According to research published Wednesday in the journal Lighting Research & Technology, billboards, stadiums, and parking lots are all wasting tons of energy – amounting to $3 billion annually across the U.S. – on excessive, poorly-managed lighting. These lights block out the stars, contribute to climate change, and even throw migrating animals off of their course. “We waste tremendous resources on light that goes out into space and doesn’t do anyone any good,” UVA astronomer Kelsey Johnson, who didn’t work on the project, said.
In one sense, it’s not surprising that Americans don’t know much about how hegemony shapes other countries’ politics and societies. As UVA political scientist Brantly Womack explains in his book, “Asymmetry and International Relations,” hegemonic powers like the United States have the privilege of treating their relations with weaker countries more or less as hobbies simply because there’s rarely much at stake for them.
Dr. Taison Bell, assistant professor of medicine in the divisions of infectious disease and pulmonary/critical care medicine at the University of Virginia, joins Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers to discuss the recent COVID-19 case spikes.
As fall and winter roll around, colder weather in those states could also be driving people indoors in close proximity to one another. Dr. Bill Petri, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health at the University of Virginia, said indoor spaces are "more dangerous" and increase risk of airborne infection.
(Analysis by Kyle Kondik, political analyst at UVA’s Center for Politics and the managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball) Per Crystal Ball tradition, we are going to release our final ratings for the 2020 election on Monday. That includes picking all of the Toss-ups. Well, perhaps not quite all of them. Today we’re shifting both of Georgia’s Senate elections from Leans Republican to Toss-up.
Breast Cancer Awareness Month isn’t over just yet, and one fitness studio in Charlottesville is trying to raise money for research and treatment through cycling. Zoom held its Tapbacks for Tatas fundraiser all day Thursday to raise money and awareness to benefit the University of Virginia’s mobile mammography unit.
Most laws that are subjected to such a test – lawyers refer to this rigorous level of constitutional analysis as “strict scrutiny” – are struck down. Yet, while the Court used three loaded words in Sherbert, the judiciary applied something much less rigorous than strict scrutiny in cases involving religious objectors. A 1992 study by James E. Ryan, now the president of the University of Virginia, found that federal courts of appeals heard 97 free exercise cases applying the “compelling interest” test between 1980 and 1990, and those courts rejected 85 of these cases.
A study by professors at UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce found that in a month when a conservative user visited Facebook more than usual, they read news that was about 30% more conservative than the online news they usually read. By contrast, when a typical conservative used Reddit more than usual, they read news that was about 50% more moderate than what they typically read.
A Charlottesville-area pumpkin carver is helping one of the University of Virginia libraries get into the spirit of Halloween. The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library is now home to some carvings by Ed Morton, an experienced pumpkin carver.
UVA Sustainability Director Andrea Ruedy Trimble says the University is making its efforts in conjunction with Charlottesville and Albemarle County as part of their Climate Action Together partnership. The University made a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030 and free of fossil fuels by 2050.
"These forests can be some of the only really clear signs we can see on the landscape of the salt water coming in," says Cora Johnston Baird, director of UVA’s Coastal Research Center. Baird helped design the collaborative “Ghosts of the Coast.” She says it’s part botany lesson, part field study, part revelation.
With 11,000 streams and 10 drive-in screenings, this year’s Virginia Film Festival was successful, albeit unusual.
The presidential election of 1800 was the first to go to the House of Representatives for resolution, after Vice President Thomas Jefferson received the same number of electoral votes as his fellow Democratic-Republican, Aaron Burr. “There were threats of violence and talk of the Virginia or Pennsylvania militias marching on the Capitol if Jefferson wasn’t elected,” says Sidney Milkis of UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs.
William Petri, a professor of infectious diseases at the UVA School of Medicine, said he is not traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday, but is driving with his wife in early November to see a newborn granddaughter in Tampa. For Thanksgiving, Petri said he would be OK with his two children on the West Coast flying to visit him, as long as they wore masks and goggles on the flight.
According to J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at UVA's Center for Politics, the 2016 election showed that accounting for education is now as important as race and gender for conducting an accurate poll. He said “the biggest lesson, especially in the Trump era, is educational attainment as a predictor of people's voting habits.”
The Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia has announced several changes to the campus landscape. UVA President Jim Ryan stated that these “actions that will make this place more clearly and obviously welcoming to all, and where all have an opportunity to thrive.”
Juan R. Torruella, a groundbreaking Hispanic federal judge in New England who championed the rights of his fellow Puerto Ricans and, in a recent case, joined a decision to overturn the death penalty imposed on a Boston Marathon bomber, died on Monday in San Juan. He was 87. He received a master of law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law.
Dr. Bill Petri, a professor at the UVA School of Medicine, said that the next president needs to focus on finding a vaccine for the disease and producing those vaccines within the U.S.
Assuming Democrats win a Senate majority, “there will be a tremendous amount of pressure on Biden and on the Senate as well” to expand the size of the Supreme Court, said professor Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at UVA’s Miller Center and a Supreme Court expert, adding progressives might think they would need to “fight fire with fire” after Trump appointed three justices to the Supreme Court.
Republicans expected to re-up “conservative bias” complaints. Yet rigorous research has demonstrated that social media provides a megaphone for conservative stories and voices, sometimes even helping fringe right-wing views reach many millions of people. Steven Johnson, a data scientist at the University of Virginia, recently finished a study looking at how nearly 200,000 people used social media over four years.