June 2025 Media Highlights

ABC News - 'Danger zone': Top companies weather uncertainty as Trump's tariffs fluctuate - "If consumption starts coming down and companies are not investing, that's when you start to see little parts of gross domestic product come down," Jadrian Wooten, a professor of economics at Virginia Tech, told ABC News.

Washington Post - Satellite measures river flow waves for the first time - “We’re learning more about the shape and speed of flow waves, and how they change along long stretches of river,” Hana Thurman of Virginia Tech, the paper’s lead author, said in a news release.

USA Today - Ukraine drone attack shows familiar-looking drones can be terrifying weapons - So far in the United States, drones are an inexpensive, convenient and hugely useful tool that have made significant inroads into many arenas that might seem improbable at first, said John Coggin, associate director of Virginia Tech's Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership program in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Time - Authorities Issue Warnings Over Multistate DMV Scam Texts. Here’s What to Look Out For - Murat Kantarcioglu, a professor of computer science at Virginia Tech, told TIME earlier this year that people should also make sure they are informing their older relatives of any prevalent scams, as they may be less tech-savvy and more vulnerable.

Time - How Doubling Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum Will Hit U.S. Businesses and Consumers - “Consumers will have to pay the price,” says Virginia Tech economics professor David Bieri. “The continued uncertainty that is created by the government is poisoning business plans.”

Fox Weather - How researchers use new tools to predict future flooding - Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech, David F. Muñoz, joins FOX Weather to share how researchers use deep learning to predict future floods. 

Discover - Bed Bugs May be The First Human Pest, Having Spread to Neanderthals 60,000 Years Ago - “We wanted to look at changes in effective population size, which is the number of breeding individuals that are contributing to the next generation, because that can tell you what’s been happening in their past,” said Lindsay Miles, lead author and postdoctoral fellow in the Virginia Tech Department of Entomology, in a press release.

New York Times - Early Humans Settled in Cities. Bedbugs Followed Them. - “When humans decided they liked being around other humans and started to build cities, the bedbug population skyrocketed,” said Lindsay Miles, an entomology researcher at Virginia Tech and an author of the study. 

New York Times - How to Keep Bedbugs From Coming Home With You - Bedbugs leave behind fecal stains of digested blood, which resemble “little black spots that look like they’ve been made by fine felt-tipped marker,” according to Dini Miller, a professor of entomology at Virginia Tech. 

Interesting Engineering - New recyclable, self-healing circuit board could solve world’s e-waste crisis - Researchers from Virginia Tech have developed a new type of recyclable circuit board material that could aid in the fight against the growing problem of electronic waste (e-waste). 

Technical.ly - Virginia Tech hones in on advanced computing with new institute - “As Virginia’s land-grant research university, we are connecting the world’s best talent and partners to the commonwealth and bridging the gaps between academia, industry, and government in the greater DC area,” Virginia Tech President Tim Sands said in a press release.

IFL Science - Next Megatsunami May Sink Parts Of The Pacific Northwest Coast By Up To 2 Meters - “The expansion of the coastal floodplain following a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake has not been previously quantified, and the impacts to land use could significantly increase the timeline to recovery,” Tina Dura, assistant professor of geosciences in the College of Science, explained in a statement.

Forbes - The Prototype: This AI Model Could Make It Faster To Find New Medicines - A team of researchers at Virginia Tech invented a new kind of circuit board that is both more durable and easier to recycle than conventional electronics. 

USA Today (also Scientific American) - Stinging and 'wicked' Asian needle ants are spreading across the US - "People are most often stung when they're working in their garden," said Theresa Dellinger, a diagnostician at the insect identification lab at Virginia Tech. 

Washington Post - 'Dreaming of Home' is part memoir, part guide for community organizing - Janine Joseph is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech. She is author of “Decade of the Brain: Poems” and “Driving without a License,” and co-editor of “Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora.”

The Cool Down - Scientists investigate little-known side effect of next-gen power plants: 'So important' "- Habitat loss due to agricultural intensification and urbanization is arguably the biggest threat to birds, along with climate change," said Virginia Tech associate professor in the College of Natural Resources and Environment Ashley Dayer in a school press release.

ScienceAlert - We've Been Misreading a Major Law of Physics For Nearly 300 Years - Virginia Tech philosopher Daniel Hoek wanted to "set the record straight" after discovering what he describes as a "clumsy mistranslation" in the original 1729 English translation of Newton's Latin Principia. 

Science - 'Dragon prince' dinosaur may be missing link in T. rex evolution - “It’s awesome to see this part of the tyrannosaur tree being filled in with new fossils,” says Sterling Nesbitt, a paleontologist at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University who led the description of Suskityrannus, a smaller, slender-bodied tyrannosauroid that lived in North America some 92 million years ago.

GQ - The Best Bike Helmets for Maximum Noggin Protection - For $90, it also includes MIPS impact protection and received a five-star Virginia Tech helmet rating.

Construction Dive - Skanska nabs $303M Massachusetts bridge job - The firm said it has signed a supplemental contract worth $240 million with Virginia Tech to construct a new College of Engineering building.

NPR - Ancient miasma theory may help explain Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s vaccine moves - "They discovered what we know as germs – microbes," says Melanie Kiechle, a historian at Virginia Tech. "Bacteria and viruses and other microscopic materials were actually what caused illness and also explained the spread of illness from one person to another. So miasma theory is debunked, essentially." 

Politico -  ‘President Trump is right’: Pardon hopefuls play up connections to Trump - Virginia Tech political science professor Karen Hult, who specializes in the powers of the presidency and the executive branch, said that while issuing pardons in arenas of personal interest to the president isn’t necessarily unusual — see Jimmy Carter’s pardon of people who evaded the Vietnam War draft — repeatedly circumventing the Justice Department’s pardons process, as Trump has done, is a less-than-common occurrence.

Reuters - Virginia governor's race a test of Trump's grip on competitive state - Virginia's politically diverse electorate requires Spanberger to break into more rural areas that have been a challenge for the national Democratic Party, according to Brandy Faulkner, a politics professor at Virginia Tech. "She's going to have to get out of that little bubble and really see what ordinary people in the non-metro areas are concerned about and why they've been voting as they have been,"

Travel + Leisure - This Is One of the Biggest Cybersecurity Mistakes You Can Make at an Airport, Experts Warn - While cruising an airport’s public internet network may feel like a convenience, criminals can easily exploit those networks to steal sensitive data from unsuspecting travelers, experts warn. “It’s definitely among the worst things you can do at an airport,” Matthew Hicks, a cybersecurity expert and associate professor of computer science at Virginia Tech, told Travel + Leisure.

Business Insider - The 5 best cat litter mats we tested with a vigorous digger - Cats who are vigorous diggers are more likely to fling litter out of the box, says Dr. Mark Freeman, a veterinarian and clinical associate professor of community practice at Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine.

Scripps News - Tensions mount worldwide as Trump calls for Iran's 'UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER' - Experts, however, say an unconditional surrender is highly unlikely. "The Iranian political elite was forged in the experience of the revolution of 1979 and the brutal eight-year Iran-Iraq war against Saddam Hussein. Iran did not quit during that war, and the political elite are quite aware that they can withstand a lot more pressure than what they have seen so far," said Dr. Ariel Ahram a professor at Virginia Tech and editor of the Middle East Journal. 

Daily Mail - Do 'miracle seats' whose occupants can survive a plane crash exist? Experts reveal all after Air India's sole survivor escaped from 11A - Ella Atkins discusses recent plane crashes. 

The Cool Down - US agencies scramble to contain massive oil leak from decades-old well: 'We owe it to our communities' - The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill that happened in the very same region in 2010 caused $17.2 billion in damage to natural resources, according to a Virginia Tech article.