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Open source software delivers library resources to users by seamlessly integrating them into a browser.

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The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Arts Council of New Orleans, and the Institute for Cultural Policy and Practice (ICPP) at Virginia Tech are working together to create and link the arts organizations more closely with their communities.

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Illustrating their commitment to sustaining the environment and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the Town of Blacksburg, City of Roanoke, and Virginia Tech are converting their diesel fuel-powered public works and facilities vehicles and power equipment to biodiesel fuel "” a cleaner-burning, renewable diesel fuel replacement made primarily from soybean oil.

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Veterinary researchers will work with the Tanzanian National Park Authority to develop management strategies to protect the free-ranging chimpanzee population from tourism related problems, such as disease, habitat destruction, and competition for resources. They will live and work in environment friendly portable quarters.

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Kitchen Planning is a reference book providing information for the design of kitchens that are convenient, functional, efficient, and that meet the needs of today's lifestyles. Home*A*Syst: An Environmental Risk Assessment Guide For The Home received a US Department of Agriculture Secretary's Honor Award.

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Alberto Bustani, president of the Monterrey Region of the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in Mexico, will deliver the keynote address at Virginia Tech's 2007 Graduate Commencement Ceremony on Friday, May 11. Bustani is also a leading environmental researcher and advocate.

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The major goal of Patrick Schaumont's CAREER project is to develop a methodology to create secure embedded system designs to protect information in cell phones, RFIDs and other portable systems, and protect copyrighted materials, such as songs and movies in portable players, and intellectual properties, such as embedded software.

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General John Philip Abizaid, U.S. Army (Ret.), former Commander of the U.S. Central Command that oversees American military operations in a 27-country region including the Middle East, and whose experience includes Operation Iraqi Freedom from 2003 to 2007, will speak at Virginia Tech's Commencement May 11 at Lane Stadium/Worsham Field.

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The newly released book, Cradle of America: Four Centuries of Virginia History, is going to challenge citizens and scholars alike as to what they've always thought was true about the past. Named a History Book Club selection for May, Cradle of America has already been cited for its "crisp writing and innumerable fascinating stories."

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A special event for food lovers, food writers and editors, chefs, dietitians, vintners, and culinary historians will celebrate Jamestown's 400th anniversary April 20-21 on the Virginia Tech campus.

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Dennis Hong is designing his Whole Skin Locomotion (WSL) mechanism to work on much the same principle as the pseudopod "” or cytoplasmic "foot" "” of the amoeba. Preliminary experiments show that a robot using the WSL mechanism can easily squeeze between obstacles or under a collapsed ceiling. It can use all of its contact surfaces for traction.

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Three Virginia Cooperative Extension agents and two faculty members in Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences are blogging about their experiences during a 17-day trek across South Africa. The team left the United States on March 1 and returns on March 17, 2007.

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Currently, the most advanced optical microscope can achieve a resolution only as low as 50 nanometers. Yong Xu, of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech, has received a National Science Foundation Award to overcome that limit. His goal is to be able to observe the "vacuum field" at a resolution of one nanometer.

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Virginia Tech is once again a pioneer in the educational arena, linking more than 250 engineering freshmen on wireless Tablet PCs synchronously to provide an interactive environment between the professor and the students.

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New River Journal (www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/), the first online journal devoted exclusively to digital writing and art, announces the release of its premier issue for 2007 with exciting new works by some of today's leading digital authors.

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A survey reveals not only whom college students are talking to, but also for how long, and from where they converse.

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Virginia Tech's School of Education has been selected by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as one of 20 research universities to participate in an initiative to strengthen and transform the Doctorate of Education (Ed.D) degree.

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Eight stories about Virginia Tech research, ranging from Appalachia to Albania, are presented in the winter 2007 issue of the magazine. Topics also include food safety, saving endangered birds and livestock, personalized medicine, and dance therapy to help people recover from head injuries.

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A new industry affiliates program will improve access by business to information and students from the Space Science and Engineering Center at Virginia Tech.

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Virginia Tech's Dining Services is cutting trans fat from its menus this semester. The goal is for all food served in Virginia Tech dining centers to be trans fat-free, including the butter-flavored oil used to prepare grilled items and as a seasoning in more than 100 popular recipes.

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The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech announces that the first Roche GS-FLXâ„¢ was installed at its Core Laboratory Facility. The Roche GS-FLX is a next-generation genome sequencing system. The sequence of a typical bacterial genome can be obtained in days with one person and one instrument without the need for cloning and colony picking.

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A Virginia Tech professor and a graduate student have produced a collection of 39 essays that celebrates the joy of teaching. In the book, various authors describe how teaching excellence can be achieved while facing the challenge of large classes and the demand to produce meaningful research and scholarship.

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Elisa Sotelino, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, has developed a family of parallel algorithms, named Group Implicit Algorithms, which have had a major impact in the nonlinear dynamic analysis of structures.

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The cost of biosolid treatment and hauling is a major expenditure for wastewater treatment utilities. Pathogens and odor problems may restrict the biosolid disposal options and affect hauling costs. A Virginia Tech environmental engineer is identifying processes for the destruction of organic solids and the elimination of disease causing organisms in biosolids.

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Jim A. Kuypers, assistant professor of communication at Virginia Tech, reveals a disturbing world of media bias in his new book Bush's War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2006).

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Based on 20 years of detailed archival research, "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" is an enthralling, compelling study of the darker side of human history. Author Roger Ekirch received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 to finish the book, and is now receiving awards for the effort.

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As research fields become more complex, engineers must adapt to working with researchers in other disciplines who are trained in different methods of evaluating research, seeking evidence, and drawing conclusions. The NSF has awarded a $525,000 grant to Maura Borrego, in engineering education at Virginia Tech, for development of methods that will better prepare faculty and graduate students for interdisciplinary research.

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A self-made billionaire who did not graduate from Virginia Tech has announced his gift of $2 million to the College of Engineering. His philanthropy is the result of a long-term relationship with Paul and Dot Torgersen of Blacksburg, Va., whose lawn he use to mow. Today, that young man is the CEO of Google.

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The Nov. 29-30 Energy Research Engagement Showcase at Virginia Tech will foster commercialization of research from Virginia universities in the energy and energy-related environmental fields, enhance public-private partnerships, stimulate economic development, and facilitate the adoption of profitable energy solutions. The showcase is part of Virginia Tech's "Energy Ideas" initiative, a year-long series of events.

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Authors of book to be published in 2008 about remarkable trees in Virginia have more than 480 nominations with 93 of Virginia's 108 cities and counties represented. But they still need of more nominations for hickory trees and trees with special stories.

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About 350 million years ago, at the boundary of the Devonian and Carboniferous ages, the climate changed. There was no one around to record it, but there are records nonetheless. A Virginia Tech professor reports on evidence of climate change that he found in the fossils of the 350-million year-old ancestors of modern trees.

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Asian Soybean Rust was detected in a commercial soybean field in Chesapeake, Va.., and in a sentinel plot Suffolk, Va., on October 14. This year's crop is out of danger. Once soybean seeds reach their full size in the pod, the crop will mature before rust affects a significant amount of leaf surface. Although Virginia's soybean crop is out of danger, scouting for the disease continues.

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A software package developed at Virginia Tech, to predict results and timelines for cleaning up ground-water contamination, has proved itself at eight Department of Defense sites and is being offered free to environmental cleanup professionals.

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Based on the lovely green rock, olivine, also known as the gemstone, peridot, a Virginia Tech graduate student has created a mineral lifetime diagram that provides the a clue to when and for how long there might have been water on Mars.

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Richard Shryock, Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Virginia Tech, is co-curator of an exhibit and co-organizer of a colloquium at the prominent Museum of the Art and History of Judaism in Paris honoring Gustave Kahn (1859-1936) a Symbolist poet and prolific art critic who became an important figure in the Jewish cultural renaissance in France.

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About two million cancer patients currently receiving certain drug therapies and chemotherapy find foods and beverages to have a foul metallic flavor, according to a medical study. These problems impact nutrition and quality of life. Virginia Tech researchers are looking for the cause, with funding from the Institute of Public Health and Water Research.

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Virginia Tech researchers are using System X, the university's supercomputer, to test a new search program that can tell the stories of life "“ the connections between gene sets, for instance, or the connections between discoveries reported in biomedical articles.

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Biomechanics innovations ranging from a computer model of a pregnant driver to a head injury monitoring system for the Hokie football team have earned Virginia Tech researcher Stefan Duma a place among the world's top young technology developers.

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A new Undergraduate Research Institute will help students refine inquiry skills, understand how research differs across disciplines, and find research opportunities.

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Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech have developed a disposable microchip that replaces space-consuming instrumentation with fast, cost-effective, lab-on-a-chip technology.

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Aging families affected by Hurricane Katrina have experienced both physical and emotional problems in the aftermath of the disaster, and many yearn to "go back home," according to preliminary findings from a team of researchers.

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Cover your nose, and come see one of Virginia Tech's two rare Amorphophallus titanum, or "corpse plants" that is ready to bloom and emit its intensely powerful stench. The plant is expected to bloom by the middle of next week - about August 1 or 2.

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In the Virginia Tech E-Textiles Lab, electrical and computer engineering faculty members are developing "smart" clothes that appear and feel normal but that can sense their own shapes, the wearer's motions, and the positions of the sensing elements. The primary focus of their research is potential medical applications.

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Soybeans, the largest row crop in the state, are being closely monitored for signs of Asian soybean rust. While the fungus has been detected throughout the south, none has been discovered in Virginia fields.

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Wireless communication research, long an area of strength at Virginia Tech, has become a major focus with the creation of one of the largest wireless research groups in the U.S., Wireless @ Virginia Tech, encompassing the Center for Wireless Telecommunications, Mobile and Portable Radio Research Group, and Virginia Tech Antenna Group.

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The summer 2006 issue of the Virginia Tech Research magazine reports on a new device to monitor the nation's electric grid, technologies to supplement the grid, and alternative energy sources.

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Researchers in the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine's Center for Molecular Medicine and Infectious Diseases at Virginia Tech with funding from Fort Dodge Animal Health Inc. have developed a vaccine against Post-weaning Multi-systemic Wasting Syndrome (PMWS) in pigs, a major threat to the global swine industry.

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As education researches and engineering faculty members develop pedagogical models for the classroom, the university-industry alliance supports a new Tablet PC computing initiative for incoming freshmen to provide students, faculty, and staff with training and assistance throughout the development and implementation of new models of teaching and learning.

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Deck failure can ruin an outdoor party -- and cause injury too. Research by Virginia Tech has identified the connection between the deck and the house as a common failure point and has resulted in recommendations for better construction and changes in the state building code.

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Virginia's K12 schools, museums, and libraries will be among the first in the nation to connect to both the National LambdaRail (NLR) and Internet2 "“ providing better access to educational and research resources worldwide.