters.

Americans' "general naivete" regarding the beliefs and assumptions of religions other than their own is hampering their ability to understand discussions about those suspected of being responsible for last week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, according to Phillips Stevens, Jr. Stevens, associate professor of anthropology at the University at Buffalo and nationally-recognized expert in the anthropology of religion, says the lack of knowledge is particularly acute when it comes to fundamentalist religious groups of the Middle East.

Pamela S. Hinds, Ph.D., director of nursing research at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis and a specialist in end-of-life decision-making for children and adolescents, will present the fifth annual Bonnie Bullough Lecture, to be held at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 4 in the Center for Tomorrow on the North (Amherst) Campus.