Research: Personalized Heating System Helps with Weight Loss

Research:Personalized Heating System Helps with Weight LossKen McLeod, professor of bioengineering at Binghamton University, has made a practice of thinking outside the box.  Most recently he’s put his innovative mindset on the problem of obesity—using a heater.

McLeod started researching body weight when his wife, a superintendent of schools, was mandated with providing obesity reports on students based on body mass index, including the entire football squad. McLeod came to the conclusion that the body is not trying to maintain energy balance — calories in versus calories out — but heat balance. Indeed, body temperature is tightly regulated and rarely varies by more than a few degrees.

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For this Alum, it’s all about the Apps

Watson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences alumnus Ankesh AroraAnkesh Arora ’09, MS ’11, was nurturing a startup in Binghamton — providing marketing strategies for businesses in college towns — when a new opportunity caught the entrepreneur’s eye.

That’s how his current venture, Mobile Universal, got started. Arora and Zia Siddiqui are co-founders of the company that makes custom apps for businesses such as restaurants, hotels and schools. It has clients in New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, California, Europe and South America.

“We had to completely stop the old business and focus on apps because there was such a narrow window for apps,” Arora says. “If we had gotten into this venture two or three months later, we would have missed our opportunity.”

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Recent Graduate Receives Gates Cambridge Scholarship

Natalia Chapovalova, an undergraduate and Harpur FellowNatalia Chapovalova has become the first Binghamton University student to receive a prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Chapovalova, who graduated in December 2012 with a degree in psychology, is one of only 39 U.S. scholars chosen for the 2013-14 academic year. She also is one of two students from New York schools to earn the scholarship (the other recipient is from New York University). She will pursue a PhD in polar studies at Cambridge.

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The Binghamton Buzz: Baxter the Bearcat

Everyone loves SUNY mascots, as we witnessed during the first SUNY Mascot Madness tournament. Included in this group is Binghamton‘s own Baxter the Bearcat. In this segment of The Binghamton Buzz, the university’s student-run video series, students were asked the question, “What would you do with Baxter for a day?”

Watch the video after the jump to see the responses.

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In the Company of Crows

Crows flying and Anne Clark of Binghamton UniversityTo the uninitiated, the birds all look the same — shimmering black feathers, with eyes, beaks and feet to match. They sound the same, too, their calls collapsing into cacophony as they rise and fall on the wing.

Not so for behavioral ecologist Anne Clark. Binoculars at the ready, the Binghamton University associate professor of biological sciences sees enough intrigue and drama among a murder of crows to one day fill a novel. There is the peanut hound abandoning her nest for a treat, the devoted father driven from home in his dotage — by his sons — and the orphaned juveniles insinuating themselves into a new family. Hear the alarm call? The territorial declaration?

Clark has devoted the past decade of her research career to deciphering the biological and social relationships among a population of some 2,000 American crows in Ithaca, N.Y. “I’m interested in social behavior,” she explains, “and these birds are not only long-lived, they have a very complex social life.”

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