News

Human development and family sciences professor Elizabeth Gershoff, an internationally renowned expert on the effects of corporal punishment on children, helped inform a new policy statement from The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) with her extensive body of research on the topic.

Last year, Texas saw a particularly deadly flu season. Now, there is a new Federal Drug Administration-approved treatment, Xofluza, designed to catch the flu in its early stages and stop it from spreading. The drug is thanks in large part to professor emeritus Robert Krug's basic research, undertaken almost 40 years ago.

Equations may seem set in stone, but the shapes they describe rely on the space they occupy. This is a concept explored by tropical geometry, a relatively new field of mathematics which reduces complex shapes into simple stick drawings. Quanta Magazine featured a pair of joint papers with connections to the University of Texas at Austin that add new insights to the field.

The Fields Medal is sometimes called the Nobel Prize of math – only this prize is given just once every four years. The 34-year-old mathematician announced as its winner today spent most of his career on the University of Texas at Austin's Forty Acres, making mathematical breakthroughs with applications for everything from meteorology to economic decisions about how to move and distribute materials.

Ewin Tang, a 2018 University of Texas at Austin graduate in computer science and mathematics, is receiving national attention for a feat accomplished at the age of 18 by disproving, as part of an honors thesis, a widely held assumption about the hottest next-thing in technology, quantum computing.

There's a new line of attack in the war on alcoholism: Reporting in the journal Science, UT Austin researchers discovered that people suffering from alcoholism have less of a protein, GAT-3, in the part of the brain called the amygdala.

A series of high-profile news items have featured Karen Fingerman, professor of Human Development and Family Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. A series of national features look at the latest lessons for parents and all of us from her research, with tips ranging from what a new empty nester needs to keep in mind to which relationships help enhance our wellbeing.

Artificial intelligence is quickly creeping into our lives, from smart phone apps that help us find the quickest path through rush hour traffic to voice assistants that serve up lasagna recipes on command. In their new book AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together, James Scott and Nick Polson lay out an optimistic vision for how AI can help us overcome our cognitive weaknesses and live happier, healthier lives. The book is already attracting attention from media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The Times (UK) and PBS's SciTechNow.

​Valentine's Day may be over, but for the peregrine falcon that lives in the UT Tower, it may be the beginning of a love story.

The US Supreme Court is considering whether Texas legislative districts are racially discriminatory. The high court is also hearing other high profile cases about partisan gerrymandering. Amid the increased national attention on the issue, the University of Texas at Austin hosted a conference focused in part on the mathematics of gerrymandering – how it's done, how to quantify it and ways to prevent it. Andrew Blumberg, associate professor of mathematics at UT Austin, co-organized the event with Moon Duchin, a Tufts University mathematician who runs the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group.

A University of Texas at Austin astronomer has published a commentary in the journal Science noting that a new study on the movement of galaxies has the potential to either reinforce or change our understanding of how dark matter contributes to the motion of galaxies.

​Physicists from the University of Texas at Austin and the Department of Energy (DOE) recently published a new study on how perovskite solar cells degrade, which could help improve the performance and durability of solar cells.

Each spring, over a million fish migrate to a small patch of the Gulf of California to spawn. Now—thanks to new research by Brad Erisman at the University of Texas at Austin's Marine Science Institute and his colleagues published in the journal Biology Letters—we know that the Gulf corvina are the loudest known fish on the planet.

A UT Austin faculty member spoke to reporters about the discovery of a hidden void in Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza. The almost 100-feet long cavity was detected by scanning the pyramid using high-energy particles called muons.

What's the best way to carve a pumpkin? If you ask chemistry lecturer Kate Biberdorf, she might tell you to let the pumpkin carve itself, just as she does in recent media coverage of her Fun with Chemistry outreach program.