Functional MRI shows that Buddhist meditators use different areas of the brain than other people when confronted with unfair choices, enabling them to make decisions rationally rather than emotionally.
Rafael Davalos of Virginia Tech's School of Biomedical Engineering describes the use of a method he invented, irreversible electroporation, to successfully treat a seven-year old Labrador retriever with a tumor. The National Science Foundation is now funding additional work in this area.
A consortium of major research universities has formed a new initiative to address the environmental impacts of the discovery, development, production, and use of energy resources in Appalachia.
The lead article in the April 4 issue of the journal Academic Medicine connects research on how the brain learns to how to incorporate this understanding into real world education, particularly the education of medical doctors.
Toy libraries offer multiple benefits for children, their parents, their community, and society in general.
Researchers found that when managers give an explanation for decisions that have caused loss, they need to be more specific in addressing the concerns of their followers and the reasons behind their decisions. Being vague or dismissive can actually make things worse. And the greater the loss incurred, the greater was the need for specificity.
One year ago, Kirk Cameron decided his company MiserWare would give away its main product -- intelligent energy-saving software for personal computers. Recently, he found out how valuable his software giveaway program was when he learned that Time Magazine had named it a Top 20 Green Tech Idea.
Nematodes, microscopic worms, are making engineers look twice at their ability to exhibit the “Cheerios effect” when they move in a collective motion.
The results of a Virginia Tech study by environmental engineers and a virologist on the risk of airborne infection in public places from concentrations of influenza A viruses are published in the on-line, Feb. 2 issue of the United Kingdom’s Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
NASA rockets to be launched as early as today (Jan. 26) from Alaska will allow researchers from the University of Colorado to capture ultraviolet images of the Whirlpool Galaxy -- 31 million light years from Earth. And researchers from Virginia Tech will use rocket-mounted instruments to measure nitric oxide, a molecule that destroys ozone, from about 30 to 100 miles above the ground.
In the first phase of a more than two-year study funded by InterDigital, Virginia Tech researchers have made great strides in the development of more reliable and efficient spectrum sensing techniques that will be needed to meet the ever-expanding demand for wireless technologies.
Research by engineers and cancer biologists at Virginia Tech indicate that using specific silicon microdevices might provide a new way to screen breast cancer cells’ ability to metastasize.
Thomas M. McNamara Jr., formerly a program area manager of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, has been hired as president and chief executive officer of the newly established Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation.
A next generation of design criteria for buildings located in geographic regions where earthquakes are known to occur, either rarely or frequently, is under development at Virginia Tech through a research contract awarded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
As the U.S. policy makers renew emphasis on the use of nuclear energy in their efforts to reduce the country’s oil dependence, other factors come into play. One concern of paramount importance is the seismic hazard at the site where nuclear reactors are located.
When an antibiotic is consumed, researchers have learned that up to 90 percent passes through a body without metabolizing. This means the drugs can leave the body almost intact through normal bodily functions.
The Broselow Pediatric Emergency Tape – otherwise known as the Broselow Tape -- has been a staple of ERs and child trauma units for nearly three decades. Using a color coded-format, it provides specific medical instructions to medical caregivers based on the height and then subsequent weight of the child. This information now will be displayed on a large LCD monitor within emergency rooms, for all personnel to see.
“Of the 675 fish species found in southeastern waters, more than 25 percent are considered imperiled,” Donald J. Orth of Virginia Tech said during his keynote address at the Southeastern Fishes Council annual meeting.
Using hyperthermia, Virginia Tech engineering researchers and a colleague from India unveiled a new method to target and destroy cancerous cells. The research was presented at the 63rd annual meeting of the American Physical Society Nov. 23 in Long Beach, Calif.
Accelerator-based supercomputers hold eight of the top 10 spots on the Green500 list. Green500 has ranked the energy efficiency of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers since its debut in 2007, serving as a complement to the well-known supercomputer industry marker TOP500.
One of the serious threats to a user’s computer is a software program that might cause unwanted keystroke sequences to occur in order to hack someone’s identity. An authentication framework called “Telling Human and Bot Apart” has been developed to combat such attacks.
Breeding populations of piping plovers , shorebirds that have been listed as threatened since 1986, exist in three distinct locations — the Atlantic Coast, the American and Canadian Great Plains, and the Great Lakes — but birds from all three populations use the Gulf shore as overwintering habitat.
Techulon Inc. has signed a license with Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties Inc. to market a new DNA delivery platform that carries a beacon so scientists can follow its progress. The material, which integrates therapy with diagnostics, was created by Theresa Reineke at Virginia Tech and Joshua Bryson at Techulon.
A professor of business information technology is working on developing new approaches for modeling disaster resilience that will enable decision makers to gain a better understanding of the tradeoffs inherent in managing supply chain operations during a disaster.
A new study by a professor of marketing at Virginia Tech sheds new light on consumer responses to rewards programs, used by airlines, credit-card companies, hotels, retailers, and other businesses to promote customer allegiance.
A team of Virginia Tech engineers has received a three-year, $1.5 million award from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy to investigate specific ways to reduce emissions from vehicles and to improve fuel economy.
Kathleen Alexander discovered that banded mongoose that were living closely with humans in northern Botswana are dying from a novel tuberculosis species.
Virginia Tech is releasing its full version of the Smart Grid Information Clearinghouse (SGIC) web portal today (Sept. 30) -- the platform for direct sharing and dissemination of relevant smart grid information. It contains information about more than 200 smart grid projects in the US and more than 50 projects overseas.
After returning from deployment, military personnel are screened for mental health and other health-related concerns. But the effects of injuries such as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury can surface three to six months later, says Mary Beth Dunkenberger, senior program director with Virginia Tech’s Institute for Policy and Governance.
Jules White, with the Virginia Tech College of Engineering, seeks to create a massive data collection system that would rely on information captured by “citizen scientists” who would use devices such as smart phones to take photographic evidence from the site of disaster areas. Once collected at a single source, scientists and other responders could quickly sift through data, and decide how best to react.
A new technology for removing water from ultrafine coal slurry has been successfully tested at the commercial scale at an operating coal cleaning plant. The technology offers the possibility of reducing the coal slurry impoundment problem from the source.
Leading brain researcher P. Read Montague will join the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute as a senior professor and will lead programs in human neuroimaging, including the Roanoke Brain Study, a cradle-to-grave effort at understanding the neural basis of human decision-making and its impact on health.
Student research teams are preparing for the 2012 international autonomous vehicle competition, which will require nabbing an unsecured USB flash drive kept in a remote and highly secured office. The vehicle must enter through a broken window, and then decide how to proceed once inside the building.
Environmental Engineers are doing research to determine if the shape of a crude oil remnant – be it a flat syrupy sheet or a tar ball – can affect deterioration rates. The researchers also will study how a lack of oxygen can hinder microbe growth, and how carbon leaching from dissipating oil can further fuel these oil-eating microbes.
Two million dollars is coming to Virginia Tech to create HokieSpeed, a versatile new supercomputing instrument for accelerating and transforming discovery and innovation across a myriad of disciplines.
The Virginia Tech Colleges of Engineering, Science, and Agriculture and Life Sciences have been awarded a $3 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to launch a Ph.D. training program aimed at preparing future researchers to solve emerging challenges at the intersection of the engineering and biological sciences.
Virginia Tech engineers and Tufts biologists have discovered internal soft-tissue movements of freely crawling caterpillars are massively out of sync with the external body movements.
Chang Lu and his chemical engineering research group at Virginia Tech have discovered how to “greatly enhance” the delivery of DNA payloads into cells. The description of their work will be featured on the cover of Lab on a Chip (issue 16), the premier journal for researchers in microfluidics. The work also appears in the July 8 issue of Nature magazine ((Vol. 466, p. 163)
Four unmanned autonomous vehicles designed and built by a team of engineering students at Virginia Tech using the TORC Robotic Building Blocks product line, are headed to Hawaii to participate in the 2010 Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) war games in July.
Viva Virginia, a two-week music festival in June 2010 brought together luminaries from the opera and chamber music worlds to coach and mentor a new generation of superstar performers. See a video and hear the magnificent voices: http://www.youtube.com/user/vtoutreachvideo#p/u/3/FrXQpwsBnK4
The next submission deadline for the Green500 List, which ranks the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world, will be June 7. The Green500 highlights those supercomputers that place a high premium on energy-efficient performance for sustainable supercomputing without jettisoning performance.
The eruption of a volcano in Iceland and an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have drawn attention to air flow patterns and current flow. Research published in the journal Chaos will aid scientists and engineers in understanding and in controlling this type of global-scale phenomena.
Engineered artificial proteins that mimic the elastic properties of muscles in living organisms are the subject of an article in Nature magazine to be released May 6. “Our goal is to use these biomaterials in tissue engineering as a type of scaffold for muscle regeneration,” said co-author Dan Dudek, an assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics at Virginia Tech.
Virginia Fowler and Nikki Giovanni, two notable professors of English, have created "The Answer is Yes" endowment -- a legacy gift with an estimated value in excess of $800,000 plus a bequest of Giovanni's intellectual property.
The inaugural “Gender, Bodies, and Technology” conference explore how technologies, broadly defined, construct, reinforce and destabilize gendered bodies.
Walter O’Brien, director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Turbomachinery and Propulsion Research, has received a patent for his design of a novel ignitor for combustion and supersonic flows, a device that may prove useful in Mach 5 or hypersonic speed vehicles.
The researcher has developed first system capable of minimally invasive and non-destructive light sensitive, molecular sensing and control of biological and transport processes within living organisms.
An article in ES&T that contradicted years of government assertions that no residents in Washington D.C. had been harmed by years of unnecessary exposure to very high levels of lead in their potable water has received the Editor’s Choice Award for Best Science Paper of 2009.
They have been called “financial weapons of mass destruction” and blamed for a number of catastrophic losses and bankruptcies. New research by a finance professor at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business, however, counters the popular perception of derivatives as dangerous tools and investments.
Virginia Tech Research Professor John Harrald testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee that the U.S. is vulnerable to catastrophic events. A shift in preparedness to the public sector is essential, he said.
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