September 2023 Media Highlights

New York Times - ¿Hay que usar mascarilla otra vez? - Google Translation: Linsey Marr, an expert on airborne virus transmission at Virginia Tech, said that a good rule of thumb to avoid getting COVID-19 is to wear a mask if you are elbow to elbow with other people: “When you are in environments where you can reach out and touch someone.”

Scripps News - Nationwide research looks to figure out how to stop spread of flu - "I think the pandemic has really brought greater attention to this type of research and the need for it," said Virginia Tech's Linsey Marr, the project director of MITIGATE FLU, which stands for "Multidisciplinary InvesTIGATion to Ease inFLUenza."

The Guardian - ‘Hardcore science’ or ‘just a sticker’ – do anti-anxiety patches actually work? - Kristofer Rau, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, was similarly skeptical. He found it difficult to make sense of NuCalm’s meandering explanation of how the stickers work. “NuCalm’s site has a lot of descriptions of biological mechanisms and various neurotransmitters, and there’s a lot of accuracy in those descriptions, but they tie in a lot of wild assumptions about what their product does,” he said. “That’s what a lot of biotech companies do when they’re trying to sell their stuff. Without any specifics or better research, it comes off as quackery.”

ProPublica - Erasing the “Black Spot”: How a Virginia college expanded by uprooting a Black neighborhood“ - Small colleges, large colleges, small cities, large cities — it was widespread just in the same way that urban renewal, more broadly, is widespread,” said Virginia Tech professor LaDale Winling, author of “Building the Ivory Tower.”

Scientific American - Mistranslation of Newton’s first law discovered after nearly 300 years -  Throughout the centuries, many philosophers of science have interpreted this phrasing to be about bodies that don’t have any forces acting upon them, says Daniel Hoek, a philosopher at Virginia Tech. For example, in 1965 Newton scholar Brian Ellis paraphrased him as saying, “Every body not subject to the action of forces continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line.” But that’s a bit puzzling, Hoek says, because there are no bodies in the universe that are free of external forces acting upon them. Why make a law about something that doesn’t exist?

Salon - Bulldogs, pugs and other snout-less dogs will suffer as climate change worsens, experts warn - Dr. Lisa Gunter, an assistant professor of Animal Behavior & Welfare at the Virginia Tech School of Animal Sciences, broke down the biology of why these sweet-natured dogs are unfortunately prone to heat-related health problems. "Unlike people that sweat as our primary way to stay cool in the heat, dogs pant," Gunter explained by email. "It's their special form of evaporative cooling."

USA Today - The Sphere in Las Vegas is a new immersive experience and a glitzy add-on to the strip - The unique venue is just the latest spectacle in a city known for its iconic neon signs and over-the-top attractions, according to Stefan Al, an architect and associate professor of architecture at Virginia Tech and author of "The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream." "It will definitely make a splash," Al said.

Scientific American - Food Can Be Literally Addictive, New Evidence Suggests - The definition of food addiction is separable from obesity. Surprisingly, many people who tick the boxes for food addiction maintain a typical weight. If anything, food addiction is the closest cousin to binge eating disorder, says Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, a neuroscientist at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion.

Newsweek - Why Robotaxis Are Dividing San Francisco - According to a study that Cruise conducted in collaboration with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, since November 2021 the company's robotaxis were involved in 54 percent fewer collisions than normal vehicles. Also published by MSN.

Scripps News - Derna facing unique challenges amid flooding - Transcript: Joining us tonight to provide insight into why the floods were so destructive and why it will be hard to help the people of this region is associate professor of geophysics and remote sensing at Virginia Tech Manoochehr Shirzaei.

PC Magazine - Big Tech Had a Water Problem Long Before ChatGPT - Those U.S. data centers are drawing fresh water from the country's reserves, mostly on the densely populated coasts, according to Virginia Tech. Many are already overused, particularly in hot climates, contributing to the ongoing issue of outpacing natural replenishment cycles by hundreds or thousands of years.

New York Times - A Key Question in Google’s Trial: How Formidable Is Its Data Advantage? - To make its point, Google will call an expert witness, Edward Fox, a computer scientist at Virginia Tech. Professor Fox has conducted a “data reduction experiment” on Google’s behalf to estimate how much Google’s search quality would decline if it used far less data — roughly the amount available to Bing. The result, according to Google’s filing, was that the data difference explains only part of the gap in search quality between Google and Microsoft.

New York Times - For People With Disabilities, Technology Needs to Do More - In 2014, when she was in her early 30s, she was diagnosed with bone cancer; she underwent a partial-leg amputation, after which she was fitted with a prosthetic foot and leg. A chemo drug affected her hearing, so she was also prescribed hearing aids. A philosopher of technology who teaches humanities courses to future engineers, doctors and nurses at Virginia Tech, Shew felt as if her new prosthetics had transformed her into a real-life version of the synthetic humans she’d been lecturing on: a self-described “technologized disabled person — a cyborg, a cripborg.”

Washington Post - What Las Vegas tourists need to know about casino hacks - Aaron Brantly, associate professor of political science and director of the Tech4Humanity lab at Virginia Tech, said the attack could last until the company pays the ransom and the hackers provide a digital key to unlock data, or until MGM can return its system from secure backups. “If the ransom is paid, the networks could be back up quickly,” he said. “If it is not, the reconstitution of the network could take days or weeks.”

Wall Street Journal - Where’s the Signal? Warehouse Robots Are Searching for Stronger Internet Connections - “If you start thinking of autonomous vehicles or robots in general, they require many different types of sensor and visual data to take decisions and to operate autonomously, so that data has to reach them in a reliable and timely manner,” said Harpreet Dhillon, a computer engineering professor at Virginia Tech.

Associated Press - Departure of Murdoch as Fox leader comes as conservative media landscape is increasingly fractured - But Megan Duncan, a Virginia Tech communications professor who studies news audiences, said it’s unlikely there will be big changes at Fox as long as Rupert Murdoch is still around as chairman emeritus, since he has long groomed Lachlan as his successor. “He’s made sure that his son has been involved in the company all along,” she said. “And we know from his time in the company that (Lachlan’s) views are very similar and probably he’s not going to do a 180 with the company.”

New Scientist - Catastrophic Libyan dam collapse partly caused by climate change - Manoochehr Shirzaei at Virginia Tech says the dams that failed were built to prevent previous floods and had been effective in the past. “Since people had this false sense of security, they were living just behind this second dam,” he says. “Nobody had time to escape.”

Wall Street Journal - Libya Flood Disaster That Killed Thousands Was Decades in Making - Scientists say dams deteriorate over time, sinking under their own weight and slowly losing their ability to hold back the water due to storm surges and other natural forces. “Like any other structure they begin to degrade in terms of quality,” said Manoochehr Shirzaei, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech. “Any dam that was not maintained for two decades is a recipe for failure and disaster.”

New York Times - From Mexico, a caped crusader who wrestled Like no woman before her - There’s a glamour to Monti’s ease, a sense of independence that feels true to an era of change in the nation. “The luchadora movies come out at a time in Mexico when you have the transformation of feminist movements and the creation of la chica moderna, the modern young woman,” Vinodh Venkatesh, a professor at Virginia Tech who wrote a study of Latin American superheroes, told me. Monti even did her own stunts, except for the brief wrestling match sequences. These she left to actual luchadoras in a gesture of solidarity, because female wrestlers were barred from public arenas at the time.

Associated Press - FDA advisers vote against experimental ALS treatment pushed by patients - “Creating false hope can be considered a moral injury and the use of statistical magic or manipulation to provide false hope is problematic,” said Lisa Lee, a bioethics and research integrity expert from Virginia Tech, who voted against the treatment. The lone positive vote came from a panel member representing patients.

CNN - 18 leaf peeping essentials worth investing in this fall - So, how to get started? “Well, that’s easy,” says John Seiler, a forest biology professor at Virginia Tech’s department of forest resources and environmental conservation. “Get in your car and drive to the mountains.” He says selecting a mountainous region is best because changes in elevation, differences in soil type and changes in aspect (like the direction of the slope facing, say, north versus south) results in a wider range of tree diversity, with said range in tree species resulting in varying degrees of “peakness” and foliage color. “While one tree species may be past peak, another species may be just starting to peak,” he says.

National Geographic - Meet the newest species of tarantula. It’s electric blue. - Such structural colors often create iridescence, says Ling Li, an associate professor at Virginia Tech who collaborates with Kariko in studying spider colors. “It’s like a peacock feather. If you change your angle the color will change a little bit,” while colors made from pigment don’t change with the angle of your view.

Science Friday - Where technology meets ableism - Dr. Ashley Shew, associate professor at Virginia Tech, studies the intersection of disability and technology and how our collective fixation on these fancy, supposedly transformative gadgets could be doing more harm than good. In her new book, she coins the term “technoableism” to get to the heart of the matter.Guest host and musician Dessa talks with Dr. Shew about her book Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement, about what disability technology is, what the future should look like, and even how disability intersects with space travel and climate change.

LiveNOW Fox (also picked up online by Fox affiliates) - Writers Strike: Negotiations heat up Could there soon be an end to the Writers Strike? With negotiations underway, James Ivory at Virginia Tech joined LiveNOW from FOX's Josh Breslow to discuss where everything stands.

Scientific American - Cannibalistic dads may be contributing to hellbender salamander declines Eastern - hellbenders once swam in at least 570 streams in the eastern and central U.S., says Bill Hopkins, an ecologist at Virginia Tech. But numbers of the craggy, beady-eyed amphibians have plummeted in recent decades, with only about 126 streams now harboring healthy populations—and scientists didn't know why.

AlarabyTV via X - The specter of a government shutdown looms over #America in light of the disagreement between Republicans and Democrats on spending - Includes interview with experts Karen Hult and David Bieri.