January 2024 Media Highlights

NPR - Can $3 billion persuade Black farmers to trust the Department of Agriculture? - Projects in the first tier are dominated by multinational corporations like PepsiCo and Tyson Foods, land-grant universities such as the University of Illinois and Virginia Tech, large commodity groups like the Iowa Soybean Association and USA Rice, and nonprofits such as the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the National Association of Conservation Districts.

BBC - The lost ancient practise of communal sleep - However, records of this activity are most abundant in the early modern period – roughly from 1500 to 1800. In this era, bedsharing was extremely common. "For most people, with the exclusion of aristocrats and well-to-do merchants, as well as some members of the landed gentry, it would have been unusual not to have had a bedmate," says Roger Ekirch, a university distinguished professor of history at Virginia Tech, Virginia, and the author of At Day's Close: A History of Nighttime.

Forbes - Support DEI? It’s A Billion Dollar Question - According to Menah Pratt, Vice President for Strategic Affairs and Diversity at Virginia Tech University, “In my opinion, Mark Cuban gets it. The corporate world, reluctantly, realized and accepted many years ago that a diverse workforce was better for their bottom line, because that is what matters in the corporate world. The concept of ‘diversity’ forced corporations to re-evaluate what they often associated and conflated with merit—networks, relationships, connections, and access to social and political capital.

Forbes - Aeva Launches Atlas FMCW Lidar Sensor, Daimler Trucks First Customer - The first customers for the Atlas lidar will be Daimler Trucks AG and Torc Robotics. Torc Robotics was founded in 2005 by a group of graduate students from Virginia Tech University that were working on the DARPA Grand Challenge.

Axios - Development projects in the D.C. area to watch in 2024 - Meanwhile, Virginia Tech is opening the first building on its Innovation Campus later this year, bolstering the Potomac Yard/National Landing area's rep as a burgeoning tech scene.

Southern Living - How To Keep Bed Bugs Away, According To Experts - Transported around the globe by our travels, bed bugs have been with us for 37,000 years. “They’re not part of the ecosystem but live in the human environment,” says Dini Miller, PhD, professor at Virginia Tech and urban pest management specialist for the state of Virginia. “They need us to survive.”

Earth - Origami-inspired robots mimic the behavior of plants - In a groundbreaking approach to environmental sensing, researchers Suyi Li from Virginia Tech and Ian Walker from Clemson University are developing robots inspired by plant behavior. Supported by a four-year, $840,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, their work aims to deploy sensors in challenging, often inaccessible environments. — College of Engineering

Diverse Issues in Higher Ed - 10 U.S. Universities Selected to Advance Systemic Change in Doctoral STEM Education - SCSC seed grantees include University of California, Berkeley; University of Colorado, Boulder; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; The Ohio State University; University of Pittsburgh; Portland State University; Purdue University; University of Texas, El Paso; Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University; and University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Science Alert - Weight Loss Drugs Like Ozempic Could Have a Surprising Effect on Drinking Habits - "Participants reported drinking less, experienced fewer effects of alcohol when they did drink it, and decreased odds of binge drinking," says Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, an appetitive neuroscientist at Virginia Tech. DiFeliceantonio and colleagues used a large dataset of 68,250 posts and comments from across 313 'subreddits', posted between 2009 and 2023.

LiveNow for Fox - Primary polls open in New Hampshire - The race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is down to two major candidates for Tuesday’s New Hampshire first-in-the-nation GOP primary. Donald Trump is aiming for a commanding victory that would make a November rematch with President Joe Biden look more likely than ever. LiveNOW from FOX Senior Digital Journalist Josh Breslow spoke with Karen Hult, professor of political science at Virginia Tech about the important primary.

LiveNow for Fox - Polls close in less than an hour in New Hamsphire primary - Interview with political science expert Caitlin Jewitt about the potential outcomes of the Donald Trump-Nikki Haley presidential election contest.

Atlas Obscura  - The Many Lives of ‘Sounds of North American Frogs - Virginia Tech sociologist and WUVT radio DJ Liam Weikart (aka Dr. Moolenbeek) remembers downloading the record online in the early 2000s, “in the context of experimental music,” he says. “The online blogosphere for this kind of thing was raging” at that point, and it was easy to grab mp3s of “weird field recordings,” like this or fellow Folkways classic Sounds of the Junk Yard.

New York Times - Virginia Moves to End Legacy Admissions at Its Public Universities - Virginia Tech, another prestigious public university in the state, announced last year that it would no longer take legacy status into account.

Wall Street Journal -  Why More Chinese Workers Are Settling for Less Pay - If underemployment spreads, it could erode confidence and spending further. It could also slow China’s already weak productivity growth, says David Wang, an economics professor at Virginia Tech. That could happen if more people are stuck in jobs they don’t like or that don’t drive innovation, he says. “If this is persistent, it will become very problematic for China’s economy,” says Wang.

Wall Street Journal - Want Your Packages Delivered Faster and Cheaper? AI Is on the Case - In a study with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, a dashcam from fleet-management tech company Motive successfully alerted drivers to unsafe behavior about 86% of the time. The device looks for red flags such as drowsiness by monitoring drivers’ facial expressions and motions.

Today - How much water do you need to drink? Stanley cup craze has people sipping all day - “There’s a pretty long list of reasons why maintaining proper hydration status is important for maintaining someone’s health,” Brenda Davy, a professor in the department of human nutrition, foods and exercise at Virginia Tech, tells TODAY.com.

NPR/MarketPlace - Mel Jones discusses the housing market - * Transcript: The word you're looking for here: seasonality. Home sales slowdown in the winter, usually. Jones: “Over the last two to three years in the post-pandemic scenario, we’ve actually not seen a lot of seasonality, because there's been so much continued demand, everybody sort of rethinking where they want to live.” Which means: “So the return to the seasonality feels good, because of the predictability, right? People like to be confident in what the market is doing.”

Axios - Virginia moves to end legacy admissions - Virginia Tech was the first public school in the state, and among the first in the U.S., to end legacy admissions last fall.

Inside Higher Ed - Are the Legacy Dominoes Finally Falling? - They’re also among the select group of public universities that still consider legacy status in admissions decisions. Data suggest it can play a fairly important role: 15 percent of UVA’s student body last year were legacy admits, according to a university spokesperson; the share at William & Mary was 8 percent. Virginia Tech, another high-profile public state university, dropped its legacy policy last July.

L.A. Times - Opinion: Have New Hampshire and Iowa lost the power to pick presidents? It’s complicated - We nevertheless appear to remain on a collision course with a Biden-Trump rematch that nobody wants. But we shouldn’t blame Iowa and New Hampshire for that. Caitlin E. Jewitt is an associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech and the author of “The Primary Rules: Parties, Voters, and Presidential Nominations.”  (Also carried by Yahoo News)

The Conversation - What latest polling says about the mood in Ukraine – and the desire to remain optimistic amid the suffering (also picked up by Talking Points Memo) The latest survey by the National Democratic Institute released on Jan. 26 provides insight into how Ukrainians are coping. Administered by the reputable Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, this telephone survey recorded the views of 2,516 Ukrainians from Nov. 14-22, 2023. Gerard Toal, Professor of Government and International Affairs, Virginia Tech

The Conversation - Ukraine recap: Zelensky battles corruption and a major row with his commander-in-chief - Gerard Toal, professor of government and international affairs at Virginia Tech, believes this resolve may be tested once the next round of recruitment, which aims to add as many as 500,000 fresh troops to Ukraine’s armed forces in the field, gets under way.

New York Magazine - What Is MIPS, and Does My Bike Helmet Need It? - “It adds a little slip plane between your head and the helmet,” explains Dr. Barry Miller, the director of outreach and business development at Virginia Tech’s helmet-testing laboratory, which has a special focus on concussion mitigation. “You want the helmet to decouple and move independently from your head, even for a few fractions of a second. And that drastically reduces the numbers that are indicative of concussion risk.”

Self - 9 Best Bike Helmets for Every Type of Ride in 2024 - One way to see how helmets stack up against each other—in terms of safety—is to check out the Virginia Tech (VT) Helmet Ratings. The school has been impact-testing head protection since 2011 and rates the effectiveness of sports helmets in reducing concussion risk. They give each piece of gear a numbered score (referred to as the VT impact score), which correlates to the estimated concussion risk—a lower score means less chance of it.

WebMD - New Study Reveals Why Fats and Sugars Are Irresistible - “Given the success of gut-derived peptides (such as Wegovy and Ozempic) for weight loss, it’s essential to understand the gut-brain axis to develop more effective treatments and strategies for weight loss and weight maintenance,” said Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, PhD, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion.

Diverse Issues in Higher Ed - Virginia Tech’s CEED Program Builds Pipelines to Engineering Starting with programs for middle and high school students, through supports for graduate students, the Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity (CEED) at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) has provided inspiration, insight, encouragement, and community for engineering students.