Gov. Chris Christie's already arduous road to become a top presidential contender has taken another damaging diversion with the Bridgegate charges Friday, political experts agree. "If he were indicted or directly implicated in approving this nutty plan, his presidential plans would be over and his governorship would be in jeopardy, but we don't have that," agreed Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
When her husband died, Martha Washington destroyed almost all the letters the couple had exchanged during decades of married life, an era that included the Revolutionary War, the formation of the country and his presidency. Only a few are known to remain, including two, both tender and fraught, that George Washington wrote just before he left for war. Now researchers are launching a major new initiative to track down, transcribe, research and publish all of the Washington family’s papers. The joint effort by the Papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia and the Fred W. Sm...
Iran’s seizure of the Maersk Tigris cargo ship probably stems from a $3.6 million judgment in a decade-long dispute over 10 shipping containers, the Maersk Group said. Myron Nordquist, a maritime law specialist at the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, said the seizure of the vessel may violate international law, even if it was in Iran’s territorial waters, if the ship was operating within internationally recognized transit lanes.
Every day brings another presidential preference poll. Clinton leads the GOP field in North Carolina! Walker has the edge over the other Republicans in Iowa! Jeb Bush is has a slight margin over Hillary Clinton in Virginia! So are these polls remotely relevant to who will take the oath of office in January, 2017? They are not. I will add one caveat, courtesy of the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato. Early polls, he wrote here at usnews.com last month, “open or close many donors' wallets. When the polls look good for a candidate, the war chest fills. The early polls als...
This is the last of five posts I am publishing this week by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, all dedicated to reading and based on his new book, “Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do.” Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of several books, including “Why Don’t Students Like School? and “When Can You Trust The Experts? How to tell good science from bad in education.”
Scientists reported Thursday that they had identified an important new potential driver of aging, a finding that could have vast implications for human longevity and the treatment of diseases such as cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's. "This is a beautiful example of how genomics, human stem cells and the new gene-editing technologies conjoin to provide major insights into human disease," said Rick Horwitz, executive director of the Allen Institute for Cell Science, who is on leave from his position as a professor at the University of Virginia. "This is an early example of wha...
Goodpasture Christian School sits on a sprawling, bucolic campus seven miles north of downtown Nashville, where 900 students ready themselves for adult lives of college, career and loving the Lord. Right next door sits the United Fellowship Center, a planned church where adults will ready themselves to have sex with each other after enjoying a little BYOB togetherness. It’s the newest incarnation of The Social Club, a whispered-about swingers club in downtown Nashville that left for the suburbs when a building boom took its parking lot. All the courts would have to do in the swingers clu...
Republican presidential hopeful and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul blames the recent outbreak of violence in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray on the lack of family structure for the residents of that community. A report authored by Robert I. Lerman, professor of economics at American University and W. Bradford Wilcox, professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia presented American Enterprise Institute in 2014 supported the statement made by Rubio a year prior.
The University of Virginia’s main research library, built in 1938, has never had a major renovation. And when funding for such a project comes through, some faculty fear 2 million of Alderman’s 3 million books will be shipped to the Ivy Stacks, off-campus storage on Old Ivy Road, never to return. English professor David Vander Meulen rang the alarm at an April 17 lecture attended by former UVA president John Casteen, and accused the library staff of being secretive about plans that he believes will gut Alderman of its printed books, leaving digital versions with “irreversible...
Aakanchhya Tamrakar, vice president of the Nepalese Student Association (NSA) at the University of Virginia (UVA), says her fellow members wanted to help, but felt helpless in doing so. After receiving the support of campus organizations and students, Tamrakar says the NSA responded by raising awareness and starting fundraising campaigns. To raise money for hunger relief efforts, the NSA at UVA created a fundraising event, Stay Strong Nepal: Noms for Nepal, in partnership with three local restaurants A percentage of the proceeds will go toward United Nations World Food Programme.
With the first detailed observations through imaging interferometry of a lava lake on a moon of Jupiter, the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory places itself as the forerunner of the next generation of Extremely Large Telescopes. LMIRcam, the camera recording the images at the very heart of LBTI in the 3 to 5 micrometers near-infrared band, was the thesis work of Jarron Leisenring as graduate student at the University of Virginia. For Jarron, now an instrument scientist for NIRCam (the Near InfraRed Camera for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope) at Steward Observatory, these observations...
In 2013, Hillary Lewis came up with the idea for her Charlottesville-based organic juice company, Lumi Juice, after shopping at a Whole Foods store. Today her products are found at about 350 stores in the U.S., including Whole Foods and Fresh Market. Lewis was a student at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business when she developed the concept for Lumi. At Whole Foods, she picked up a juice made with high-pressure processing and became curious about that production method.
While an undergrad at William & Mary during those post-recession years, Lambert ‘99, now vice president of University Advancement, was lured by the promise of pizza to the Sadler Center to write letters to legislators supporting higher education funding. Meanwhile, the trend of decreasing public appropriations for higher education continued to intensify. University of Virginia – one of the flagship universities that, along with University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and University of California, Berkeley, formed the basis of Lambert’s inquiry – saw its state fundi...
(By Gerry Yemen, a senior researcher, and Gregory B. Fairchild, a business professor at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.) A couple of years ago, many Cubans couldn’t go into a restaurant. Now they are quietly opening their own eateries. In a country where private companies don’t have an identity, self-employed people are conducting “private activity.” Although the term “entrepreneur” generally is not favored, Cubans who have good ideas, a good education and are not government employees are instead registering as self-employed people.
A team of researchers from the Hampton University, alongside Professor William Moore, have been chosen by NASA to manage the Living, Breathing Planet Project, a part of NExSS or NASA Exoplanet System Science, which will be aiming to determine habitability on Mars and other planets to form guidelines for identifying what could support life on other planets out there. Moore will be leading researchers not just from HU but those from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Virginia Tech, the Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Virginia, the National Institute of Aerospace, the...
A new University of Virginia study is refuting current pediatricians’ recommendations for the maximum amount of television children should watch on a daily basis. “We were interested to see that children watching only one to two hours of TV already had almost the same degree of unhealthy body weight as those watching more than two hours,” Dr. Mark D. DeBoer, a UVa pediatric endocrinologist who led the research, said in a statement.
Once again, California’s Silicon Valley is confirming its status as a place of high-tech entrepreneurship and wealth creation. But it is not a model for job creation and inclusive growth that policymakers and entrepreneurs elsewhere can emulate – at least not without making some fundamental adjustments. The University of Virginia’s Miller Center recently created a commission (of which one of us, Lenny, was a member) to identify strategies to support the creation of middle-class jobs through entrepreneurship. The ideas proposed in the commission’s report include providin...
The White House, by grudgingly yielding to Congress' right to weigh in on a nuclear deal with Iran, has managed to dodge—for now—a domestic policy fight that could have potentially scuttled the Obama administration's delicate negotiations. "The White House secured some changes to the bill that made it more palatable, so the president has agreed to sign and he's ducked for now an unpleasant fight he might well have lost," said Larry Sabato, a politics professor and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
(By Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia) Yesterday I pointed out that, as students get older, they spend read less and less in their leisure time. One way to address this trend might be to allocate some time during the school day for them to read. The idea is that it might do more than improve reading ability (especially fluency and comprehension); it could also help motivation. Students who would otherwise not read for pleasure will do so and discover that they like it. Whether this practice brings any benefit to students has been controversial, but...
Perhaps the most important characteristic of visible light is color. Color is both an inherent property of light and an artifact of the human eye. The first person to realize that white light was made up of the colors of the rainbow was Isaac Newton, who in 1666 passed sunlight through a narrow slit and then a prism to project the colored spectrum onto a wall, according to Michael Fowler, a physics professor at the University of Virginia.