On June 6-8, faculty and students of the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB and the MSU College of Human Medicine will gather for Remembrance Conference 2025 at UB, the third time the schools are hosting this exchange. 

A professor at Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine, Department of Disaster and Emergency Medicine, and director of the Emergency and Critical Care Center at Kobe University Hospital, KOTANI Joji was a medical professional when the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake struck in January 1995 and the JR Fukuchiyama Line derailment happened in April 2005. We asked him how it was at the time and what lessons have been learned.

An unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, and smoking – considered to be a relatively recent societal curse – are all risk factors to heart disease. But if that is the case, did heart disease exist thousands of years ago? Renowned UTHealth Houston cardiologist Jagat Narula, MD, PhD, discussed what examining 4,000-year-old mummies and living hunter-gatherer tribes suggests about the basis of heart disease and whether we could eliminate it in our lifetime.

The National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), the Ministry of the Environment of Japan (MOE), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have been jointly promoting the development and operation of satellites to monitor the concentrations of greenhouse gases (GOSAT Series). Observations by the “IBUKI” (GOSAT) satellite, the first satellite in the GOSAT Series, have revealed that the annual increase of the whole-atmosphere mean concentration of carbon dioxide (i.e., average concentration throughout Earth’s atmosphere) from 2023 to 2024 was 3.5 ppm, the largest annual increase since GOSAT began providing annual increase data in 2011.

Pamela McElwee, a Rutgers University professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, has spent the last 25 years studying human adaptation to global environmental change. Recently, as co-chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), McElwee oversaw the culmination and global adoption of the Nexus Assessment Report. McElwee discusses her experience during the report’s finalization and her hopes for its impact.

Frequent explosions plagued the U.S. grain industry until the Occupational Safety and Health Administration introduced new grain-handling standards in 1988. The number of explosions soon dropped.

Still, grain handling and processing facilities in the U.S. have experienced a 10-year average of 8.4 incidents annually, said Kingsly Ambrose, professor of agricultural and biological engineering. During the last decade these incidents have led to dozens of injuries and fatalities, millions of dollars in damage, and operational downtime.

In May 2024, Sandia National Laboratories became the first facility within the nuclear security enterprise to provide its employees with access to this powerful new tool with SandiaAI Chat, enabling them to ask sensitive unclassified questions.

Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has achieved significant milestones at the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA-24), the highest decision-making body for telecommunications standardization, by securing six leadership positions.