May 2023 Media Highlights

CNN Tonight - Alisyn Camerota interviews Eugenia Rho about her latest research An assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, Rho is the lead author of a new research paper that illustrates how a law enforcement officer’s first 45 words during a vehicle stop with a Black driver can often indicate how the stop will end.  

NPR - For Black drivers, a police officer's first 45 words are a portent of what's to come "The first 45 words, which is less than 30 seconds on average, spoken by a law enforcement officer during a car stop to a Black driver can be quite telling about how the stop will end," says Eugenia Rho, a researcher at Virginia Tech. Story also picked up by Talker News.  

Black Enterprise - Black drivers can predict traffic stop outcome based on an officer’s first 45 words “The first 45 words, which is less than 30 seconds on average, spoken by a law enforcement officer during a car stop to a Black driver can be quite telling about how the stop will end,” said Eugenia Rho, a researcher at Virginia Tech.

KNX-AM (Los Angeles) / KCBS AM (San Francisco) -A new study is shedding light on why some traffic stops involving black drivers end in confrontation  [Cision clip] Eugenia Rho, assistant professor of computer science at Virginia tech, says those orders can cause anxiety and fear and result in confrontation. She says a better approaches for officers to introduce themselves and ask questions.

Washington Post - Potomac Yard Metro station, decades in the making, opens in Alexandria The station, officially named “Potomac Yard-VT,” will serve a Virginia Tech graduate campus that is under construction, nearby townhouse communities and a sprawling retail complex local officials say will be transformed in coming years. The station doesn’t have parking. The 3.5-acre campus is expected to open its first academic building in the fall of 2024, with plans to erect two more buildings. Also picked up by VPAP Newsletter.  

The Guardian - How disinfecting an old US mineshaft saved a colony of little brown bats “You’re talking about essentially an entire taxonomic group that has been reduced by over 90% – it’s like the equivalent of losing all birds or something like that,” says Hoyt, an assistant professor in disease ecology at Virginia Tech University. This isn’t just bad for the victims – bats play an essential role in ecosystems by consuming large numbers of insects, dispersing seeds and pollinating.  

Popular Science - The tallest building in the world remains unchallenged—for now Stefan Al, an architect, author of the book Supertall, and an assistant professor at Virginia Tech, charts just how much concrete has improved. In the 1950s, he says, concrete was rated at around 20 megapascals. The concrete in the Burj was 80 megapascals, and today’s can do about 250 megapascals. “So basically it’s gotten 10 times stronger—or 10 times more able to withstand compression, meaning you can have 10 times more weight coming from top,” he says. “That’s certainly super impressive.”  

USA Today - Inbox overload? You are not alone. This is how many hours a week we spend on work emails So what can employees to do better manage their work schedule? Bill Becker, an associate professor of management at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business who has researched stress associated with emails, suggests turning off notifications at certain times – especially after hours. But he acknowledges that company culture can make this difficult.

Roanoke Times/Associated Press via Washington Post - Virginia Tech helps track state’s big trees At Virginia Tech, meanwhile, professor Eric Wiseman coordinates the Virginia Big Trees program, and maintains a list of state champions for more than 300 species.  

CBS News - Hazmat road accidents in the U.S. have more than doubled in the past decade In 2020, the Department of Transportation did give a 16-member research team led by Virginia Tech a $7.5 million grant to develop plans to integrate these systems safely into trucks. The research is scheduled to wrap up in 2024.

WIRED - Should you get paid for teaching a chatbot to do your job? But a company that wanted to try could turn to a concept from game theory called the Shapley value, named for Nobel Prize–winning economist Lloyd Shapley, says Ruoxi Jia, an electrical engineer at Virginia Tech who has coauthored research papers on the value. It can be used to determine fair profit sharing when multiple players contribute different amounts to a group achievement and has been used to compensate patients for sharing medical data of differing values with researchers.  

Chicago Tribune - With no state funding and shifting guidance, schools’ actions on lead in water vary widely Marc Edwards, an environmental engineer and professor at Virginia Tech who has worked with cities and schools in places including Washington, D.C., and Flint, Michigan, to reduce lead levels in water, likened the lack of a national standard for lead in water to the “wild west.” “It’s just total chaos to have this voluntary system with shifting goals,” Edwards said. “There’s so much angst and money spent on this nationally; every school system has to reinvent the wheel.”

Today - Why Lyme disease symptoms go away quickly for some and last years for others “This quickly becomes a detection issue,” Brandon Jutras, associate professor in the biochemistry department at Virginia Tech, explained.  Serology tests, which look for antibodies in the blood, are the best available method for diagnosing Lyme, experts say. However, antibody tests indicate the immune system has mounted an attack against a virus or bacteria, but can’t determine whether there is an active infection. They don’t work until the immune system generates a sufficient number of antibodies, which can take six weeks or more after an initial tick bite. Picked up from NBC News.   

Washington Post - How mosquitoes use your body chemistry to pick you for their next meal “What really matters to the mosquito is not the most abundant type of chemical, it’s really those chemical interactions and relative abundances,” said Clément Vinauger, an assistant professor of biochemistry at Virginia Tech. He recently tested four commonly used soaps and found that three increased humans’ attractiveness to Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, while one — Native Coconut and Vanilla body wash — seemed to decrease it, probably because mosquitoes don’t like coconut oil.  Story also picked up by the New York Post, Atlanta Journal Constitution, EveryDay Health, UKNews Today, KSBY (California) , Prevention, and others. 

Health - Could your soap be making you more attractive to mosquitoes? Researchers out of Virginia Tech examined whether or not some soaps worn by a person drew in or repelled mosquitoes. They found that soaps interact in interesting ways with a person’s natural olfactory signature—think of it as your own unique scent profile—impacting the chemical compounds that a mosquito responds to in a human host.  

Forbes - What is Precision Population Health? Here’s why it’s needed For example, Ann F. La Berge, PhD, an Associate Professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech, penned an article entitled, “How the Ideology of Low Fat Conquered America” published in a 2008 issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. In this article, La Berge argued that creating low-fat foods meant replacing the fat with sugar, which meant that these foods never became low calorie in any way. And that was not a sweet thing to do. Obesity and overweight rates have continued to rise despite the introduction of more and more fad diets and fad exercise regimens. It’s become clear that no single diet and no single exercise regimen alone will effectively curb the obesity epidemic.

Washington Post - 5 things to know about protein (Hint: You’re probably getting enough) “Vegetarian and vegan athletes can easily meet protein needs on a plant-based diet,” said Enette Larson-Meyer, the director of the Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism Laboratory at Virginia Tech and co-author of Plant-Based Sports Nutrition. Plant proteins may not be complete, she said, meaning they don’t contain all the amino acids we need, but “consuming a combination of different plant-based protein sources, such as beans and grain, will provide a balanced protein profile.” If your diet is plant forward, but not fully vegetarian, add an egg or some cheese to improve a mostly vegetarian dish’s “amino-acid profile,” she said.

Wired - New York City is sinking. It’s far from alone “If that coastal migration correlates with building new infrastructure along the coast, it’s very likely that we will see a change in land elevation,” says Virginia Tech environmental security expert Manoochehr Shirzaei, who did the previous study of subsidence on the East Coast. (He wasn’t part of this research team but reviewed their paper for the journal.)  

Popular Mechanics - Despite Germany shutting down its plants, We could be entering a nuclear power renaissance “People are now looking at what we call cogeneration,” Alireza Haghighat, professor of nuclear engineering and director of Virginia Tech’s Nuclear Engineering Program, tells Popular Mechanics. Haghighat says this involves taking the surplus heat produced as a byproduct of nuclear fission and transferring it into other processes.  

Popular Mechanics - Scientists discovered a surprise 6th mass extinction, Which came before the big 5 The study, published in November 2022 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, merged research from Virginia Tech and the University of California Riverside to reach the conclusion that the Ediacaran Period—which stretched from 635 million to 540 million years ago—saw the extinction of about 80 percent of all animals.  

NBC Bay Area - Global temperatures could reach new records in next 5 years Dr. Manoochehr Shirzaei, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech, says that even though the spike in temperatures will be temporary for a year or two, it will give us a glimpse of what our norm will be by the 21st century. "The catastrophe is coming," Shirzaei said. "We are on a course unfortunately that things in the short term are looking really bad.”