The broad area of contemplative studies and sciences has made an impact in the workplace, in hospitals and in town squares. Campus groups across the U.S., too, have grown around the mind-body connection. But more recently, several universities have started offering degrees, certificates, trainings and centers in contemplative studies. The University of Virginia has established a Contemplative Sciences Center in Charlottesville, while in suburban Atlanta, there's the Emory Collaborative for Contemplative Studies.
As people around the world celebrated the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Sunday, the University of Virginia held its own ceremony commemorating the event that marked a symbolic end to the Cold War in front of Alderman Library. Jody Kielbasa, the university’s vice provost for the arts, said the symposium focused on political and artistic expression in Cold War-era Germany.“I can think of no better backdrop, in the shadow of the Rotunda, on the Grounds of Mr. Jefferson’s university for our Berlin Wall symposium,” Kielbasa said.
Sunday the world marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The University of Virginia is commemorating the day the communist wall crumbled. The University hosted a special ceremony Sunday evening to mark the historic moment. Students and people in the Charlottesville community have celebrated the history making moment with a weeklong symposium. "The fall colors were out this evening, it's just a stunning evening, with more than 200 students and faculty and community members gathered to commemorate the fall of the berlin wall 25 years ago today,” said UVA Vice Pr...
More than 3,500 runners and walkers participated in the 22nd Women's Four Miler race on August 30. Friday, race directors presented a $375,000 check to the UVA breast care program at a ceremony in Emily Couric Cancer Center. That total is $5,000 more than the amount raised last year, and the most in Charlottesville Women's Four Miler history.
Community organizations are getting ready to help people navigate the complexities of the federal government’s health insurance marketplace, which begins a three-month open enrollment period Saturday. The uninsured will get the chance to purchase a plan through the marketplace from Nov. 15 to Feb. 15. Legal Aid and the Charlottesville Free Clinic will be offering advice for people looking to enroll. Mary Frances Charlton, an attorney with Legal Aid who also has been designated a “navigator” for the Affordable Care Act marketplace, said the service is open to people of all bac...
Students at Piedmont Virginia Community College will soon have a new bank branch on campus - and they'll be the ones running it. Through a program with the University of Virginia Credit Union, students will get hands-on experience operating the bank right on PVCC's campus.
The Virginia Film Festival’s screening of the 1964 film, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” at the University of Virginia on Sunday nearly filled the university’s Newcomb Hall Theater and the audience included students too young to remember the years of nuclear gamesmanship between the United States and the Soviet Union. The program was part of the university’s symposium on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event that came to symbolize the end of a long conflict between East and West.
The Virginia Film Festival is officially underway in Charlottesville. Saturday, families are invited for a day of fun. It's the 6th year the festival has held Family Day. This year, it features a free screening of the Wizard of Oz on the movie's 75th anniversary.
With only about 40 years under its belt, hip-hop is a relative newcomer to the music industry. Despite that, it’s already finding a place in classrooms across the country.In the latest documentary from North Carolina-based filmmaker Kenneth Price, the origins of the genre are examined through the lens of Grammy-winning producer and Harvard fellow Patrick Douthit, better known by his producer moniker, 9th Wonder. “The Hip Hop Fellow,” presented Friday evening at the University of Virginia as a part of the Virginia Film Festival, chronicles a year in Douthit’s life as he ...
Socially precocious youths who are popular and ahead of their peers don't seem to fare as well after the final school bell rings, according to research from the University of Virginia. "It appears that while so-called cool teens' behavior might have been linked to early popularity, over time, these teens needed more and more extreme behaviors to try to appear cool, at least to a subgroup of other teens," the lead researcher, Joseph P. Allen, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. "So they became involved in more serious criminal behavior and alcohol ...
In the bays of Virginia, Karen McGlathery, an environmental scientist at the University of Virginia, is studying the world’s largest restoration of sea grass beds, a 5,000-acre effort led by the College of William & Mary. “We easily think of forests as important to climate change because they are tall and visible,” McGlathery said. “We see this little strip of grass along the ocean, and we think they can’t be as important as forests — but they are.”
Doctors at the University of Virginia Medical Center last spring were planning how they would respond if they got a case of Middle East respiratory syndrome when Ebola surfaced as another risk that travelers could inadvertently bring to the U.S.“By July … it really became clear what was happening with Ebola in West Africa, and we folded that into our planning,” said Dr. Costi Sifri, hospital epidemiologist at U.Va. and an expert in infectious diseases and international health medicine. “In July and early August, we really focused significantly on Ebola preparedness pla...
(Dr. Michael Shim, a pulmonologist at University of Virginia Health System.) The introduction of electronic cigarettes into the marketplace has been done haphazardly — even backwards — compared to many products we purchase regularly, including food, drugs and cosmetics. Rather than testing the safety of e-cigarettes right out of the gate, these smokeless nicotine delivery systems have been manufactured, marketed and sold nationwide for years without any hard data on how the use of these devices impacts the body.
(By Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley) It might not have been 1994 or 2010, but 2014 was a wave all its own: a late-breaking surge that lifted Republicans to some surprisingly strong performances across the country. Notably, though, the argument for this election being a “wave” has more to do with the House and gubernatorial races, as opposed to the main event, the Republican Senate takeover.
Social scientists who study families and work say that men who take an early hands-on role in their children’s lives, are likely to be more involved for years to come and that their children will be healthier. Even their wives could benefit, as women whose husbands take paternity leave have increased career earnings and have a decreased chance of depression in the nine months after childbirth. But researchers also have a more ominous message. Taking time off for family obligations, including paternity leave, could have long-term negative effects on a man’s career — like lower...
The heated debate over whether it’s responsible for health care workers who treated Ebola patients to go grocery shopping or bowling or get on a cruise ship before the end of the disease’s 21-day incubation period raises a larger question: What is everyone’s duty to prevent transmission of infectious diseases? “I just flew from Washington, D.C., to Tel Aviv and had to take care of six sick passengers — three vomiting with fever,” said Dr. Gil Siegal, a surgeon and professor of law at the University of Virginia who has written extensively about the legal resp...
Oyster — known in the past as Oysterport, Cobb's Island Landing, Cobb's Hill and Cobb's Mill — is on the southernmost harbor on the seaside of Virginia's Eastern Shore, a few miles northeast of Cape Charles. A relative newcomer to Oyster is the University of Virginia's Anheuser-Busch Coastal Research Center, right next door to R & C Seafood. The $2.5 million center was built in 2006 on land formerly owned by The Nature Conservancy. "We are very interested in water and water quality. If you look at the Eastern Shore, you realize you are ne...
College students know more than anyone how hard it is to try to be an adult. Students living on their own suddenly must make decisions on their own, but oftentimes they feel lost and too intimidated to make those important decisions. An Oct. 30 National Academies Press report examines the developmental attributes of young adulthood—which is approximately ages 18–26—in relation to modern society, claiming it is much harder for the current generation to transition into adulthood than it has been for previous generations. What the report found, according to Richard Bonnie, chair...
Ro Khanna had a ton of money, the blessing of Silicon Valley's tech glitterati, some of President Obama's finest campaign masterminds and national media buzz in his bid to unseat fellow Democrat Mike Honda from the House. But as Khanna conceded the hard-fought race Friday, it seemed clear his youthful energy and bravado had masked what always were pretty long odds. Khanna "didn't have a ton to work with as a challenger," agreed Kyle Kondik, a congressional elections expert at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. But "he did a pretty good job of consolidati...
The close Virginia Senate race this year came as a surprise to many. A Quinnipiac poll taken around a month before the election had incumbent Senator Mark Warner in the lead by 9 percentage points. Political analysts at the University of Virginia say data gathered from millennial voters – those born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s - may have skewed the projections. Meg Heubeck at the UVA Center for Politics says it's not that millennials voted against projections, but that they simply didn't show up to the polls.