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News

From the College of Natural Sciences

Posts highlighting some of the many articles mentioning College of Natural Sciences faculty and students in the media.

The Search for Genes Leads to Unexpected Places

Edward M. Marcotte is looking for drugs that can kill tumors by stopping blood vessel growth, and he and his colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin recently found some good targets — five human genes that are essential for that growth. Now they’re hunting for drugs that can stop those genes from working. Strangely, though, Dr. Marcotte...

A brave, new fashion world

Student designers chat about their collections, where they see themselves in the years to come and what inspires them now.

UT prof tackles conservation

Sahotra Sarkar urges that locals be consulted and their needs taken into account in creating preserves, parks.

Undergraduates study H1N1 at U.S.-Mexico border

Microbiology undergraduates Sami Miller and Kelly Broussard traveled to Brownsville to research tuberculosis alongside the world’s foremost disease detectives, Joseph McCormick and Susan Fisher-Hoch. Upon arrival, Miller and Broussard’s research shifted focus to confront the global emergence of the H1N1 strain of influenza. By Christopher Palmer

A jewel's true colours

Parrish Brady and Molly Cummings found that a Southwestern scarab beetle can perceive circular polarized light, one of only two species known to be able to do so. More on Nature.com and The American Naturalist.

Colonies of Bacteria Fight for Resources With Lethal Protein

Rival colonies of bacteria can produce a lethal chemical that keeps competitors at bay, scientists report. By halting the growth of nearby colonies and even killing some of the cells, groups of bacteria preserve scarce resources for themselves, even when the encroaching colony is closely related. Read the full story.

New reactors that make nuclear waste disappear

Scientists have designed a system that would use fusion to eliminate virtually all the waste produced by civil nuclear reactors. Swadesh Mahajan, senior research scientist at the Institute for Fusion Studies (IFS), believes that the invention could hugely reduce the need for geological repositories for waste. Read the full story at The Times.

"Epigenetics" drives phenotype?

Researchers have identified a possible mechanism by which DNA regions that don't encode proteins can still determine phenotypic traits such as a person's height or susceptibility to a particular disease, researchers report online in Science today. Read more.

How Privacy Vanishes Online

If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address? Prof. Vitaly Shmatikov's research featured in this story on privacy.

Seton, UT lay foundations for Austin medical school

An April open house will mark the official launch of the Dell Pediatric Research Institute...with a total projected capacity of 28 senior faculty members, is the first of several planned UT Austin research institutes on 30 acres of land at Mueller. Read the full story.

Dana Center Receives Grant from Gates Foundation

The Gates Foundation has committed $19.5 million to the development and piloting of new instructional tools and assessments.

Texas Expecting an Abundant Array of Wildflowers

Texas should have a colorful spring, with recent rains bringing an abundance of wildflowers and blooms already popping up, Wildflower Center experts say. Read the full story.

Want a job? Get a computer science degree

The Department of Computer Science is named one of the 10 hot computer science schools in this article about increasing enrollments in the field. Bruce Porter, chair of the Department of Computer Science, comments on the trend. Read more here.

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.

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.