Health and Medicine

A project led by a University at Buffalo geologist involving the topographic mapper being flown by the space shuttle Endeavour could help to develop a new and far more accurate way to map features of shorelines and aid scientists in determining past and future volcanic and seismic activity in an area.

Researchers at the University at Buffalo, in the Feb. 17 issue of Nature, report a new way to study the dynamics of proteins as they pass through the transition state between inactive and active.

When members of the University at Buffalo's School of Dental Medicine's Class of 2004 arrive on campus this August, they will purchase no textbooks, no laboratory manuals, no workbooks. They will pick up no course outlines or lists of recommended reading. They will receive instead one inauspicious-looking compact disc, which will contain the full content of 90 textbooks in 28 topic and the curriculum for all four years of dental school, including course syllabi, class notes, laboratory manuals and lecture slides.

Jo Freudenheim, Ph.D., professor of social and preventive medicine at the University at Buffalo, is leading a project that will map the early-childhood residences of a group of women, the proximity of their homes to sites that may have been environmentally hazardous, and compare this data to the women with and without breast cancer to see if there is an association.

The School of Nursing will offer three new advanced certificate programs beginning this summer and fall.

Scientists from the University at Buffalo report that they have developed and patented a simple blood test that can measure accumulated cell damage from ionizing radiation -- one of the major causes of cancer -- long before any physical signs are evident.

The first major national conference held to explore the lives, strengths, problems and needs of young urban women will be held in Buffalo April 14-15. The keynote speaker will be Lani Guinier, professor of law at Harvard University.

Hospitals looking to join a health-care network can expect to attain operating margins 12 percent higher if they join a network with financial risk-sharing arrangements rather than a network without such arrangements, a UB study of hospitals in New York State has shown.

Despite the terror of "Jim Crow" and the backlash of white plantation owners, African Americans had managed to accumulate nearly 15 million acres of land by 1910. Today, that number has declined to less than 1 million acres. Although their numbers have decreased significantly, there are still a handful of black farmers who continue to hold onto their family farms.

When they first arrive on campus, college freshmen are deluged with orientation packets and publications. But after the first few weeks, that deluge dries up, often leaving students' questions unanswered. The University at Buffalo has figured out how to keep information flowing to freshmen -- but not flooding them -- through the development of MyUB, an online portal for freshmen that actually grows with the student.