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The Virginia Tech Center for Design Research is unveiling the innovative future of kitchen design and construction at the Kitchen & Bath Industry Show Jan. 20-22 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

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Andrea Dietrich, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, and her colleague Gary A. Burlingame of the Philadelphia Water Department, are calling for a critical review and rethinking of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) secondary standards for maintaining consumers’ confidence in tap water as well as in its sensory quality.

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Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute scientists were awarded a grant from the Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund, part of the Center for Innovative Technology, to engineer a viral therapy for a difficult-to-treat brain cancer.

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Virginia Tech researchers in the Department of Sustainable Biomaterials demonstrated that a vacuum-steam treatment is effective at destroying invasive snails in a pallet of imported tile.

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A team of scientists has sequenced whole genomes from 544 unrelated trees of the same species. An August 2014 study identified gene sequences from Populus trichocarpa, to understand how trees adapt to different climates.

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X.J. Meng, University Distinguished Professor of Molecular Virology, has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Meng is an inventor with 20 awarded and 17 pending U.S. patents, as well as 40 awarded foreign patents on vaccines and diagnostics.

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The ability to control light in different scenarios has a variety of applications, such as creating all-optical computers that theoretically could be more efficient than electronic devices.

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The Virginia Summit on Science, Engineering, and Medicine will focus on challenges of collecting, storing, and interpreting massive amounts of data.

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Researchers reveal that a protein responsible for regulating the body's sleep cycle, or circadian rhythm, also protects the body from developing sporadic forms of cancers.

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Of about 450 different species of mosquitoes in the Anopheles genus, only about 60 can transmit the Plasmodium malaria parasite that is harmful to people. The team chose 16 mosquito species that are currently found in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, but evolved from the same ancestor approximately 100 million years ago.

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What some farmers grow as pasture plants others view as weeds. But with the need to cheaply feed food animals rising, circumstances are right for the weed invasion to escalate.

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Honored were Madhav V. Marathe, director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab; Joseph C. Pitt, a philosophy professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences; and Stephanie Shipp, director of the Social and Decision Analytics Lab.

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Laura Schoenle is interested in how mercury contamination affects the levels of a stress hormone called glucocorticoid in birds. Low levels of environmental mercury can have a profound effect on animal populations in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. 

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Patches of soaked soil act as hot spots for microbes removing nitrogen from groundwater and returning it to the atmosphere.The discovery provides insight into forest health and water quality, say researchers from Virginia Tech and Cornell.

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The National Science Foundation has awarded Michael Hsiao, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech, a grant of $418,345 to improve the accuracy in electronics design, using algorithms he designed that simulate ant behavior.

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An team of scientists led by Virginia Tech reports that the strength of a person’s reaction to repulsive images can forecast their political ideology. The brain’s response to a single disgusting image was enough to predict an individual’s political ideology.

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Researchers developed mathematical models to predict the dynamics of cell transitions, and compared their results with actual measurements of activity in cell populations. The results could inform efforts to treat cancer patients.

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The researchers from the Virginia Tech – Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences described in their article in Technology published by the World Scientific Publishing Company that they have created “a tool for blood-barrier-brain disruption that uses bursts of sub-microsecond bipolar pulses to enhance the transfer of large molecules to the brain.”

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A team from four universities including Virginia Tech will use a $1.3 million National Science Foundation grant to look at governmental policies and social attitudes on the use of fire to reduce the vulnerability of grasslands to the invasion of woody plants.

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Alireza Haghighat, a professor with the Nuclear Engineering Program at Virginia Tech, discussed research related to the 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex with scientists in Japan.

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A genetic disease called SCID forces patients to breathe filtered air and avoid human contact because their bodies cannot fight germs. Now, using a mouse model, Virginia Tech researchers describe a potential biomarker to detect SCID.

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With her 2014 Busch Award, Virginia Tech’s Amy Pruden said the $100,000 in funding will be used “to help the water industry achieve an innovative and practical approach to achieving water sustainability while also addressing consumers’ concerns about the real and growing problem of antibiotic resistance.”

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Researchers will study how social media interactions could foster support for people recovering from alcohol, opiate, or stimulant addictions.

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Before dinosaurs, it was thought the top aquatic and terrestrial predators didn't often interact. But researchers at Virginia Tech and the University of Tennessee discovered that the smaller of the two apex predators was potentially targeting the larger animal.

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A statistical report from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention aligns with a previously released estimate about the potential threat of the Ebola virus by a national group of scientists, including simulation scientists with Virginia Tech.

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The initiative funds the most comprehensive study of concussion and head impact exposure ever conducted. It will enroll an estimated 25,000 male and female NCAA student-athletes during a three-year study period.

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Google has awarded Devi Parikh of Virginia Tech’s Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering a Faculty Research Award that comes with $92,000 of unrestricted funding and allows her to work directly with Google researchers and engineers as they explore how to best teach machines from visual abstractions.

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Virginia Tech geobiologist Shuhai Xiao and collaborators from the Chinese Academy of Sciences shed new light on multicellular fossils from a time 60 million years before a vast growth spurt of life known as the Cambrian Explosion occurred on Earth.

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Virginia Tech computer scientist Daphne Yao’s proposed solutions to prevent insider attacks in the cyber security world will provide a leap forward to stronger Army command and control of cyberspace capabilities on the battlefield as well as in day-to-day operations.

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A nuclear accident has no respect for lines drawn on a map. It becomes the world's problem. But for the most part, emphasis has been on prevention, not response. Until now.

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An invasive weed poses a serious and frightening threat to farming families in Ethiopia, but scientists have unleashed a new weapon in the fight against hunger: a tiny, speckled beetle.

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Researchers open a new page in the immune system's playbook, discovering more chatter goes on among the body's infection fighters than was suspected.

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A team of scientists from the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute and the University of California at Berkeley used advanced imaging techniques to study how the brain makes choices about honesty.

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Andrea Dietrich and Amanda Sain of Virginia Tech’s Via Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering estimated that 50 percent of the population taste threshold for manganese II in water, the simplest ionic manganese oxide, to be more than 1000 times the current EPA allowable level. Their findings appear in the Journal of the American Water Works Association, and they are now looking into possible secondary pollution issues with the release of manganese in air through its use in humidifiers.

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The groundwork for Virginia Tech’s Wu Feng’s big data research in a “cloud” began in the mid-2000s with a multi-institutional effort to identify missing gene annotations in genomes. Today, this work is being formalized and extended as part of an National Science Foundation/Microsoft Computing in the Cloud grant that seeks to commoditize biocomputing in the cloud.

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FAA Administrator Michael Huerta joined Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and leaders from Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey to watch a simulation of Virginia Tech engineers using a multirotor, unmanned aircraft to gather information at a mock accident scene on an interstate highway.

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Virginia Tech researchers who were using a disinfectant when handling mice have discovered that two active ingredients in it cause declines in mouse reproduction.

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An international team of scientists compared mainstream bioeconomic theory with the lesser-known “fishing-down” theory, to discover that a large, commercially important fish from the Amazon Basin has become extinct in some local fishing communities.

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Scientists at Virginia Tech believe neutrinos could be used to monitor nuclear power plants for signs of nuclear proliferation.

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Veterinarians are testing the use of gold nanoparticles and a targeted laser treatment for solid tumors in dogs and cats.The nanoparticles circulate in the bloodstream and become temporarily captured within the incomplete blood vessel walls common in solid tumors. Then, a non-ablative laser is employed against the tumor.

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People with a BRCA1 gene mutation are at much higher risk for breast cancer, but no treatments exist to specifically target this problem. Researchers will use structural biology tools to better understand this difficult-to-treat hereditary cancer.

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New engineering study conducted at Virginia Tech investigates ergonomic effects of obesity-related functional performance impairment

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A multi-university team will answer the ongoing questions of how the impacts of manmade stressors such as agricultural use and burgeoning populations work in concert with a warming planet on water systems.

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Researchers led by scientists with the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute have discovered how fruit flies in "Evolution Canyon" have been able to adapt to extremely different, ecologies. The discovery adds to current understanding of the biodiversity.

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If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? It may be that, when it comes to stock market success, your brain is heeding the wrong neural signals, according to a multi-institutional team of researchers.

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By treating incarceration as an infectious disease, researchers show that small differences in prison sentences can lead to large differences in incarceration rates. The research was published in June in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. 

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An international team of scientists, including one from Virginia Tech, reviewed published research and determined that positive incentives for farmers, counties, and states can do as much to preserve forests as public policies that call for penalties.

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Virginia Bioinformatics Institute researchers at Virginia Tech have discovered aging can occur at different rates within an individual's genome, with some portions aging 100 times faster than others. It makes personalized medicine even more challenging.

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Using a large array of satellites and space observatories, an international team spent more than a year training their instruments on the brightest and most studied of the “local” black holes — the one situated at the core of Type I Seyfert Galaxy NGC 5548.

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Researchers mapped a cultural ecosystem service by identifying the key features that influence anglers’ enjoyment, such as environmental quality, accessibility, and fish abundance.