Like a newborn's foggy vision slowly coming into focus, the Hubble Space Telescope has enabled humanity to see more clearly than ever before the world beyond our noses, a cosmos of contradictions: incandescent and quiescent, violent and benevolent, chaotic and orderly.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced this week the election of two new members from The University of Texas at Austin—mathematician Björn Engquist and biochemist George Georgiou.
As people around the world celebrate the 45th annual Earth Day this week, it's a good time to reflect on the many ways researchers in the College of Natural Sciences are helping tackle environmental challenges, including wildfires, drought, pollution, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction and climate change.
The waning number of Ebola cases is good news for West Africa, but for those developing a vaccine for the disease, it means time is running short.
This month marks the 50th Anniversary of Moore's Law, an observation that every couple of years, computer chip manufacturers manage to squeeze twice as many transistors onto a computer chip. Because transistors are the tiny on-off switches that perform calculations and temporarily store information, Moore’s Law also embodies the exponential increase in raw computing power that has unleashed a blizzard of tech innovations.
An undergraduate biochemistry major and Dean's Scholar Honors Program participant, Brendan Chou from Houston, has been awarded a Goldwater scholarship, the premier undergraduate award of its type in mathematics, natural sciences and engineering.
In the College of Natural Sciences’ student community, about one in every 10 learners is here to pursue a graduate degree.
Nicholas Priebe, an associate professor of neuroscience in The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences, and three colleagues have been awarded a Human Frontier Science Program research grant worth $1.05 million over three years to study how our sensory systems change as the environment changes.
Pi Day, celebrated every year on March 14, corresponds with the first three digits of pi (3.14 also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday). Pi pops up anytime you want to mathematically describe a circle, curve or sphere. Here at The University of Texas at Austin, our scientists and mathematicians have reasons to celebrate pi year-round.
The dramatic drop in cost and time needed to sequence the genomes of animals over the past decade has revolutionized the study of evolutionary relationships. But for scientists who study amphibians, it feels like the genomics revolution has passed them by. More than 100 complete vertebrate genomes have been sequenced and released—including about 40 mammals, 13 fish, 9 birds and 9 reptiles. But amphibians? Just one.
Read our publication, The Texas Scientist, a digest covering the people and groundbreaking discoveries that make the College of Natural Sciences one of the most amazing and significant places on Earth.
