Latest News

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Two University of Virginia mechanical engineering students have built and flown a plastic airplane using 3-D printing technology.

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The University of Virginia today announced the establishment of the Richard Lyman Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, part of the College of Arts & Sciences. The new chair will honor Bushman, Gouverneur Morris Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University, who led one of the first Mormon studies programs in the country.

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The University of Virginia and Philippe Cousteau’s Azure Worldwide are collaborating with The Nature Conservancy to develop a large-scale computer simulation game based on a major Texas watershed. It is part of a new Global Water Games initiative.

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A warming climate and rising seas will enable salt marshes to more rapidly capture and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, possibly playing a role in slowing the rate of climate change, according to a new study published in the Sept. 27 issue of the journal Nature.

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The National Science Foundation has awarded a $130,000 grant to a team co-led by University of Virginia professor Ahmed Abbasi to fund research that will analyze social media, including tweets and online discussion forums, to identify adverse drug reactions – a process that promises to be much faster and perhaps also more accurate than the existing methods of identifying such reactions.

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The University of Virginia and three other universities will partner on a national nanotechnology research effort to create self-powered devices to help people monitor their health and better understand how their environment affects it, the National Science Foundation announced today.

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Pretend play that involves uses of the imagination to create a fantasy world or situation can be fun for preschool children, but a new University of Virginia study finds that it is not as crucial to a child's development as currently believed.

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University of Virginia Innovation, a University initiative focused on maximizing the impact of U.Va. research discoveries, today unveiled a directory featuring 72 products based on University research.

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Batoid rays, such as stingrays and manta rays, are among nature's most elegant swimmers. They are fast, highly maneuverable, graceful, energy-efficient, can cruise, bird-like, for long distances in the deep, open ocean, and rest on the sea bottom.

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The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule as early as today on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. The decision on President Obama's signature legislative accomplishment comes a little more than four months before the November election. This tip sheet offers University of Virginia experts who can comment on the issue and the court's ruling from a variety of standpoints.

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The University of Virginia is a political science powerhouse, home to the Miller Center, a national center for the study of the American presidency, and Larry Sabato's Center for Politics, whose Crystal Ball predictions are consistently among the most accurate of any prognosticators, correctly predicting 98 percent of Senate, House of Representatives and gubernatorial winners in 2006, 2008 and 2010.

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An international team of researchers, including a University of Virginia professor, has found that two ink sacs from 160-million-year-old giant cephalopod fossils discovered two years ago in England contain the pigment melanin, and that it is essentially identical to the melanin found in the ink sac of a modern-day cuttlefish.

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Using newly developed imaging technology, University of Virginia chemist Brooks Pate and co-authors have confirmed years of theoretical assumptions about water molecules, the most abundant and one of the most frequently studied substances on Earth.

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The University of Virginia and The Hartwell Foundation are expanding their long-standing relationship, with the announcement that the Foundation has selected Charlottesville as the site of its 2013 Annual Meeting of Biomedical Research.

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Among California's persistently lowest-achieving schools, those that have implemented aggressive turnaround reforms mandated by the federal government are showing significant improvements just one year later, a new study finds.

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A highly toxic beta-amyloid – a protein that exists in the brains of Alzheimer's disease victims – has been found to greatly increase the toxicity of other more common and less toxic beta-amyloids, serving as a possible "trigger" for the advent and development of Alzheimer's, researchers at the University of Virginia and German biotech company Probiodrug have discovered.

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The University of Virginia and IBM's World Community Grid today launched the Computing for Sustainable Water Project, an effort to simulate and forecast the environmental and economic effects of agricultural, commercial and industrial decisions over the next 20 years in and around the Chesapeake Bay, America's largest estuary.

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University of Virginia engineer Silvia Salinas Blemker and biologist Christopher Deppmann have been named recipients of 2011 Hartwell Individual Biomedical Research Awards, which provide $100,000 in annual research support for three years to each awardee. Blemker will use her award to improve the outcomes of cleft palate repair surgery using advanced physics-based computer simulation. Deppmann will study childhood metabolic disorders, targeting the peripheral nervous system to reverse obesity.

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A new center at the University of Virginia, created by a $12 million gift from Sonia and Paul Jones, focuses on meditation, yoga and other contemplative practices to study and share -- in a surprising variety of ways -- the benefits of training the mind and body.

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Dr. James Turner, executive director of U.Va. Student Health and past president of the American College Health Association, is available for interviews on college students' health issues, from the flu to vaccines to depression.

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Allen Lynch, a University of Virginia politics professor, is the author of the new book, "Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft." His other books include "How Russia Is Not Ruled" and "Does Russia Have a Democratic Future?"

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The most common primary brain cancer is glioblastoma, a highly aggressive and deadly form of tumor that kills about 95 percent of its victims within five years of diagnosis.

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A seagrass restoration project in the coastal bays of Virginia's Eastern Shore is demonstrating remarkable success. In a series of papers published Feb. 23 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, researchers report that after 10 years of seeding vast and once barren stretches of bay bottom and monitoring the growth of eelgrass from these plantings, about 10.5 square miles are now carpeted with lush, healthy seagrass meadows.

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Among college professors who take paid post-birth leave and who believe infant care duties should be shared equally by both sexes, the women almost always do more than half of the infant care, and report enjoying it more than men, which is likely rooted in evolutionary differences between the sexes.

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Since George Washington's death on Dec. 14, 1799, Americans have struggled to establish his place in the national consciousness, says Edward Lengel, editor of the Papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia.

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"Forked fungus beetles are not pretty – they look like tree bark – but they're helping us better understand the evolution of social behavior," said University of Virginia evolutionary biologist Vince Formica, lead author on a paper published in the January edition of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

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University of Virginia officials have introduced new programs designed to enhance the activities of the University's researchers and entrepreneurs and maximize the impact of innovative U.Va. discoveries on the global population and economy.

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Sheena Chestnut Greitens, a 2011-12 fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, is available for interviews about the transition of leadership in North Korea from Kim Jong Il to his son, Kim Jong Un.

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Nearly half of all people in the United States will experience a mental illness at some point during their lives, yet talking about mental illness remains taboo for many. A new website, Project Implicit Mental Health, allows visitors to examine and gain insight into their associations about mental health topics that may exist outside their conscious awareness or conscious control.

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The University of Virginia and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation have established a unique partnership for collaborative, graduate-level training and research aimed at developing conservation professionals to tackle some of the biggest conservation problems facing the nation.

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Raising kids is a challenge, from the stresses of sleepless nights and toddler tantrums to teenage sullenness. Plenty of research has found that the arrival of a baby is associated with declines in self-reported happiness and marital satisfaction for many, and increases in depression for some.

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With the continued growth of online shopping and this year's "Cyber Monday," a University of Virginia expert is available to help your audience or readers keep their computers, their identities and their credit cards safe.

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Astronomy has always been about finding our place in the universe, about seeking origins. A new international astronomical observatory called ALMA will bring new insights to our understanding of the farthest reaches of space and answers to our most fundamental questions as to how the universe evolved and became what it is, and how the building blocks of life began.

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New research, published this week in the journal Applied Physics Letters, suggests that ozone gas emitted from fracturing rocks could serve as an indicator of impending earthquakes.

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The Supreme Court announced today that it will hear a challenge to the health care reform law. U.Va. experts can comment on this issue.

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University of Virginia law professor Thomas Hafemeister is available to comment on laws regarding child abuse, including states' requirements in reporting abuse and government support structures designed to help detect and respond to abuse.

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Virginia's brook trout streams are showing encouraging signs of recovery – in most cases – from the debilitating effects of acid rain, according to the most recent results from a long-term study led by University of Virginia environmental scientists.

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A recent increase in the intensity of tropical cyclones in the Arabian Sea may be a side effect of increasing air pollution over the Indian sub-continent, a new multi-institutional study has found.

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A vampire-like bacteria that leeches onto specific other bacteria – including certain human pathogens – has the potential to serve as a living antibiotic for a range of infectious diseases, a new study indicates.

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The Rice Hall Information Technology Engineering Building, part of a new gateway for engineering and science at the University of Virginia, will be dedicated Nov. 18 at 11 a.m. As part of the day's celebration, Dean Kamen, whose inventions include the Segway Personal Transporter, will speak at 3 p.m. in Rice Hall's Olsson Auditorium.

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The spread of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement to cities across the country has led to a national discussion on the role of corporations and brought the term "corporate personhood" to the fore in recent weeks.

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The National Science Foundation has awarded a $3 million grant to a team lead by University of Virginia computer scientist David Evans for a project to develop privacy-preserving technologies. Secure computation is a long-standing goal of computer science that aims to allow people to cooperate in computations without exposing their data.

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In response to the needs of a nation embracing the Industrial Revolution, the Board of Visitors at the still-young University of Virginia in 1836 established civil engineering as a formal course of study.

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In light of Apple Inc. co-founder and CEO Steve Job's death from complications of pancreatic cancer, pancreatic cancer expert, researcher and innovator Kimberly Kelly, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, can discuss this disease and its complications, which affects one in 72 people in the U.S.

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October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month. Karen McDowell, an information security analyst at the University of Virginia, is available for interviews about cybersecurity in general and about "spear-phishing" in particular.

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A strategy for preventing school violence that emphasizes early attention to student behavior problems significantly reduces bullying and school suspensions, according to a new study by professor and clinical psychologist Dewey Cornell of the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education.

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Michael P. Straightiff, director of biomedical engineering commercialization in Case Western Reserve University's Technology Transfer Office, has been named director of the University of Virginia Patent Foundation, effective Sept. 21.

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Young children who watch fast-paced, fantastical television shows may become handicapped in their readiness for learning, according to a new University of Virginia study published in the October issue of the journal Pediatrics.

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In a challenging national economic climate, the University of Virginia's College of Arts & Sciences received $41.7 million in new private fundraising commitments during fiscal year 2010-11, a 49 percent increase over 2009-10.

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University of Virginia President Teresa A. Sullivan today named John D. Simon, Duke University's vice provost for academic affairs and a respected scientist, as executive vice president and provost, effective Sept. 1.