In The News

(Commentary) “The problem with Facebook is Facebook” goes the line coined by Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, a UVA media scholar. The problems, Vaidhyanathan explains, result when the platforms perform exactly as designed.

It’s fun to romanticize early modem listening as a folk ritual. In an email to Gizmodo, Kevin Driscoll, professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, described early modem listening as a participatory act of summoning the technology to do its bidding. 

Experts caution that the results are preliminary and not a guaranteed cure. Of the three initial patients, one relapsed and is no longer in the trial. Even if the institute’s trial shows that it can help some untreatable addicts, broader use is still years away. “There is a lot of research where there have been positive findings initially and then they don’t prove to be that reproducible,” said Dr. W. Jeffrey Elias, a professor of neurological surgery at the UVA Brain Institute. Even so, he says the concept and early findings are exciting. “We are understanding more and more about the brain ci...

The reason deforestation represents an “own goal” is that forests aren’t just important for the global climate. “[F]orests do a lot more than store CO2,” University of Virginia environmental science professor Deborah Lawrence explains in the press call. “They are critical climate regulators. They keep us cooler every day, protecting us against extreme heat, maintaining rainfall, and controlling the flow of water across and through our lands.”

Fast forward 1967: Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine founded the Division of Perceptual Studies, a research mecca for scientists and physicians to study survivors of clinical death with a story to tell. DOPS research attracted medical doctors like Bruce Greyson, M.D., Chester F. Carlson Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, whose specialties include death-bed visions, and neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick from University of Cambridge, who became curious when a patient described an NDE after Fenwick resuscitated him.

There are some other medical experts who believe in the possible existence of life after death. A few months back, Dr Bruce Greyson, professor emeritus in psychiatry at the University of Virginia had suggested that humans could have a non-physical part.  “I recognize that there is a non-physical part of us. Is that spiritual? I’m not sure. Spirituality usually involves a search for something greater than yourself, for meaning and purpose in the universe. Well, I certainly have that,” said Greyson.

(Podcast; subscription may be required) Today on the Academic Minute: Frank Dukes, distinguished institute fellow and lecturer at the University of Virginia, explores an example of how change is coming to many historical institutions. 

As the cost of developing solar projects continues to fall while the demand for renewable energy climbs, the pressure on local officials will intensify. How do they accommodate utility-scale solar while staying true to their comprehensive plans? “Solar is the latest emerging land use for which we need to have a public dialogue,” said Jonah Fogel, program director for the Environmental Resilience Institute at the University of Virginia. “As we build out the energy future for the country and decarbonize the economy, there are going to be trade-offs.” Fogel  also works with local governments...

Legal scholars say that the wave of state laws preventing local climate action and other progressive priorities, which they call “new preemption,” is different. States are increasingly using preemption as a partisan tool that prevents any regulation on a given issue. Foster likens the tactic to a “partisan hit-job,” while University of Virginia law expert Richard Schragger calls it an “attack on American cities.”

Pediatricians are seeing more childhood ear infections this summer than last year, as they rise to levels that were previously seen before the pandemic. Dr. Abigail Kumral, a UVA pediatrics assistant professor, says there were fewer ear infections when kids were wearing masks and practicing social distancing.

Just because you were told you had a penicillin allergy when you were a kid doesn’t mean you still have it or that you ever did, according to researchers. A University of Virginia asthma and allergy researcher says current research shows allergic reactions to one of the oldest antibiotics have been over reported over the years, often because of a confusion of rashes and reactions. Dr. Anna Smith, an assistant professor of medicine at UVa School of Medicine, says determining whether a person has an allergy could mean that more patients are able to take the drug, which is effective against a mor...

Making the case that offshore wind presents an economically viable piece of the commonwealth’s energy picture has been part of ODU’s role since 2006, when the General Assembly established the Virginia Coastal Energy Research Consortium. Headquartered at ODU, VCERC brought together researchers from Virginia Tech, James Madison University, William & Mary, Norfolk State University, Hampton University, the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University. In its 2010 final report, VCERC researchers reported that with carbon reduction measures expected to increase the cost of coal-fi...

Doxycycline, a derivative of the drug tetracycline, is an antibiotic used to treat respiratory infections, skin infections, and sexually transmitted infections that has shown potential ability to inhibit coronavirus replication and exhibited anti-inflammatory properties. A study published in July 2020 from professors at the schools of medicine at the University of Virginia, Boston University, and Cornell suggested that doxycycline could be responsible for improvement in condition of four COVID-19 patients who were “high risk for morbidity and mortality” but emphasized the need for a “larger ra...

The University of Virginia’s model projection shows cases will likely peak the week of Oct. 10, but Shelton hopes that peak can be avoided.

As UVA media studies professor Christopher Ali notes in a recent book chapter, it’s no longer the norm that “broadcasters should be responsible to, and reflective of, their communities of license,” with the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that regulates broadcast TV, having left it over the past three decades “to broadcasters, and not the regulatory mechanisms at the disposal of public policy, to ensure local communities are served.”

Siddhartha Angadi is a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at UVA – a man devoted to understanding the relationship between weight, exercise and health. “I look at the effects and interactions of everything from exercise to diet and drugs, health and disease – primarily looking at cardiovascular conditions where obesity is a risk factor,” he said. This month he and a colleague at Arizona State University shared findings from a massive review of studies on weight and fitness. His findings were so surprising that they’ve attracted attention from around the world.

Wladek Minor, a UVA professor of molecular physiology, teamed up with other researchers, including ones from China and Poland, to create the website called VirusMed. The site will be the source to find information on all of the known viruses in one place.

Researchers at the UVA School of Medicine and collaborators in China and Poland have developed a database, called virusMED (virus Metal binding sites, Epitopes, and Drug binding sites), as a freely available resource to help speed the development of vaccines and treatments against viral diseases. Accessed through the https://virusmed.biocloud.top portal, virusMED lays out everything known about the atomic structure and potential vulnerabilities of more than 800 virus strains from 75 different virus families, including SARS-CoV-2, influenza, Ebola, and HIV‑1.

While nobody could have predicted the COVID-19 outbreak, an international team of scientists are staying one step ahead of the next pandemic. UVA School of Medicine scientists, with collaborators in China and Poland, have created a powerful new tool to speed vaccines and treatment for future pandemics. The new tool, called virusMED, in the form of an internet database, maps out everything known about atomic structure and potential vulnerabilities of more than 800 virus strains from 75 different virus families, including SARS-CoV-2, influenza, Ebola and HIV‑1, according to UVA.  

In 2011, UVA ophthalmologist Jayakrishna Ambati and his colleagues made a curious observation: In the pigmented retinal layers of human eye samples afflicted with an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration, they discovered high concentrations of Alu transcripts. Alu is a class of transposable elements, DNA bits that jump around the genome through a copy-paste mechanism that occurs in the nucleus. Further studies by the team suggested that the Alu RNA was somehow causing inflammation and cell death, but it was a mystery how. Earlier this year, Ambati’s team uncovered an important clue