Science and Technology

University at Buffalo engineers have developed a one-step, low-cost method to fabricate a polymer with extraordinary properties: When viewed from a single perspective, the polymer is rainbow-colored, reflecting many different wavelengths of light.

University at Buffalo researchers are expressing concern about a new, under-recognized, much more potent variant of a common bacterium that has surfaced in the U.S.

Two University at Buffalo students know all about why your footfalls echo more loudly on bare floors than on those that are carpeted. They also know the melting point of nylon 6, the density of high-volume fly ash concrete, and the uses for methyl ethyl ketone peroxide. Correct answers to questions about these topics (and more like them) helped the two UB students place very highly in the 2011 Knovel University Challenge.

Following one of Earth's five greatest mass extinctions, tiny marine organisms called graptoloids did not begin to rapidly develop new physical traits until about 2 million years after competing species became extinct. This discovery, based on new research, challenges the widely held assumption that a period of explosive evolution quickly follows for survivors of mass extinctions.

Paper be damned. Two former servers from Western New York are spinning their experience waiting tables into a technology start-up that offers a digital solution for managing food and drink orders. Refulgent Software, based in the University at Buffalo's Technology Incubator, produces and markets "Ambur," an iPod and iPad app that serves as a restaurant point-of-service system.

Michel Bruneau, PhD, professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering in the University at Buffalo's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is the 2012 recipient of the prestigious American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) T.R. Higgins Lectureship Award.

Volcanologists now have their own online network: VHub.org, which promotes collaboration among volcano researchers and community partners by providing a place to share everything from eruption data to ash cloud simulations.

A University at Buffalo faculty member has anonymously donated $1 million to the university to establish a fund that supports commercializing the discoveries and inventions of his UB colleagues. The donation will establish the Bruce Holm Memorial Catalyst Fund, named for the UB senior vice provost who died last year and whom UB President Satish K. Tripathi described as "the exemplification of researcher, educator, collaborator and entrepreneur."

By tweaking the smallest of parts, a trio of University at Buffalo engineers is hoping to dramatically increase the amount of sunlight that solar cells convert into electricity.

A new building on the Quisqueya University (UniQ) campus in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, provides some of the most powerful evidence yet that Haiti's engineering community, with international assistance from the University at Buffalo and MCEER, is undergoing a dramatic transformation.