(By Chris Lu, U.S. deputy secretary of labor during the Obama administration and a senior fellow at UVA’s Miller Center) For Democrats to retake the House and Senate, they will have to drive turnout among college graduates, women, young people and minority voters, while reaching out to independents who supported Trump in 2016 but are now having regrets.
The rest of the year, Santa is Dr. Robert Sinkin, division head of neonatology and director of the NICU. The visit and photos help give families a break from the stressful environment of the NICU, he said. “We know how important it is to many families who celebrate Christmas with an ill child, not being able to go to the mall and get photos,” Sinkin said. “Our nursing and support staff know that the holidays are a special time, and we want to make it special.”
UVA researchers have discovered a critical trigger for macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss among the elderly. The finding may allow doctors to halt the inflammation early on, potentially saving millions of patients from blindness.
Research from the UVA School of Medicine has shown that between 1969 and 2011, cancer incidence declined in every region of the country except rural Appalachia, and mortality rates soared.
The bill from Del. R. Steven Landes (R-Augusta), HB3, calls for the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia to work with state and public university officials to set new quality standards for dual enrollment courses. It also envisions a system to ensure that courses that meet those standards will be accepted for credit at any of the state’s four-year public universities, including the College of William & Mary, the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University.
The University of Bristol has become the first university in England to join Universities Studying Slavery, a UVA-based multi-institutional collaboration dedicated to furthering the study of slavery’s legacy and wider historical and contemporary race inequalities.
A series of data will be collected as MU69 passes in front of a distant star and the New Horizon team prepare to steer it away from any hazards. UVA astronomer Anne Verbiscer said: “Using New Horizons’ suite of seven instruments, we’ll be characterizing the geology and morphology of the surface, looking to see whether there are any craters. We certainly expect to see craters.”
Jonathan Bartells, a nurse at the UVA Medical Center, was nominated for a prestigious award this year. He did something that took less than a minute but made a big difference in the lives of health care professionals whose patients died.
“The kookiness and unsavory nature of Roy Moore,” UVA’s Larry Sabato said, ultimately did his campaign in, aided by "the failure of Donald Trump – who struck out twice in Alabama this year, in a state he won by 28 percent."
Meg Heubeck sits on the carefully landscaped, kelly green lawn behind Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home, assessing the state of our democracy and talking about what was planted this year. It’s been an uneven year for Heubeck, the UVA Center for Politics youth programs educator who kicked off our national USA TODAY NETWORK weekly series this year on Americans leading positively in the wake of last year’s divisive election.
The United States has about 11.3 million undocumented immigrants. But how many of them are living in Virginia? “At the national level, ballpark estimates are credible.” That’s Qian Cai at the University of Virginia, who says she's often asked to give a ballpark estimate for undocumented immigrants in Virginia. “But the smaller the geography gets to, even at the state level, the margin of error gets to be quite large. And that’s why it’s not often produced or cited at the state level for illegal immigration statistics.”
While the jury is out on whether the Russians’ efforts actually had an impact on results, Facebook has already said it will start requiring the use of real names online so that foreign operatives can’t create fake accounts to boost their own presence. Will that work? Experts aren’t so sure. NPR reporter Ryan Lucas was able to sign up in under a minute with a fake name, and Siva Vaidhyanathan, a UVA media studies professor, says the tactic relies too much on users to be effective.
“Adrenal fatigue remains an unproven myth,” UVA professor of obstetrics and gynecology Dr. JoAnn Pinkerton says. She points to a 2016 review of articles and studies that failed to substantiate adrenal fatigue as a medical condition. “It has not been scientifically proven to exist,” Pinkerton says.
Studies have shown that moving around promotes learning, so kids in Montessori Schools are rarely required to stay in their seats, and UVA psychology professor Angeline Lilliard says they learn to write before they start reading. “Reading is very passive," she explains. "You’re taking in a stimulus, whereas writing you’re actually moving, and there are studies showing that reading is very facilitated by learning to write first.”
Tish Jennings, an associate professor at UVA’s Curry School of Education, is one of the researchers who developed the curriculum and is studying its impact in Louisville-area schools. Now in the fourth year of a six-year project, the Compassionate Schools Project aims to reach more than 10,000 students across 25 elementary schools with the curriculum, and compare them with students who are not exposed to it.
New Horizons will focus on the Kuiper Belt object, hoping to return images that have a best resolution of about 30m per pixel. The first of these should come back to Earth a couple of days after closest approach, which currently is timed to occur on Jan. 1, 2019. "Using New Horizons suite of seven instruments, we’ll be characterizing the geology and morphology of the surface, looking to see whether there are any craters. We certainly expect to see craters," explained team member Anne Verbiscer from the University of Virginia.
Democrats never expected to have a chance in Alabama, where they had not won a U.S. Senate race in 25 years. But the combination of Trump’s unpopularity, the sexual misconduct allegations that erupted against Moore in November and Trump's enthusiastic support of him anyway gave them the opportunity, experts said. “Trump was the one who got Jones within firing range, and Moore allowed Jones to win,” said Kyle Kondik, a UVA political analyst.
With its upset in Alabama, the Democratic Party has narrowed the Republicans' majority in the Senate to just one seat – energizing the party as it eyes the mid-term Congressional elections 11 months from now. "Now with 49 Democrats in the Senate, a path to a 2018 Democratic Senate majority is possible - still very tough given the seats up, but possible," tweeted Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia.
Jennifer Doleac is one of the very few academics who has studied ShotSpotter. She’s a UVA assistant professor of public policy and economics who specializes in the economics of crime and how technology impacts public safety. “There is very good evidence that this technology detects gunfire,” she told me when I asked her about the Chicago Police Department’s claims that ShotSpotter was behind the decrease in shootings. “But does it have an impact on anything that we care about, such as saving lives by getting victims to the hospital faster, clearing more cases, reducing crimes or decreasing gun...
President Donald Trump has suffered a setback in one of his heartland states after Roy Moore, the Republican evangelical accused of preying on teenage girls, lost a Senate election race in deeply conservative Alabama. “This is a tremendous setback for Donald Trump. He struck out twice – primary and special elections – in a state he won by 28 percent [last year],” said Larry Sabato, a UVA politics expert. “This was mainly due to Roy Moore’s craziness but it’s also due to Trump’s squandering of his chance to lead well as president.”