UVA researchers quizzed 2,425 pairs of male and female twins from the state of Washington about how often and how much they drink. When they looked at twins where one was married and the other single, they found married men and women tend to drink less than those who were single or divorced.
The "ban the box" movement aims to help Americans with prior arrests or convictions get a foot in the door with employers. What if the policies hurt more people than they help? That's the question posed by new research from UVA professor Jennifer L. Doleac and University of Oregon professor Benjamin Hansen.
The hacking challenge included 96 rounds in which computers were charged with examining software programs, identifying bugs, patching them and finding ways to attack rival machines. Second place went to a program created by security experts from UVA and GrammaTech Inc, earning $1 million.
A quest to build a smart computer system that finds and patches bugs faster and more efficiently than humans is off to a good start with teams in DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge performing very well. … In second place was the TechX team from GrammaTech and UVA, setting them up for a $1 million payday.
When you offer kids rewards, there's the potential for them to think, "The reason I read is because I'm offered a reward." Therefore, what's going to happen when you eventually stop the reward? The child is going to figure, "There's not really any point to reading. I wasn't reading because I liked it. I was only reading to access the reward," UVA psychology professor Daniel Willingham said.
UVA psychologists plan a clinical trial this fall to find out if it’s possible to improve people’s happiness. Samantha Heintzelman and UVA colleagues have come up with a 10-week program to make happiness a habit. She hopes to enroll more than 100 volunteers.
For those of us non-athletes, having some flexibility is important for healthy living, said Jay Hertel, a UVA kinesiologist and professor of sports medicine. "You need to be able to go through a functional range of motion from the standpoint of being able to do activities of daily living."
While meditation is still often portrayed in pop culture as an esoteric art, it’s now common at Google, Apple and the Pentagon. The surprisingly simple practice – stepping back to focus on the breath and notice thoughts and sensations – cannot only help a public servant deal with a stressful situation like a hostile hearing, but also to devise strategy and solve problems. UVA psychology professor Timothy Wilson has argued that the human brain is poorly equipped to handle the roughly 11 million bits of information that arrive in any given mom...
Congresswoman Barbara Comstock doesn’t need to reconsider her endorsement of Donald Trump in light of his comments about a Gold Star family. That’s because she never made one. That would be the most competitive race in Virginia, where Geoff Skelley at UVA’s Center for Politics says Comstock’s approach is risky, but understandable.
In an unusual legal action, federal prosecutors in San Francisco drastically cut back the potential criminal penalties they were seeking in the trial of utility giant Pacific Gas and Electric Co. which is accused of violating pipeline safety laws in the wake of the 2010 San Bruno gas explosion. As UVA law professor Brandon Garrett told the Associated Press, "Obviously, if a company does not have to pay a fine that is larger than its gains, then its crime becomes profitable."
Brian Nosek, a UVA psychology professor and executive director of the Center for Open Science, argued that data should be made more widely available, especially if the research is publicly funded. “It makes a lot of sense for the federal policy-makers to get interested in open data because we paid for it with taxpayer dollars. It’s a return on investment,” he told Vocativ.
The surprising decision by federal prosecutors in San Francisco to drop pursuit of a potential $562 million fine against one of the nation’s largest utilities after a deadly pipeline blast marked the second time in recent months that the office has backed down in a high-profile criminal case against a major corporation. Brandon Garrett, a UVA law professor who studies corporate crime, said the moves indicate “the office is not adequately planning and investigating its corporate cases before trial.”
Babies and young children are much less likely to learn from a video than from a live person. UVA’s Judy DeLoache and colleagues looked at “baby media” in a study in the journal Psychological Science in 2011. Babies watched a popular DVD meant to teach them new words. Though they saw the DVD repeatedly, they were no more likely to learn the words than babies in a control group. But in live conversation with their parents, babies did learn the words.
Heart disease risk factors – such as abnormal cholesterol levels and high blood pressure – appear to increase before a woman goes through menopause, not after, new research finds. "These risk factors related to heart disease and stroke appear to worsen rapidly in the years leading up to menopause, and during the postmenopausal period they progress less rapidly," said Dr. Mark DeBoer, the study's senior author and a UVA associate professor of pediatric endocrinology.
Entrepreneur Magazine and Livability.com recently named Charlottesville fourth in their ranking of 50 Best Cities for Entrepreneurs. The ranking cites the Innovation Laboratory at UVA as well as the Community Investment Collaborative and the Charlottesville Business Innovation Council as assets helping to accelerate business growth.
From surveillance cameras to smartphones, today’s crimes are increasingly being captured on video. But could showing slow-motion replays of crimes in court be producing harsher verdicts? This is the suggestion from a new study published in PNAS by a team including UVA researchers. They argue that slow-motion replays can give viewers “the false impression that the actor had more time to premeditate before acting.”
A soon-to-be-published paper in the Journal of Family Psychology provides data on a question pondered in bars all across America: Are we all just drinking because we’re lonely and single? It’s important to look separately at the questions of how often people drink and how much they drink, said lead author Diana Dinescu, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Virginia.
Doctors thought the onset of menopause increased women’s risk of heart disease. New research led by Dr. Mark DeBoer, a UVA associate professor of pediatric endocrinology, shows the trouble starts even earlier.
“History doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes,” said Ed Ayers, one of the hosts of “BackStory with the American History Guys,” a history-focused radio show and podcast recorded at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Ayers, Peter Onuf and Brian Balogh – all of whom have taught at UVA – each specialize in a specific slice of American history.
In a legal filing, Wells Fargo said its lending practices “did not cause the City’s financial difficulties any more than they caused the City to thrive in the years leading up to the financial crisis.” Bank of America expressed a similar sentiment in its filings. “If the Supreme Court finds standing for the city, then you’ll see a lot more of these lawsuits,” said George Rutherglen, a UVA law professor. “And if not, then the court is retrenching on a very broad approach to litigation under the Fair Housing Act.”