New York Times - Touch football, sold as safer, now requires a helmet There are enough soft-shell helmets on the market now that scientists at Virginia Tech began rating them in July. Stefan Duma, the engineering professor who oversees helmet testing at the university, said the quality of soft-shell helmets varied widely. But the decision to mandate them in Texas, the largest high school touch football program in the country based on the number of teams, will spur the development of more sophisticated headgear and their adoption in other sports.- College of Engineering, Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science

New York Times - Antonio Brown’s Helmet standoff Nears a Conclusion What are the differences between the AiR Advantage and newer helmets? According to Stefan Duma, who runs the independent helmet testing laboratory at Virginia Tech, it mostly comes down to more resilient padding. Also picked up by the Ringer.  - College of Engineering, Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science

Washington Post - The Energy 202: Here’s why Newark’s lead crisis is different  “I barely did it and it could not be done today,” says Marc Edwards, a civil engineer at Virginia Tech who helped blow the whistle on Washington’s lead contamination in the early 2000s. - College of Engineering

Washington Post - Five myths about autonomous vehicles According to the most optimistic estimates — including McKinsey’s 2015 report — the widespread adoption of self-driving cars could reduce traffic accidents by as much as 90 percent, since they largely take driver error out of the equation. Tesla has said that when its cars are in autopilot mode, they are statistically safer than human drivers. A similar claim was made by Virginia Tech Transportation Institute in its 2016 study of Google’s self-driving cars. - College of Engineering

Washington Post - A stunning supercell thunderstorm spun up over Virginia on Thursday Overbeck, who graduated from Virginia Tech in May with a degree in meteorology, was thrilled, he said on Twitter. “I wasn’t expecting it to be THIS impressive!” - College of Natural Resources and Environment

Washington Post - A new approach for working students in Montgomery county With an average GPA of higher than 3.0, TAWS graduates came from a wide variety of ethnicities and social classes and 19 Montgomery County high schools. They earned college credits and passed Advanced Placement courses in calculus, English, literature and statistics. One-third of the students had GPAs above a 3.5; many were accepted at top colleges, including the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, the University of Maryland Baltimore County, George Washington and St. John’s universities and the Juilliard School.

Fox News - Drones increasingly used in Africa to save people's lives, deliver blood samples to labs Virginia Tech has been so successful in implementing drone internships for five Malawians that they’ve been taken on full-time by USAID. And now UNICEF Malawi is working on establishing the African Drone and Data Academy. Most drone pilots working on humanitarian missions in Africa have been Americans, or from other continents.

Forbes - Leading U.S. bicycle safety academics question protected-cycleways-are-risky study Ralph Buehler, an associate professor at the Virginia Tech Research Center in Arlington, Virginia, has recently met with the study’s authors. “I think an important point from this study is that protected bike lanes have to be designed well,” he tells me by email that: “The main issue they found was protected bike lanes at street level with many intersections and alleys. The key is to make the intersections safe and find a way to deal with alley traffic. Thus the main messages are: cycle tracks are safe, protected bike lanes can be safe, but design is crucial.” - College of Architecture and Urban Studies

WIRED - Ford’s bid for safer scooters? Sensors everywhere The partnership was forged by Ford, which has a preexisting research relationship with Virginia Tech’s Transportation Institute. (That collaboration has involved a man dressing up as a car seat.) A year from now, Spin will whisk the scooters from campus, and researchers from the institute will spend the next six months combing through the data picked up by these scooters, with the goal of creating some kind of guide to safely deploying scooters in your city, town, or campus. 

Boston Globe - Is chronic lyme disease real? Earlier this summer, Virginia Tech biochemist Brandon Jutras and his collaborators published ... - College of Agriculture and Live Sciences, Fralin Life Sciences Institute

American Scientist - Flint Water Crisis yields hard lessons in science and ethics Q&A with Virginia Tech civil engineer Marc Edwards on uncovering the water crises in Flint, Michigan and Washington, DC and his efforts to keep it from happening again. - College of Engineering

Silicon Republic - Huawei begins researching 6G in Canadian lab Meanwhile, in June, researchers at Virginia Tech also began researching the subject of 6G, suggesting that the 5G system that will be widely available in five years’ time will be the “first step toward a fully fledged 6G”. - College of Engineering

Business Insider - KKR has quietly started hiring college seniors— we have the details, and what it says about how private equity is battling banks to fill six-figure jobs For those roles, it holds meet and greets with students at a range of schools, including George Mason, Virginia Tech, Howard University and William & Mary. The goal is to inform a broader population of people about a possible career in private equity and let them know about Carlyle, which employs more than 1,775 people overall.

Mother Jones - Academics doubt Trump’s claim about Google Influencing the 2016 election Katherine Haenschen, a communications professor at Virginia Tech University, said that apart from Epstein’s work, most research suggests online influence has a limited effect on election outcomes. “When Dr. Epstein says the effects are ‘huge’ and ‘more powerful’ than anything he has ever seen, I respectfully suggest that he needs to read the political science literature before making that claim,” she said. “Large-scale digital mobilization has basically failed to deliver sizable effects in terms of persuasion or turnout.” - College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences

The Sun - DROWNED OUT Seaside towns ‘urged to MOVE inland’ as climate chaos now means ‘retreat’ needed, top scientists warn “Our research shows that sea-level rise can significantly increase the tsunami hazard, which means that smaller tsunamis in the future can have the same adverse impacts as big tsunamis would today,” said Robert Weiss, a professor of geosciences at Virginia Tech. - College of Science

How Stuff Works - 7 warning signs of a looming recession But there is plenty of reason to pay attention to stock prices as a sign of what's to come. George Morgan, a professor of finance at Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business, explains that the stock market gives a snapshot of the economy six months down the road. - Pamplin College of Business

Slate - 2.6 Million reasons to keep yelling about “bias” Among academics, Epstein is a lonely voice on Google’s election-throwing powers. “When Dr. Epstein says the effects are ‘huge’ and ‘more powerful’ than anything he has ever seen, I respectfully suggest that he needs to read the political science literature before making that claim,” Katherine Haenschen, a communications professor at Virginia Tech University who studies internet targeting on voter turnout, told Mother Jones this week.

Sinclair Broadcast Group - Facebook report on anti-conservative bias underscores need for transparency “What’s missing from the report is any real hard data that says there is bias,” said Michael Horning, an assistant professor of communication at Virginia Tech University who studies the social and psychological effects of communications technologies. “These are opinions people have. From that standpoint, we don’t really know exactly what’s true and what’s not.” - College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences