UVA Today News Blog

The International Space Station. (NASA photo)

UVA Today’s Fariss Samarrai reports:

There will be three visible-from-Earth passes of the International Space Station over Central Virginia this week, according to U.Va. astronomer Ed Murphy.

The first is this evening, April 23, from 9:45 to 9:48 p.m.

To view it, Murphy says to go outside at about 9:40 p.m. – “to let your eyes adapt to the dark” – and face northwest. “The ISS will look like a very bright star rising straight out of the northwestern horizon,” he says. “It will climb high in the northwestern sky and then disappear high overhead at 9:48:02 p.m. when it passes into the shadow of the Earth.”

Continue reading…

Arts & Sciences, College of Arts & Sciences, Community, News, Science, technology | Tuesday, April 23rd | By: Dan @2:14 pm | 0 Comments     

UVA Today’s Fariss Samarrai reports:

The University of Virginia’s Fan Mountain Observatory is open to the public just twice a year, once in April and once in October. This spring’s Public Night will be on April 12. Guests will be allowed to look through the telescopes beginning at about 8:30 (once it’s dark enough, and weather permitting). The event runs until everyone has had a chance to look through the 40- and 31-inch telescopes.

Continue reading…

Arts & Sciences, College of Arts & Sciences, Community, Science | Thursday, February 14th | By: Dan @5:20 pm | 1 Comment     

This is not U.Va.-related, directly, but given our preoccupation with weather lately …

Check out this wind map of the U.S.

Here’s the Web proprietor’s disclaimer:

The wind map is a personal art project, not associated with any company. We’ve done our best to make this as accurate as possible, but can’t make any guarantees about the correctness of the data or our software. Please do not use the map or its data to fly a plane, sail a boat, or fight wildfires

If the map is missing or seems slow, we recommend the latest Chrome browser.

Surface wind data comes from the National Digital Forecast Database. These are near-term forecasts, revised once per hour. So what you’re seeing is a living portrait. (See the NDFD site for precise details; our timestamp shows time of download.) And for those of you chasing top wind speed, note that maximum speed may occur over lakes or just offshore.

Arts, News, Science | Tuesday, October 30th | By: Dan @1:30 pm | 0 Comments     

Some days, we at UVA Today HQ can spend some time putting together a really thoughtful or entertaining blog post, and bring you, our dear readers, joy or enlightenment.

Today, alas, is not one of those days.

So I’m calling on my esteemed and much more productive colleague, Morgan Estabrook of U.Va. Innovation to bail me out. Her excellent “What’s Next” blog has a great post for faculty and other researchers who have an idea that they think just might have some potential for commercialization, but have no idea how to get started.

(You can click here to read her blog post about the new U.Va. Innovation Learning Center, or click here to skip the introduction and go directly to the center itself.)

Thanks, Morgan!

research, Science, technology | Thursday, October 25th | By: Dan @4:37 pm | 0 Comments     

The imperative: President Obama issued an executive order in 2009 mandating that action be taken to mitigate the impact of nutrient run-off on the Chesapeake Bay.

The question: Which of the existing best management practices had the most potential to achieve the objective?

The idea: The Computing for Sustainable Water Project, led by U.Va. environmental scientist Gerald Learmonth, which sought to evaluate the possible measures through a massive computer simulation.

The problem: How do you simulate and evaluate the effectiveness of so many possibilities over a huge watershed? Even using all of the computing resources currently available to him at U.Va., it would likely take 90 years to perform all of the calcuations.

The solution: Enter IBM’s World Community Grid, which harnesses the power of the computers of 600,000 volunteers in 80 countries.

The results: The World Community Grid began crunching the numbers on April 17. On Wednesday, exactly six months later, IBM announced that it had finished the calculations, having “processed over 24 million results which required nearly 4,200 years of computing power.”

Next steps: Now it is up to the grateful researchers (here’s their thank-you post on the World Community Grid blog) to pore over the mountains of data that were created and come up with their recommendations for real actions to save the Bay. “We will certainly share these results with you and the wider community as quickly as possible,” they pledged.

And once they’re done with that, they hope to apply their model to other watersheds around the world.

Arts & Sciences, College of Arts & Sciences, research, Science, Sustainability, technology | Friday, October 19th | By: Dan @2:13 pm | 1 Comment     

Our friends over at the UVA Innovation blog are reporting that U.Va.’s acclaimed Bay Game is getting some national exposure. Philippe Cousteau, son of Jacques and a major Bay Game backer, will lead two Bay Game simulation sessions at the SXSW Eco festival in Austin, Texas. The festival runs Oct. 3-5.

Cool stuff.

Science, Sustainability | Thursday, September 27th | By: Dan @4:16 pm | 0 Comments     

Got an idea for a business that you think just might fly? U.Va.’s fourth annual Entrepreneurship Cup — a business-concept competition open to all U.Va. undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows – is coming up, offering students a chance at glory, a trophy (right), maybe some cash, and perhaps a shot at starting a business othat could propel you into the coveted 1 percent.

(You can read some FAQs on the competition here, Read about the past winners: 2011, 2010, 2009.)

If you’re interested in competing, but need a little help getting started, U.Va. Innovation is offering a series of “design thinking” workshops that it says will “provide students with opportunities to compare interests, form teams and develop concepts for their E-Cup submissions.”

Good luck! And if you win the big bucks, just remember where you read this tip …

News, On Grounds, Science, Student Life, technology | Wednesday, September 19th | By: Dan @4:06 pm | 1 Comment     

The annual Perseid meteor shower peaks this weekend. U.Va.. astronomy professor (and all-around good guy) Ed Murphy offers these tips for viewing:

The best time to see the shower will be Saturday night after 11 p.m. into Sunday morning or even Sunday night into Monday morning.  The moon will be a thick waning crescent and will rise at 1:46 a.m. on Sunday. Thus, it should not greatly interfere with viewing the shower.

The Perseid Meteor Shower typically produces 50 to 60 meteors per hour under dark skies.  A telescope or binoculars are not needed.  Just simply lay outside after 11 p.m. on a blanket or in a chair, face the northeast and look high up in the sky.  The typical Perseid meteor is traveling about 30 km/s (18 miles per second) as it hits the Earth’s atmosphere.

 The meteoroids are a bit larger than a good-sized grain of sand and the glowing trail is the result of the small meteoroid compressing and heating the air around it as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere.  The Perseid meteoroids derive from the Comet Swift-Tuttle.

Murphy also offers this link for more information about the Perseids.

Arts & Sciences, College of Arts & Sciences, People, Science | Wednesday, August 8th | By: Dan @12:19 pm | 2 Comments     

Check out the new episode of the UVA Today Radio Show, a weekly five minute segment on WTJU radio. Look for new editions of the show every Wednesday at 11:55 a.m. and every Friday at 3:55 p.m. on WTJU. Afterward, all of the segments will be posted on iTunesU.

Read more about the stories featured in this week’s program:

• U.Va. Discovery Unlocks Secrets of Cancer’s Critical ‘Chimeras’ (Hui Li)
• U.Va. Students Ponder Ethical Questions in Summer Philosophy Course (Stacie Thyrion)
• Summer Reading, Part II: Family Sagas, Dilemmas and a Treasure Hunt (Beth Blanton-Kent)

• Air Date: 7/4/2012

To download mp3, click here.

College of Arts & Sciences, Health and Safety, Health System, News, Radio, research, Science | Thursday, July 5th | By: brevy @5:04 pm | 0 Comments     

U.Va. professor Daniel Cox has long studied how various conditions, including diabetes and ADHD, affect young drivers. Last night, he was interviewed for the “NBC Nightly News.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

News, research, Science, TV | Friday, June 1st | By: Dan @3:03 pm | 0 Comments     

A photo illustration depicting a view of the night sky just before the predicted merger between the Milky Way and Andromeda. The view is inspired by dynamical computer modeling of the future collision between the two galaxies. (Credit: NASA, ESA, Z. Levay and R. van der Marel (STScI), and A. Mellinger)

Rachael Beaton, a U.Va. astronomy graduate student, is co-author on a new paper in Astrophysical Journal that has caught the interest of NASA. The space agency held a press conference Thursday afternoon showcasing that research and another study, led by U.Va. astronomy alumnus Sangmo Tony Sohn (now at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore). The two studies demonstrate that the Milky Way is destined for a head-on collision with its neighboring Andromeda Galaxy – in 4 billion years.

The Milky Way is destined to get a major makeover during the encounter, and it’s likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed.

Continue reading…

Alumni, Arts & Sciences, College of Arts & Sciences, research, Science | Friday, June 1st | By: Dan @8:00 am | 0 Comments     

UVA Today’s Fariss Samarrai reports:

Speaking of blogs (since this is one), we have a couple of good ones to refer you to.

As we reported last week on UVA Today, U.Va. and IBM have launched U.Va.’s new “Computing for Sustainable Water Project” on IBM’s World Community Grid. The project is an effort to simulate and forecast the environmental and economic effects of agricultural, commercial and industrial decisions over the next 20 years in and around the Chesapeake Bay. It is sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research.

By harnessing the massive power of 2 million computers provided by close to 600,000 World Community Grid volunteers in 80 countries, the effort seeks to compress and collapse 90 years worth of computational research into just one year.

Continue reading…

Science, Sustainability, technology | Wednesday, April 25th | By: Dan @3:36 pm | 0 Comments     

This just in from UVA Today science correspondent Fariss Samarrai:

The UVA Bay Game, a large-scale interactive game simulation of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, will be a featured panel discussion/demonstration Tuesday at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. SXSW, as it’s dubbed, is a 10-day trade show/music and film festival that highlights cutting-edge innovations and attracts about 100,000 attendees.

Continue reading…

Curry School, News, Science, Sustainability, technology | Monday, March 12th | By: Dan @1:54 pm | 0 Comments     

Last month, UVA Today reported on U.Va. Innovation, a new University-wide initiative that will provide guidance and services to U.Va. researchers seeking support for strategic partnerships, entrepreneurial networks, new ventures and technology commercialization.

Part of the initiative involves the launch of the “What’s Next?” blog to update readers on the latest tech transfer news and successes. Today’s post highlights SpermCheck, an at-home male fertility test developed by U.Va. spin-off ContraVac Inc., that is now available for sale on websites and soon will be on the shelves at Walgreen’s and CVS stores.

You can read the blog’s introductory post here.

Medical School, research, Science, technology | Tuesday, February 7th | By: Dan @4:45 pm | 0 Comments     

We at UVA Today headquarters are usually the ones who present the news from around the University, but today I’m asking you, dear readers, for a little assistance.

Yesterday we came across the obituary of Roy Britten, a pioneering DNA researcher at Caltech. Britten was a graduate of U.Va., where he studied physics. Presumably, he worked with legendary U.Va. physicist Jesse Beams, as both ended up working on the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort to build an atomic weapon. (Britten’s obit quotes his son, Ken Britten, as saying, “As a committed pacifist, he was always pleased to say that his particular project was a complete failure.”) Another U.Va. figure who worked on the Manhattan Project is Frank L. Hereford, who went on the become president of the University.

Which brings me to my question: Has anyone ever put together a good history of U.Va.’s participation in the Manhattan Project? It sounds like it could be a pretty fascinating story. (Then again, I would imagine that a lot of the source materials may still be under lock and key.)

Alumni, On Grounds, People, Science | Friday, January 27th | By: Dan @3:56 pm | 4 Comments