Avery Walters, a third-year civil engineering student at the University of Virginia, has designed a passively cooled Cambodian farm school, a rapidly deployable shelter for displaced people, created 3-D models of Soviet spacecraft and is now working on a smart HVAC control system that manages indoor air quality and energy consumption as his capstone project.

He can add a John Mather Nobel Scholarship to his list of accomplishments.

Walters, whose studies focus on civil engineering with a concentration on environmental and water resources, will use the funds to network.

A new discovery about osteoporosis suggests a potential treatment target for that brittle-bone disease and for bone loss from rheumatoid arthritis.

The findings from University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers and their collaborators help explain why specialized bone cells, called “osteoclasts,” begin to break down more bone than the body replaces. With more research, scientists one day may be able to target that underlying cause to prevent or treat bone loss.

A summer surge in U.S. COVID-19 cases, fueled by the delta variant, has begun to wane, although many health systems remain heavily strained. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, one in three U.S. hospitals with intensive care units recently reported that at least 95% of their intensive care unit beds were full. 

University of Virginia professors Micah Mazurek and Dr. Beth Ellen Davis have spent their careers working to improve the health and well-being of children with disabilities. Both Davis’ and Mazurek’s long-standing commitment to this work is, in part, an outgrowth of their serving as fellows and, ultimately, leaders in the national Leadership Education in Neurodevelopment & Related Disabilities, or LEND, program.

This month, the U.S. National Science Foundation announced that researchers in the University of Virginia’s Department of Environmental Sciences, along with researchers from 11 other universities and research institutes, will take a leadership role in The Center for Chemical Currencies of a Microbial Planet, or C-CoMP, a virtual center coordinated through an administrative hub based at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

The statistics vary from year to year, but a failure rate of 60% for candidates is not unusual at the U.S. Army’s Ranger School.

Second Lieutenant Sam Martino, a former University of Virginia wrestler, is among the soldiers who passed the grueling 62-day course and earned a Ranger tab this summer.

“I don’t pretend to know how hard it was, but just some of the things I’ve heard and read, it’s crazy what they go through,” UVA head wrestling coach Steve Garland said. “What that young man was able to endure and persevere through, that’s just incredible to me.”

Tax breaks for charitable giving should be expanded, not eliminated, to encourage community engagement among all income levels, says University of Virginia School of Law professor Andrew Hayashi.

Many U.S. schools, businesses and governments requiring COVID-19 vaccination have offered religious exemptions. But what are they, exactly, and is the government even required to offer the exemptions in the first place?

The Virginia Film Festival announced Tuesday that it will be returning for its 34th year with a program of in-theater and drive-in presentations from Oct. 27-31. Festival officials also announced that this year’s lineup will include an episode of the highly anticipated Hulu limited series “Dopesick,” presented in partnership with the Virginia Festival of the Book. The screening, which will be held at the Paramount Theater, will be followed by a conversation with writer and executive producer Danny Strong.