January 2025 Media Highlights

USA Today (also NPR) - Keep wildfire smoke out of your home: Expert advice to avoid hazardous conditions - Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech Linsey Marr says, "The overall goal is to keep the outdoor air outside and to clean the indoor air as much as possible." 

Forbes - What Boards Need To Know On Digital And Cybersecurity Governance In 2025 - Research is emerging that documents the realized benefits when there is director cybersecurity expertise on the board. Virginia Tech has documented these benefits which complements the long-standing research from MIT that shows the substantial value creating benefits when there is broader director digital expertise on the board, such as AI expertise.

Fortune - Wealth managers warn investors to watch out for these 3 major themes in 2025 - Erin Cox, associate extension specialist for family and community economics at Virginia Cooperative Extension, says no matter your income or financial standing, having an active relationship with your money is paramount. That means setting goals and boundaries sooner rather than later. 

Times Higher Education - Trying to decide what, where and when to publish research? - Walid Saad is a professor in the Bradley department of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech. He also leads the Network intelligEnce, Wireless, and Security (NEWS) laboratory and is the Next-G wireless lead at the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus. 

Inc. - How Jensen Huang and 3 Nvidia Board Members Became Billionaires - “It’s a happy ending” for the board members, who are incentivized with equity to ensure that the company keeps growing, Virginia Tech finance professor Felipe Cabezon told Bloomberg.

MSN - 10 things you can do in the UK you can’t do in the US - So we're not saying nobody walks anywhere in the US - think big cities such as New York for example -but there are still many more places there which are only accessible by car, while 2023 research from Virginia Tech and Rutgers University found that just 12% of all trips in the US are walked. In the UK, meanwhile, we're far more accustomed to hopping on the bus, taking the Tube or just walking to the local high street or wherever we want to go.

New York Times - For Los Angeles, Fires Ramp Up Difficulty of Hosting 2028 Summer Games - Jadrian Wooten, a professor at Virginia Tech who has studied the economics of sports, said the central question in the months and years ahead would be “how much of the city’s resources will be devoted to revitalizing areas for the Olympics versus responding to destruction from future wildfires.” “Balancing those two priorities will be critical in determining whether L.A. has both the money and the capacity to handle an event of this scale alongside wildfire response,” he said.

News York Times - At This Ballet Company, the Priority Is Dancers’ Mental Health - Julia Basso, the director of Virginia Tech’s Embodied Brain Lab, has established further proof of the link between dance and neurodivergence, by measuring brain waves. 

CNN - Adam Coates on California fires - * When asked why these fires are happening in January, when this is supposed to be the rainy season, Adam Coates shared his condolences with everyone affected and then shared that, "It's a challenging situation. Last year, with the El Niño year, there was a lot of opportunity for vegetation to grow, and then this year, to be dry for eight months, really presents an opportunity where anything can create some type of ignition. Once that ignition is fueled by intense wind and dry conditions that are part of that wind—low humidity and dry winds—you get these fires that move really quickly."

ABC News - Possible links between utility companies and LA wildfires under investigation - "The big difference between what they [the LADWP] do and Public Safety Power Shutoff is: PSPS is preventive. You do it because you don't want anything to happen and you anticipate the high fire risk and de-energize," said Ali Mehrizi-Sani, an electrical engineering professor at Virginia Tech. "Blocking reclosers is actually reactive. Something happened and just to make sure you don't make it worse, you de-energize the line," Mehrizi-Sani added.

NBC News - Startups race to build bigger, better drones to fight bigger, hotter wildfires - There are reasons to be cautious, said Jonathan Keller, the founder of BlackBee Robotics based in Blacksburg, Virginia, who works as a test engineer at Virginia Tech’s FAA-designated drone test site and develops custom drones on the weekends. Researchers at those test sites are slowly finding ways to operate drones that can automatically avoid each other.

Washington Post (also Yahoo) - Egg prices continue to climb amid the bird flu outbreak Michael Persia, a professor of poultry nutrition and management at Virginia Tech, says the extended duration of the outbreak has made it harder for the industry to make up the losses in egg production. “Over the past three years, we’ve seen significant reductions in our flocks, and at this point, there’s a bottleneck in that replacement, because the entire mechanism that generates all of these birds is stretched to the limit,” he said.

Forbes - The Riddle Surrounding Red Supergiant Stars - These massive stars are so large that they could be centered around the Sun and their radii would reach out to the distance of Jupiter, Sarah Healy, a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, told me via email. Yet we still fail to understand the complex mechanisms that drive their evolution, she said. 

IFL Science (also Science Alert) - Watch Frogs Fling Themselves Across The Water's Surface – One Impressive Belly Flop At A Time - “It’s fascinating how easily we can be fooled by fast animal movements,” said study co-author and leader of the research team, Professor in Mechanical Engineering Jake Socha. “Here, we’re fooled by a frog that appears like a skipping stone, but is actually jumping and dunking multiple times in a row. Frogs are great jumpers, but most of them don’t exhibit this porpoising behavior, and we still don’t know why. Is there something special about the frog’s leap, or is it simply a matter of small body size?”

Deutsche Welle (also MSN) - What to expect at Trump's inauguration as US president - "I think that, for Trump, reconciliation is something that is not a concern," Cayce Myers, a political communications expert at Virginia Tech, told DW. "Ultimately, what he's looking at is the pinnacle moment of the MAGA movement... his [inaugural] speech... is the culmination of four years of struggle to be elected."

Washington Post - Trump promises ‘unity’ in inaugural address. Can he deliver it? - “It’s going to be something that he views as a victory lap for himself,” said Cayce Myers, a professor of public relations at Virginia Tech. “It will be a departure from what we have seen in modern American politics.”

The Hill - Trump plays dealmaker as questions surround TikTok - While Trump’s 50 percent proposal is somewhat “outside the box,” it might represent a starting point for negotiations, said Cayce Myers, a public relations professor at Virginia Tech. “I think he sees this extension as a way to leverage the ban to get ownership interest or for the U.S.,” Myers said. However, he added, “That’s a real unprecedented strategy and would be an unprecedented outcome for something like this.”

HuffPost (also picked up by Yahoo) - 6 Real Vaccine Facts Everyone Should Know - “Vaccine side effects are generally very mild, and most are associated with the shot itself. For example, having a sore arm after getting a shot is possible, but is not a serious problem,” said Dr. Lisa M. Lee, a professor of population health sciences at Virginia Tech, epidemiologist and former CDC official. “For some vaccines, a handful of people have aches, or a fever for a day or two after getting the shot. This is usually a sign that the person’s immune system has been activated, which is what we want.”

USA Today - Pink eye can be painful and unsightly. But how contagious is it, really? - Pink eye can result from a viral infection, a bacterial infection, a chemical (toxin) irritation, or from allergies. "Viral conjunctivitis is worse in the fall and winter," says Dr. John Epling, a practicing family physician and a professor of population health at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine.

LiveNOW FOX (picked up by Fox affiliates) - Trump to host 'Victory Rally' in D.C. - President -elect Donald Trump is set to hold a 'Victory Rally' on Sunday. Virginia Tech Public Relations Professor, Cayce Myers, joins LiveNOW from FOX with an update on the latest. 

National Science Foundation - Superalloys resist wear at nearly forge-level heat using new process - Finding lubricants that work at exceptionally high temperatures challenges researchers and industries alike. Recently, a Virginia Tech team may have uncovered a promising candidate by happenstance: transition metal spinel oxides formed on nickel-chromium-based superalloys.

Interesting Engineering (also CBS News) - US scientists tag 32,000 bees with QR codes to study foraging - The goal is to determine exactly how far honey bees travel from their hives. The team has begun collaborating with Virginia Tech to analyze the relationship between foraging duration and waggle dance information.

MSN - Scientists warn one of the world's continents is breaking apart - In a 2020 study by Virginia Tech, researchers suggested that new oceans would form first in the northern part of the Rift. 

Gizmodo Australia - Automakers Want Feds to Pump the Brakes on New Emergency Braking Rules - A study from AAA found that 2024 models of vehicles equipped with the current version of the safety feature [AEB system] were able to avoid 100% of forward collisions when tested at speeds up to 35 mph. The NHTSA’s own data suggests bumping the AEB requirements up to 62 mph will save 360 lives per year and prevent more than 24,000 injuries, and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute believes the technology could lead to “substantially higher safety gains” that will help to avoid more accidents.

FOCUS - What is planned for the inauguration of Donald Trump? - Its return to the White House has thus preceded four turbulent years. So how will Trump present himself on the day of the inauguration? "Reconciliation is not an issue for Trump," says Cayce Myers, an expert in political communication at Virginia Tech University. "What he experiences is the culmination of the MAGA (Make America great again). His inaugural speech is the coronation of his four-year struggle to win the election".