(Press release) Margaret Saha always loved science, but she didn’t set out to be a scientist. “When I was younger, I never thought I could do science,” she said. “Why not? I just thought science was for the really smart people. No one in my family had attended college, so I didn’t know what was even possible.” … She finished her history Ph.D., then switched specialties from Medieval European to history of science, but soon ramped off into science itself. “When I started my biology Ph.D., I was 33,” she said. “More than ten years older than everybody else. And I had a three-y...

The lawyer for a once-celebrated high seas treasure hunter has been hit with a four-year Virginia license suspension while his former client sits in prison for refusing to reveal the location of 500 gold coins. The coins are a missing portion of millions of dollars in gold and other valuables pulled by Tommy Thompson from the wreck of the S.S. Central America, which sank in 1857 loaded with West Coast treasure. Lawyer Richard T. Robol, a graduate of both the University of Virginia and Harvard Law School, was Thompson’s counsel and defended Thompson against accusations that h...

Teacher Deanna Cumberland said the program kicked off on Friday at school where her students had a tutor majoring in computer science from the University of Virginia teaching them how to create apps. “Friday night, we got on Zoom and met with Mrs. Velma Wilson, and she spoke to my students about Martin Luther King and her experience,” Cumberland said.  

Challenges remain in making far-out EV concepts a reality. For electric trucks, the weight required of the batteries to pull heavy loads over long distances is testing the limits of current technology, said Michael Lenox, a UVA professor and author of the book, “The Decarbonization Imperative: Transforming the Global Economy by 2050” in an email interview. He said the same hurdles of weight and battery life are hindering the dream of long-haul commercial flights. “Biofuels and hydrogen may end up being a better solution to decarbonize commercial air flights,” Lenox added.  ...

University of Virginia professor Paul Cantor argues that Macbeth, like Hamlet, is the story of a man and a country torn between antithetical ideologies, those of Christian England and pagan Norway.  

Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said Biden should stick to scripted, public remarks rather than marathon press conferences like the one he presided over last week. “It would be hard for any president, even one as good at this as a John Kennedy, to stand up there for two hours and just do it. I think he is strongest giving set speeches and reading from a script, where most contemporary politicians are not as good at that.”  

(Commentary) Entertainer John Legend, who has 13.8 million Twitter followers, tweeted: “Black parents need to flood these tip lines with complaints about our history being silenced. We are parents too.” UVA political analyst Larry J. Sabato took that ask further. He tweeted: “Parents of ALL races should flood Youngkin’s tip line.”  

It’s not entirely clear just what those “inherently divisive concepts” targeted by the Youngkin administration might include. Likewise, it’s not clear what the order means by “critical race theory,” which was originally recognized as a legal philosophy but now is often used to describe a larger grouping of racial equity policies or curricula that are frequent targets of conservative anger. “The order certainly doesn’t define what critical race theory is beyond saying that it is a set of ideas that foregrounds racial discrimination as a significant issue in American history a...

(Commentary) Some GOP legislators believe drop boxes, receptacles for early votes, are problems. Ken Hughes, researcher at UVA’s nonpartisan Miller Center, disagreed. “I voted by absentee ballot and drop box in the last election for health reasons, as did thousands of other voters,” Hughes said by email, “and we voted without jeopardizing the security of the election in any way. Politicians grossly exaggerate the problem of voting fraud to give themselves an excuse to engage in vote suppression, a means by which they make it more difficult for the majority to remove them fro...

Experts – including Dr. Steven Zeichner, professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases at the UVA School of Medicine – say myocarditis is not more common post-vaccine than it is post-COVID-19 infection. Vaccine-related myocarditis has been reported in 0.3-5 cases per 100,000 vaccinated people. But direct COVID-related heart injury or myocarditis is found in 1,000–1,400 per 100,000 people with COVID-19.  

Biden’s choice could unite Democrats in an election year when the party is expected to lose seats in Congress in the midterms. “This opening comes at an opportune time with Biden’s approval numbers declining and Democrats downright depressed about the party’s midterm prospects,” says Bertrall Ross, a law professor at University of Virginia Law School who served on Biden’s Supreme Court reform commission.  

Breyer’s retirement would be politically significant in the U.S. because there are rising fears among Democrats and liberals that the court – which now has a 6-3 conservative majority – is poised to reverse major judicial precedents. Biden’s fellow Democrats hold a razor-thin majority in the Senate, which under the Constitution must confirm Supreme Court nominees. If Republicans were to win back control of the Senate in the November election, that might foreclose Biden’s ability to name a new justice. “We are so polarized,” Douglas Laycock, a professor of constitutional law ...

Biden’s chance to pick a Supreme Court justice gives the White House an opportunity to tell a positive story, said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “It’s better than what the White House has had to deal with lately,” Kondik said.  

“He’s an optimist about what the law can do. He’s an optimist about what the Constitution can do, and he’s an optimist about democracy and how democracy can function and how it can function on behalf of the people,” said Risa Goluboff, dean of the University of Virginia law school, who clerked for Breyer during the 2001 term.  

The UVA Medical Center is seeing the highest number of COVID-19 patients than ever before. According to a UVA Health doctor, one in six patients admitted to the hospital have COVID-19 as part of their admission diagnosis. “This morning, 32 patients in the ICU with COVID and 117 total COVID patients are in the hospital, so those are pretty big numbers,” critical care specialist Dr. Kyle Enfield said Wednesday.  

I’ve been on the “obesity as a Covid comorbidity” beat for a while now, but the evidence keeps piling up, so I’ll keep sharing it. The latest comes from Arthur Weltman and Siddhartha Angadi, kinesiology professors in the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development. Here is an excerpt from a recent Q&A with the two.  

The American Society of Clinical Oncology has some new guidelines coming out regarding treating brain cancer. According to a release, these guidelines for treating cancers that have spread to the brain are poised to improve care for patients and help increase patient survival rates. The ASCO assembled a panel of experts to come up with these guidelines, including Dr. David Schiff from the UVA Cancer Center.  

A local doctor is partnering with other medical professionals to create a new treatment for burns. When you get a burn, the skin around the burn also dies. The team working on this new medication hopes to stop the surrounding skin from dying and prevent grafting. Dr. Mark Roeser, with the UVA School of Medicine, is working with Charlottesville-based Purnovate, a subsidiary of Adial Pharmaceuticals, and started doing research with lung transplants that required medication through an IV.  

(Press release) An international collaboration has demonstrated a new way to manipulate and measure subtle atomic vibrations in nanomaterials. This breakthrough could make it possible to develop customized functionalities to improve on and build new technologies. In this research, published in the journal Nature on Jan. 26, the team layered two different oxides into a Lego-like nanostructure called a superlattice. The structures were imaged at the atomic scale by Eric Hoglund, the paper’s first author and a researcher at the University of Virginia.  

Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business led all schools with an impressive 9.47 average across all 16 questions. The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School followed Georgetown with an impressive 9.43 average. Following Wharton was the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce with a 9.26.