It was developed in Japan where they found the traditional fog horn, a horn used by ships to announce their presence in low visibility conditions, to be an ugly drone harsh on the ear. The fog harp was designed to have a rich, melodic pleasance to it, to give the mind a moment of respite from the stress of navigating essentially blindly

As a fellow Hokie I'm just happy they aren't calling us Virginia Tech University.

I occasionally hear people pronounce it out loud as "vah tech". But seeing it written "VA Tech" is even more bizarre.

I don't even know that much about the school but I read the headline as "Virginia based tech sector scientists"

VA tech does not have the most agreeable ring compared to the others you listed tho that's for sure.

If it makes you feel any better, California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo is most commonly just known as SLO. There are two other Cal Polys, one of which is known as CPP (Cal Poly Pomona) and the other mostly just referred to as Humboldt (Cal Poly Humboldt). Moreover, unless you knew this already, if you Google "cal poly" it'll only return results about SLO, further muddying the waters.

As a Wahoo, I don't have the "VA Tech" issue, but I assume journos write it that way because their style guides tell them abbreviating states is acceptable, and they don't care that they're doing it to a trademark that doesn't support abbreviation.

Fellow Virginia Tech alumnus here. "VA Tech" is perfectly legible and unambiguous. "VT scientists" is straightforward to Americans, but not everyone in the world will know what "VT" is in this context. It could be Vermont scientists, or who knows what else.

Incidentally, the author is the wife of physicist Sean Carroll. She certainly knows how to abbreviate Virginia Tech, but Ars Technica's editors will want to influence the title to appeal to a global audience.

"VA Tech" is a reasonable balance between writing something unambiguous for a global audience, but short enough to be interesting. Nobody's going to be interested in an article titled "Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University scientists build a better fog harp."

Of course, you still need to read the article itself to find out what the heck is a "fog harp," and why we need a better one.

Go Hokies!

Georgia Tech is pronounced 'gah tech' and its domain name is gatech.edu. That may be the origin of VT's abbreviation.

For a moment I thought it was about the VA, like maybe this was a musical therapy tool for veterans or something.

One of my friends who graduated from there a few decades ago calls it Vippy Soo.

Since the article is about VT scientists, not the school itself, the correct term is "Wahoos"

It's just Headlinese, an evolution of earlier telegram style.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_style

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headline#Headlinese

Per the convention, "Virginia" is shortened to its acronym VA. So although it's written "VA Tech" it's meant to be read aloud (or in your head) as "Virginia Tech."

I imagine the first layer would harvest most of the water?

That paper read to me like a theoretical one. Is there any commercially viable application of the idea? Ionizing large volumes of air for any practical application of gathering water strikes me as both hazardous and uneconomical.

edit to add: also, the research doesn't appear to be mutually exclusive? The VA Tech folks were looking at how to prevent clumping on the wire mesh used to gather water, while the study here was increasing the volume gathered on the mesh. It seems natural that you could combine both ideas. That is, a grounded harp mesh which gathers more fog due to ionization, and doesn't clog due to the harp design from VA Tech.