News

Monday, 15 February 2010

Lecture: The Search for Randomness

AUSTIN, Texas -- On Friday, February 19, at 3:15 p.m., renowned mathematician Persi Diaconis will speak on “The Search for Randomness.” “I will take a careful look at some of our most primitive images of random phenomena,” says Diaconis, “actions like flipping a coin, shuffling cards, and rolling a roulette ball. In each case, physics and math show...

Monday, 15 February 2010

What your heart and brain are doing when you're in love

Although the physiology of romantic love has not been extensively studied, scientists can trace the symptoms of deep attraction to their logical sources. "Part of the whole attraction process is strongly linked to physiological arousal as a whole," said Timothy Loving...Read the full story.

Monday, 15 February 2010

Essay: Where the wild things were

We’re entering an age of vanishing wilderness, when the wild places were. To have any hope of preserving our biodiversity in the face of climate change, we need to be futurists, pragmatic but farsighted. It is time for radical notions. One such notion is to transplant species that otherwise have no hope.

Monday, 15 February 2010

Saving species from climate change

How can we save some of our most charismatic animals from extinction due to climate change? One US biologist, Camille Parmesan, has a radical suggestion: just pick them up and move them.

Monday, 08 February 2010

Environmental Science Campus Proposed

Faculty envision a public science center like the California Academy of Science (CAS) at BFL. In this photo, CAS visitors explore the rainforest dome and its 100,000-gallon Amazon Flooded Forest tank. Photo © Tim Griffith. Courtesy: CAS. Brackenridge Field Lab (BFL) should expand to become a new environmental science campus for The University of Te...

Thursday, 04 February 2010

Opinion: Obama Gets Space Funding Right

By Steven Weinberg In the federal budget released this week, President Barack Obama calls for increasing NASA's funding by two percent while cutting its manned space flight program. If enacted by Congress, the cuts will likely end plans to return astronauts to the moon. Some claim these cuts will damage America's capabilities in science and technol...

Wednesday, 03 February 2010

Math Prof Honored with Teaching Award

Kathy Davis has been honored as the recipient of the 2010 Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment Award for Excellence in Teaching. Established in 2006, the award recognizes faculty who are engaged, dynamic instructors who inspire others, embrace innovation, collaborate with colleagues, assess teaching and learning, and use technology t...

Wednesday, 03 February 2010

Office Hours: George Pollak's Big Idea

For more than 35 years, neurobiologist George Pollak has been using echolocating bats to study the mammalian auditory system, trying to understand how the auditory system processes communication signals and how animals are able to associate a sound with its location in space. He’s done groundbreaking work in, among other areas, decoding the meaning...

Monday, 01 February 2010

Training the eWorkforce

A new program launching this summer would train recent graduates of the College of Natural Sciences in a health information technology curriculum. Read the full story from the Texas Tribune.

Thursday, 28 January 2010

Walk Softly When Exploring the Dark Side of the Universe

In his upcoming lecture, "Walk Softly When Exploring the Dark Side of the Universe: Black Holes, Dark Matter and Dark Energy," Karl Gebhardt will offer a broad overview of what astronomers currently know, and how they're working to know more, about the "dark components" of the universe.