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A painting honoring the late Otto Warmbier has been returned to �鶹�ƽ�� Theta Chi Fraternity. The painting was returned Friday morning, found on the front doorstep of the fraternity's house, with an apology note. Warmbier died shortly after being released from North Korean custody in 2017. The note left with the painting said in part: "This was taken out of utter stupidity…We recognize how inconsiderate this act was."

The University of Virginia is looking at its energy use, and finding ways to better use its buildings.

The word “slut” scrawled at the end of the manuscript for John Steinbeck’s seminal novel “The Grapes of Wrath” – thought by some to have been written there after the manuscript was placed in the UVA Library archives – may have been explained, thanks to a handful of Swedish academics. 

The Commonwealth of Virginia Campaign kicks off each October. The CVC is a statewide initiative that works to maximize the power of state employees and agencies. The University of Virginia is one participant that donates to many nonprofits in the state. “It’s the largest annual workplace giving drive, which is pretty great. It helps over 900 charities and not for profits,” UVA chief creative officer, Matt Weber said.

An annual charity campaign has gotten underway across Virginia. The Commonwealth of Virginia Campaign launched earlier this week, giving employees of state agencies a way to donate to community nonprofits through payroll deductions or other means. According to a release, UVA has historically been the largest-contributing state agency, with employees giving nearly $1 million each year to nonprofits.

The University of Virginia is getting a new learning space, but it doesn’t look anything like the rest of the buildings on UVA Grounds. The Contemplative Commons held a groundbreaking ceremony Friday morning. 

The University of Virginia has broken ground on the Contemplative Commons building located near the Dell on Emmet Street. Planned to open in 2023, the 57,000-aquare-foot Contemplative Commons will comprise flexible learning studios that can be configured for academic classes, quiet reflection, social interaction or physical activity.

(Subscription may be required) A University of Virginia language professor will join a colleague from the UVA School of Data Sciences in an effort to preserve two languages edging closure to extinctions. The National Science Foundation has awarded a $250,000 grant to Allison Bigelow, an associate professor in the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

(Editorial; subscription may be required) In another effort to counteract staffing shortages, the UVA Medical Center plans to spend more than $30 million in merit raises now and pay rate increases in the next fiscal year. … Kudos to UVA for making these provisions.

UVA Health is seeing a decrease in the number of COVID-19 patients. The COVID unit currently has 49 patients, 22 of whom are in an acute unit and 25 are in the ICU. Dr. Reid Adams, UVA Health’s chief medical officer, says this is a decrease from two weeks ago. The COVID unit saw a peak of 68 patients.

“It’s a long way in the rear view mirror – sixteen years out for me – but you always think about it,” says the wildly popular – and polarizing – Fox News host [and UVA Law grad] Laura Ingraham when reflecting on being diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 41 in 2005.  “Anyone who says they don’t think about it, I don’t know if I buy that.” If you’re one of the 2 million plus viewers of “The Ingraham Angle” – which airs on the highest rated cable news network, the Fox News Channel, celebrating its 25th anniversary this week – but didn’t know of the conservative talker’s cancer history...

In the hit early-2000s TV show “The O.C.”, Ryan Atwood was a kid from the wrong side of the tracks with a strong moral compass. Now Ben McKenzie, the actor who played him, has channeled Ryan and taken a principled stance on cryptocurrencies, criticizing his fellow celebrities for shilling risky tokens to unsuspecting amateur investors. McKenzie majored in economics at the University of Virginia and is deeply interested in markets, at least according to his Twitter. 

If you’ve logged in to TikTok recently and have been bombarded with content about “couch guy,” you’re not alone. The hashtag #couchguy currently has more than 702,800,000 views and climbing. On Sept. 21, TikTok user Lauren Zarras (@laurenzarras) uploaded a video of herself surprising her boyfriend, Robbie McCoy at the University of Virginia. Set to Ellie Goulding’s song “Still Falling for You,” some viewers watched and concluded that the boyfriend, dubbed couch guy, wasn’t that excited to see her.

Iron deficiency was highly prevalent in middle-age study participants, with nearly two-thirds having functional iron deficiency. “Iron is essential for hemoglobin synthesis, which is the main oxygen-carrying molecule in the bloodstream,” Siddhartha Angadi, a cardiovascular exercise physiologist and UVA professor, said. “Iron is also critically involved in the Kreb’s cycle – the essential pathway for aerobic production of energy.”

Another significant aspect was the durability of the weight loss compared with older drugs, says Dr. Jennifer L. Kirby, associate professor in �鶹�ƽ�� Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism: “The weight loss continued beyond the one-year mark, so that is impressive.”  She adds that another important benefit of that level of weight loss is that it gets patients “to a place where they can really be physically active.”

(Commentary) Nine months ago, in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, enough Republican leaders and Trump White House officials viewed the Trump-inspired attack on the democratic transition of power as an event of such horrifying excess that it was difficult to imagine them normalizing, justifying, and rationalizing it as they had the Trumpian excesses of the previous four years. Yet that is exactly what has taken place in the intervening months. “Republicans initially started down the road to a post-Trump party, as opposed to a Trump party . . . and they backed up in record time,” Lar...

(Subscription may be required) “If I was an investor, I would be very concerned about a strategy at this point that depended on access to the Chinese market and the good graces of Chinese film regulators,” said Aynne Kokas, the author of “Hollywood Made in China” and a UVA media studies professor. “To make very expensive films in anticipation of being able to deliver them to the Chinese market and then not being certain that’s possible is actually a much more financially irresponsible strategy from my perspective.”

(Commentary) Educators tend to underestimate the importance of knowledge, as though teaching rote facts detracts from teaching higher-order thinking. But the science shows otherwise. “The very processes that teachers care about most,” like critical thinking and problem solving, “are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory,” writes Daniel Willingham, a UVA cognitive scientist.

Saikrishna Prakash, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, said this conflict is entering legally unknown territory and the Supreme Court has found that former presidents enjoyed executive privilege, at least to some extent. “Imagine having a conversation with President Biden during the last two months of his presidency,” Prakash said. “Are you going to give him some sincere advice if you know it’s going to come out in two months, that the privilege is over in two months?” No, maybe not.

(Commentary by Siva Vaidhyanathan, Robertson Professor of Media Studies) magine what it’s like to work at Facebook this week. For about five years much of the world has slowly turned against the service that once promised to connect the world and spread democracy and cookies and puppies and such. But this week, in the wake of revelations of serious malfeasance and moral irresponsibility by Facebook’s leaders, it must be unbearable to face friends and family, even distant Facebook friends.