News

Just as one too many cocktails can lead a person to make bad choices, a few drops of oil can cause coral reef fish to make poor decisions, according to a paper published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution. A team of fisheries biologists led by Jacob Johansen and Andrew Esbaugh of The University of Texas Marine Science Institute have discovered that oil impacts the higher-order thinking of coral reef fish in a way that could prove dangerous for them—and for the coral reefs where they make their home.

The College of Natural Sciences will be hosting the inaugural Symposium for Undergraduate Research Exploration (SURE in CNS) this fall to bring bright upper-division undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds to The University of Texas at Austin to share their research and explore options to pursue advanced degrees in the sciences.

Two undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin and their faculty co-authors have won a best paper award from the Association for Computing Machinery. They presented their paper, which focuses on making 3D printing more efficient, at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference on July 18. Their paper was one of two nominated in the Real World Applications category.

Quantum computers might sound like science fiction. A fully functioning quantum computer could complete calculations in a matter of seconds that would take a conventional computer millions of years to process.

Supernovas — the violent endings of the brief yet brilliant lives of massive stars — are among the most cataclysmic events in the cosmos. Though supernovas mark the death of stars, they also trigger the birth of new elements and the formation of new molecules. In February of 1987, astronomers witnessed one of these events unfold inside the Large Magellanic Cloud, a tiny dwarf galaxy located approximately 160,000 light-years from Earth.

Despite increased acceptance of same-sex marriage and workplace equality for lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people many LGB youth continue to have higher-than-heterosexual rates of drinking, according to a new paper published today in Addiction.

Until now, biologists have struggled to reconstruct an accurate family tree for frogs. Based on fossils and limited genetic data, it appeared that most modern frog species popped up at a slow and steady pace from about 150 million to 66 million years ago. New research shows that a mass extinction 66 million years ago sparked an explosion of new frog species.

The College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin has launched its first master's program offered completely online, a Master of Science in Nutritional Sciences. The program, open to qualified applicants for enrollment in the fall 2017 semester, is designed to provide a rigorous education to working professionals in nutrition or health education as they seek to advance in careers in dietetics that increasingly require a master's degree.

Scientists from The University of Texas at Austin took an important step toward safer gene-editing cures for life-threatening disorders, from cancer to HIV to Huntington's disease, by developing a technique that can spot editing mistakes a popular tool known as CRISPR makes to an individual's genome. The research appears today in the journal Cell.

When children avoid school to avoid bullying, many states' schools can lose tens of millions of dollars in funding, and California alone loses an estimated $276 million each year because children feel unsafe.