News

New research from The University of Texas at Austin shows that children adjust more poorly when parents react negatively in direct response to their child's crying, fussing and other aversive behavior than if the parent is negative in general. Children who routinely experience negative backlash from a parent are also less successful at navigating social situations.

The key to preventing or surviving a breast cancer diagnosis could be the food you eat, writes Linda deGraffenried, associate professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, in The Dallas Morning News.

In parts of the 19 states where the practice is still legal, corporal punishment in schools is used as much as 50 percent more frequently on children who are African American or who have disabilities, a new analysis of 160,000 cases during 2013-2014 has found. 

A new hunting ground for medically important compounds may be the genome of a stressed-out, poisonous evergreen shrub. Rhazya stricta is a relative of a plant currently mined for chemotherapies and holds promise for future cancer therapies, according to scientists at The University of Texas at Austin, King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Saudi Arabia and two institutions in Canada, University of Ottawa and Université de Montréal.

Lydia Steinman and students in her nutrition class have cooked up a new way to help Longhorns and others plan for healthy meals this academic year. Thanks to a recent Provost's Teaching Fellowship, Steinman has amassed the tools needed for her students to produce informative cooking videos for the general public. The best videos are curated online under Cook 'Em.

Faculty members in the College of Natural Sciences are leading new Pop-Up Institutes as part of a new interdisciplinary research initiative at The University of Texas at Austin. Three Pop-Up Institutes were announced this week, with two originating in Natural Sciences. These research efforts will assemble fresh collaborations to address the influence of individual variation on the health and fitness of populations and the impact of discrimination on health outcomes.

For 3 billion years, one of the major carriers of information needed for life, RNA, has had a glitch that creates errors when making copies of genetic information. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a fix that allows RNA to accurately proofread for the first time.

There's a silver lining to the Great Recession: new research published in the Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences shows that the addition of an adult child to your home may no longer spell trouble for your marriage. The study compared marriage quality from 2013 to that from 2008, before the financial collapse.

It took nearly a half trillion tries before researchers at The University of Texas at Austin witnessed a rare event and perhaps solved an evolutionary puzzle about how introns – noncoding sequences of DNA located within genes – multiply in a genome.