"Collectors find value that you and I would maybe raise our eyebrows about. Collectors find value in things that we may devalue," said Raiford Guins, a Stony Brook University professor who studies video game history and has researched the landfill. In those circles, he said, the landfill games have become "the holy grail for Atari collectors."

A professor who directs a large research laboratory at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities will be the new dean of Stony Brook University’s engineering school, officials announced Thursday. Dr. Fotis Sotiropoulos, 52, was selected after a national search to lead the 5,000-student engineering and applied science college.

"Far more people are looking for things that are unplugged," said Ann Garbarino, an advisor at the Small Business Development Center at Stony Brook University. "And it’s something that a lot of generations can agree on."

Dr. Barbara Chapman, who grew up in New Zealand, said she left the more temperate region of Houston driven, in part, by the intelligence and personality of Robert J. Harrison, Stony Brook’s director for the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. Additionally, Chapman sees opportunities to work with local collaborators.

A large gathering of community members and loved ones helped welcome home a Selden teenager who spent the last eight months in the hospital. Erika Gottlieb, 13, had been at Stony Brook University Hospital since the beginning of the year with bone cancer.

It’s not the first time construction workers have left messages for hospital patients: The same thing happened earlier this summer at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital in New York.

"Volunteering moves people into the present and distracts the mind from the stresses and problems of the self," said Stephen G. Post, founding director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York. "Many studies show that one of the best ways to deal with the hardships in life is not to just center on yourself but to take the opportunity to engage in simple acts of kindness."

From the moment he first set foot on Stony Brook’s campus to take over as athletic director in May 2014, Shawn Heilbron said his vision was to build a football program powerful enough to drive the fundraising necessary to put the New York state school with the funny name on the major-college athletic map.

Allen Tannenbaum, a professor of computer science and applied mathematics and statistics at Stony Brook University, has added a field called graph theory to some of the tools he knows well from his work in medical imaging and computer vision. A normal, healthy cell is like a factory, with genes sending signals through proteins, enzymes and catalysts, moving reactions forward or stopping them, and the genetic machinery indicating when and how hard the parts should work.
Cancer, however, is like a hostile takeover of that factory, producing the factory equivalent of M16s that damage the cell and the individual instead of baby toys, Tannebaum suggested.

Stony Brook University researchers examined texting and distractions. They created a test/obstacle course as part of their study to show how hard it is to concentrate on anything else while you are on your phone including walking.