The Legislative Effectiveness Project was launched by political scientists Craig Volden at the University of Virginia and Alan Wiseman at Vanderbilt.
Scouring the Web to learn new ways to instill better health habits? Trying to find the best health app to lose weight or reduce stress? Or maybe you're posting on Twitter and Facebook to try to build a supportive community for your healthy goals. Online and mobile health interventions are getting easier to come by but psychologists say that while social media and Internet-based treatment programs can be beneficial, there is a need for rigorous methods to help guide the development and evaluation of these programs and apps. "It is our hope that the ‘bench to bookshelf' trajec...
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Institute of Politics: On Christie: Christie and Bush "were better than usual." On its winners: There were winners in that debate, Colbert and Saturday Night Live. Saying he'd meet with a deceased world leader "is a real goof. Christie's a governor and people in that position always have to prove they are competent in foreign policy. Unless Christie has employed a medium to communicate with King Hussein, Christie's going to have to do something he doesn't do well, admit an error." On its losers:...
The National Football League (NFL), Under Armour, GE, and the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the five winners of Head Health Challenge III, an open innovation competition to support the discovery, design and development of advanced materials that better absorb or dissipate impact. The new materials have the potential to improve the performance of protective gear, playing surfaces, and equipment for athletes, members of the military and others. The Challenge III judges included Jeff Crandall, professor in Engineering ...
When malnutrition is mentioned, people would always assume that the solution is to give more food especially to children. However, researchers say this is not always the case. Apparently, damage to the gut by infection can cause malnutrition and vaccination failure in children. Researchers from the University of Virginia School of Medicine worked with malnourished children in Bangladesh and found that food is not enough to vanquish malnutrition. They claim that if effective nutritional measures were implemented to every child around the globe, malnutrition rates would decrease by just a third.
A group of professors crafted the statement of support in response to calls to ban Muslims from coming to America. They say that kind of rhetoric goes against the beliefs of Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the university.
Kyle Kondik of the Center for Politics says politicians “find wedge issues that divide the country in ways in which the speaker is getting the bigger half of the country.” Republicans have used gay marriage and Democrats have used abortion rights to this end in the past.
Ben Castleman, an assistant professor of education and public policy, offers insights into how educators nudge students and families to make more active and informed decisions about the educational opportunities they pursue.
Improving science is precious to Brian Nosek and the Center for Open Science at the University of Virginia that he leads. I interviewed him recently at the “Improving Biomedical Research 2015″ conference at Stanford, hosted by METRICS, run by John Ioannidis and Steven Goodman. Listen to the podcast episode with that interview.
Micavibrio aeruginosavorus is the world's smallest known predator. The tadpole-shaped bacterium feasts on other bacteria, sinking its "teeth" into their cell walls and slurping up their insides. It was first discovered over 30 years ago, but it has been difficult to study because it gets contaminated in the lab by the bacteria it feeds on. “You can give it all the nutrients it needs to survive on its own and it simply won’t grow,” explains Martin Wu, a professor of biology at the University of Virginia. But this vampire is one of the good guys.
This year featured the two most expensive Senate races in history. One was a $6 million race to replace retiring state Sen. Chuck Colgan (D-29). The Democrat in that race, Jeremy McPike, raised $13 million. He beat the Republican in that race, Hal Parrish, who raised $2.2 million. The other was the $5 million race to fill the open seat in the Richmond suburbs created by the retirement of state Sen. John Watkins (R-10). Democrat Dan Gecker raised $1 million more than Republican Glen Sturtevant, although he still lost. "The status quo was preserved," says Geoff Skelley, analyst at the ...
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center of Politics, has written a 10-point summary of the literature on ballot order effects. Overall, the research suggests that there is an advantage to being the first name printed on the ballot. There’s also an advantage to being the last name on the ballot in a large field, as we have in the GOP presidential primary this year.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump can win the GOP nomination if he continues making shocking statements, builds an effective get-out-the-vote campaign, captures early primary states and convinces his angry working-class supporters to actually show up at the polls, experts told the Herald. Win early. Even if he loses Iowa Feb. 1 to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, he could bounce back quickly with a victory in New Hampshire eight days later, said Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.
(By W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia) It’s a message we hear more and more: Religion is bad. And certainly recent headlines — from terrorist attacks perpetrated by radical Islamists in Paris and San Bernardino to the strange brew of warped Christian fundamentalism that appeared to motivate alleged shooter Robert Dear at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs — feeds the idea that religion is a force for ill in the world. But in “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason,”...
When we think of a person suffering from malnutrition, we typically believe that the solution is more food. However, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine say this may not always be the case. A research group at UVA is working with malnourished children in an urban area of Bangladesh. They say that food alone is not enough. All signs point to a damaged gut as part of the problem.
Scientists don't like to admit it, but they love attention from the media. Stories about their work raise their professional profile, leading to better grants and better jobs. Some scientists had to put their work on the back burner to deal with the media deluge. "It was completely overwhelming, despite having prepared for weeks for it," says Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who led a massive replication of psychological science published in Science in August—No. 5 on Altmetric's list.
Looking at why providing food is not always enough to treat malnutrition in developing countries, researchers have discovered that damage to the gut from an infection can cause malnutrition and vaccine failure. It has been estimated that if every nutritional measure known to be helpful were applied to every child in the world, global malnutrition would be decreased by only a third, the study said. ‘We found that the longer that the child suffered from inflammation, the worse was their nutrition, suggesting that the body's immune response may be the root cause of the problem of malnut...
Ames, Iowa, is the top-ranked college town in the US, according to a new list from American Institute for Economic Research (AIER). The city of roughly 60,000 people earned the top spot thanks to its affordable cost of living and ample employment opportunities in the fields of science and technology. The rankings are calculated using 11 criteria including economic vitality, availability of entertainment, and rent. No. 4 on the list is Charlottesville, Virginia — home of the University of Virginia.
It wasn't that long ago that college meal plans were pretty simple, three meals a day, whatever was being served, inside a dining hall. Now, a new plan that adds culinary options for University of Virginia students and their meal plans could help pump new revenue into restaurants all along the university's Corner district. A dozen restaurants on the Corner are offering menus for the Elevate Meal Plan. It's a startup from two UVA graduates who want to give students more options to get some food beyond campus.