February 2024 Media Highlights

Wall Street Journal - How a Break From Alcohol Affects Your Health and Fitness Goals - If you’ve been hitting the gym but haven’t seen any gains, alcohol could be to blame. People who exercise more tend to drink more, according to a study by the Cooper Institute in Dallas published in 2022. But exercise doesn’t cancel out the effects of alcohol. “Alcohol cancels out the effects of exercise,” says Stella Volpe, department head of human nutrition, foods and exercise at Virginia Tech.

Washington Post - Proposed Caps, Wizards arena collides with transit plans for Amazon HQ2 - The e-commerce giant’s new headquarters would be nestled near the Pentagon, and a new Virginia Tech graduate engineering campus — another key to winning the company over — would be built in Potomac Yard.

MSNBC - There’s one simple purpose behind the Nevada GOP’s 2024 caucus - Op-ed by Caitlin E. Jewitt, an associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech and the author of "The Primary Rules: Parties, Voters, and Presidential Nominations."

Fox News Edge - Taylor Swift economics - “I think her personal brand is so big that she has the ability to change public opinion, change consumer behavior, whether that's football, clothing, politics,” said economics professor Jadrian Wooten.

LiveNOW Fox - Super Bowl Era: 'Taylor Swift effect' - LiveNOW from FOX's Jeane Franseen caught up with Virginia Tech University Professor Donna Wertalik about the effect Taylor Swift is having on the Super Bowl. Tonight the San Francisco 49ers will face off the Kansas City Chiefs in Las Vegas, Nevada.

CBS Newspath (via CBS New York & carried by CBS affiliates) - Taylor Swift bringing extra buzz to this year's Super Bowl - Transcript: “It was CBS’ most watched non-super bowl broadcast since the 1994 olympics and I think we’d all be naive if we thought Taylor Swift had nothing to do with that,” Anthony Amey, assistant professor of practice for sports media and analytics.

U.S. News & World Report - See the 2024 U.S. News Rankings for Best Online Programs - Best Online Master's in Information Technology Programs: Columbia University, Johns Hopkins' G.W.C. Whiting School of Engineering in Maryland and Virginia Tech once again ranked in the top three among online graduate information technology programs. However, unlike last year, Columbia and Johns Hopkins tied for the No. 1 spot.

New Yorker - Will Plants Ever Fertilize Themselves? - Getting nitrogenase up and running outside of its bacterial home is a bit like taking a finely tuned Rube Goldberg machine and reassembling it on Mars … Dennis Dean, a biochemist at Virginia Tech, echoed the sentiment: “I have a colleague I’ve collaborated with for many years, and he said that nitrogenase is good evidence that if God exists, he’s very devious.”

Earth - Bird population in North America has plummeted by 3 billion birds Ashley Dayer, an associate professor at Virginia Tech and an expert in wildlife conservation, emphasizes the critical threats facing birds today. These include habitat loss due to agricultural intensification and urbanization, climate change, window collisions, and predation by cats. Dayer, whose research focuses on applying social science to wildlife conservation, highlights the vital role birds play in our ecosystems.

Earth - Experts are using forensic science to fight wildlife trafficking - To address the pressing issue of wildlife trafficking, the College of Natural Resources and Environment at Virginia Tech has been granted $2.6 million by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

Smithsonian - Which Dogs Live the Longest? Scientists Say Small and Long-Nosed Canines Outlive Others - This contrasts with the long-held belief that crossbred dogs are longer-lived than purebred dogs because they have more variation in their genes, says Audrey Ruple, a veterinarian at Virginia Tech who was not involved in the new research, to New Scientist’s Chen Ly. Scientists may want to look more deeply at this difference in the future, she adds.

Outside -  Confused About Pooping in the Woods? This LNT Expert Has Tips. Jeffrey Marion teaches recreation ecology at Virginia Tech, and he wrote the book, literally, on Leave No Trace. It turned out, to my surprise and bowel relief, that there is some good news where #1 and #2 are concerned. “In the grand scheme of things, human waste isn’t a huge problem in the backcountry,” says Marion. “It can be a problem in localized areas that get a lot of use, like on Mt. Whitney. Also in extremely cold places, or dry places, or anywhere you can’t dig a cathole. Otherwise it isn’t usually a big deal, because it’ll decompose within a year.”

Inside Higher Ed - Student Success Wrapped: What You Wanted to Know About Supporting Students Health and Wellness Spaces, including a Brain Gym at Virginia Tech, a Reflection Room at Virginia Commonwealth University and new health center at Princeton University, promote student thriving.

New York Times -  The East Coast Is Sinking - The new research from Virginia Tech and the U.S. Geological Survey used satellite data to show the mounting threats to coastal communities. Nearly 40 percent of Americans live along coasts, where aging buildings, roads and rails face structural damage from floods. “You have a hazard that is becoming worse every day with sea level rise,” said lead author Leonard Ohenhen, Ph.D. candidate at Virginia Tech.

CBS News - It's not just rising sea levels – the land major cities are built on is actually sinking, NASA images show - A NASA-funded team of scientists at Virginia Tech's Earth Observation and Innovation Lab found the geographical problem is "happening rapidly enough to threaten infrastructure, farmland, and wetlands that tens of millions of people along the coast rely upon," NASA said.

Newsweek - NASA Images Show Where US East Coast Is Sinking - "Subsidence is a pernicious, highly localized, and often overlooked problem in comparison to global sea level rise, but it's a major factor that explains why water levels are rising in many parts of the eastern U.S.," Leonard Ohenhen, a Virginia Tech geophysicist and one of the paper's authors, said in a NASA Earth Observatory post sharing the maps.

Bloomberg - Unpredictable Power Surges Threaten US Grid -  And Your Home - The technology exists to track grid faults that pose a danger, but it’s “not properly used to take into account this extra data set, which costs extra money or requires investment,” said Saifur Rahman, a professor at Virginia Tech who served as the president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2023. “Until that regulation exists, the power company will not pay any attention to this.”

Forbes - Be Careful What You Feed Your Head - “When we have this consistent pattern in which major broadcast networks diverge completely, to the extent that they’re portraying an almost different reality in which topics are discussed, then you have this irreconcilable division across audiences,” says Eugenia Rho, [an] assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, who uses artificial intelligence to analyze cable news coverage and its impact on the American psyche.

The Hill - US needs to take China’s cyber-threat to US infrastructure more seriously - Op-ed written by Charles Clancy, Ph.D., the chief technology officer at MITRE, a not-for-profit research and development company. He was previously the Bradley Distinguished Professor of Cybersecurity at Virginia Tech and started his career at the National Security Agency.

BBC - How sewers are helping us to monitor disease outbreaks - Amy Pruden, a professor at Virginia Tech, says that this kind of surveillance could help pinpoint communities which have more of a resistance problem, alerting doctors to potential infections which are spreading among the population and providing them with more information to be able to prescribe the most effective antibiotic.

Slate - QAnon Can’t Be the Scapegoat Anymore - Michael Senters, a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech who researches the language and rhetoric of the far right online, argued that just as much as QAnon, anyone seeking to fight online extremism needs to monitor communities formed around anti-vaccine activism, Christian nationalism, and incel-style misogyny, among other issues.

The Verge - Automating ableism - More generally, says Ashley Shew, an associate professor at Virginia Tech who specializes in disability and technology, it “feeds into extra surveillance on disabled people” via technologies that single them out.

Sky News - Bloodthirsty vampire bats have been spotted just 30 miles outside of Texas and scientists fear the rabies-riddled creatures will invade the US in the next five years - Scientists led by a team at Virginia Tech have said they expect an ‘invasion of vampire bats to US soil between five and 20 years in the future,’ with sightings now just 30 miles outside Texas.

Full Measure (carried by Sinclair affiliates) - What's in a Name? - If anyone knows about manipulating language, it’s Kelly Wright. You could define her as an experimental sociolinguist and lexicographer.

Wall Street Journal - What Have Negative Political Ads Done to Us? - “In Virginia we’ve had a tradition of not having these negative races,” said Cayce Myers, a professor of communications at Virginia Tech who studies political advertising. “In the last few election cycles we’ve really seen an increase in negativity. Part of the reason is that negative ads are designed to drive hyperpartisan voters out to vote.”

ABC News - Even a losing presidential campaign can have benefits - "Candidates can run to stay relevant and keep their name out there, increase their name recognition, promote their own brand and increase their popularity," said Caitlin Jewitt, a political science professor at Virginia Tech.

New York Times - Student Housing Has a New Mantra: Bigger Is Better - Core Spaces has developed edge-of-campus housing in dozens of cities across the United States. The company’s Hub on Campus brand, for example, stretches from the University of California to the University of Florida. Its biggest, with more than 1,500 beds, is the one near Virginia Tech’s campus in Blacksburg, Va.

BBC - The remote island where giant tortoises clear runways for albatrosses - "Tortoises have an important ecosystem shaping behaviour," says Elizabeth Hunter, a conservation biologist for the US Geological Survey and Virginia Tech. She has studied tortoise ecology in the Galápagos Islands for over a decade. "[When they are gone], much more is lost than just the animals themselves. If there's no large herbivore present, then there's nothing to stop those woody plants [proliferating which] has cascading effects on other species and the habitat itself."

Reuters - Motive Technologies Sues Rival Samsara Over AI Dashcam, Fleet-Management - Technology Makani said Motive asked an outside third party, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, to benchmark both AI technologies side-by-side, and in the results Motive’s technology detected 86% of unsafe driving behavior while Samsara’s technology detected 21%. [Also in US News & World Report, Yahoo Finance, more]

Washington Post - Some D.C.-area colleges push back deadlines to commit after FAFSA delays - A growing list of colleges and universities in the D.C. region — including the University of Maryland at College Park, Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia — are giving prospective students more time to weigh admissions offers as schools wait for the Education Department to send critical financial aid data.

PBS News Hour - Students applying for college facing uncertainty as revised FAFSA delayed - Just this past week, Virginia Tech, for example, said it had moved its admissions deposit deadline for first-year college students to May 15. “Understandably so, families are concerned about the FAFSA process this year, and they are telling us that they need more time to make fully informed decisions,” Juan Espinoza, interim vice provost for enrollment management, said in a statement.

Associated Press (Picked up by ABC News, Fox News, and others) - Students and parents are frustrated by delays in hearing about federal financial aid for college - Just this past week, Virginia Tech, for example, said it had moved its admissions deposit deadline for first-year college students to May 15. “Understandably so, families are concerned about the FAFSA process this year, and they are telling us that they need more time to make fully informed decisions,” Juan Espinoza, interim vice provost for enrollment management, said in a statement.

Fortune - Student financial aid commitments are coming so late this year that grads are putting off their college decisions - Just this past week, Virginia Tech, for example, said it had moved its admissions deposit deadline for first-year college students to May 15. “Understandably so, families are concerned about the FAFSA process this year, and they are telling us that they need more time to make fully informed decisions,” Juan Espinoza, interim vice provost for enrollment management, said in a statement.

ADDitude - Q: “School Bullying Gave My Child Social Anxiety That Persists at Their New School.” - I just want to validate how hard this is and the importance of advocating for your student by moving him to a different school and trying to set him up for success. Rosanna Breaux, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist, director of the Virginia Tech Child Study Center, and assistant professor of psychology.

Washington Post - How this simple tool could keep your fruits and vegetables fresh - Your refrigerator already helps slow down the production of ethylene. Absorbers can be an extra help here. To get the most out of the technology, give it some space to work, said Alexis Hamilton, an assistant professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology at Virginia Tech.

New York / Intelligencer -  How AI Is Being Used to Influence and Disrupt the Election - [Eric Burger, the research director of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative at Virginia Tech and the former FCC] chief technology officer from 2017 to 2019, says that the agency’s vote will ultimately have an impact only if it starts enforcing the ban on robocalls more generally. Most types of robocalls have been prohibited since the agency instituted the Telephone Consumer Protection Act in 1991.