News

Ocean warming is occurring at such a rapid rate that fish are searching for cooler waters to call home.

In parts of the 19 states where the practice is still legal, corporal punishment in schools is used as much as 50 percent more frequently on children who are African American or who have disabilities, a new analysis of 160,000 cases during 2013-2014 has found. 

Physicists have hypothesized the existence of fundamental particles called sterile neutrinos for decades and a couple of experiments have even caught possible hints of them. However, according to new results from two major international consortia, the chances that these indications were right and that these particles actually exist are now much slimmer.

Arley Muth, a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Marine Science, was one of 52 graduate students nationwide who were recently awarded a Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Graduate Fellowship from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

A new hunting ground for medically important compounds may be the genome of a stressed-out, poisonous evergreen shrub. Rhazya stricta is a relative of a plant currently mined for chemotherapies and holds promise for future cancer therapies, according to scientists at The University of Texas at Austin, King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Saudi Arabia and two institutions in Canada, University of Ottawa and Université de Montréal.

Update, October 2020: The 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to two researchers, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna, "for the development of a method for genome editing." The two scientists discovered CRISPR-Cas9, genetic scissors which are based on a natural defense mechanism bacteria use against viruses, and showed that the tool can be used to precisely edit any DNA. Doudna was an advisor to David Taylor, featured in the piece below, while he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.​

Update, October 2017: ​The 2017 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to three researchers who developed cryo-electron microscopy, a method that allows biochemists to "freeze biomolecules mid-movement and visualize processes they have never previously seen." This fall, UT Austin has opened its own cryo-EM facility, where researchers are beginning to explore new insights into the chemistry of life. Read on to learn about one of the faculty members involved with the new Sauer Laboratory for Structural Biology, and work planned within the College of Natural Sciences. 

"We did it!" announced physics alumnus David Reitze to the world on February 11, 2016 – breaking the news of perhaps the biggest scientific discovery of our time.

Ila Fiete, associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience, is the first faculty member from The University of Texas at Austin to receive recognition through a new program from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). She joins 83 early-career scientists from across the nation who have been chosen for the Faculty Scholars Program.

Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a new superconducting material that might allow the construction of quantum computers that are more resistant to outside noise, such as electromagnetic interference.

Like many predators, the fringe-lipped bat primarily uses its hearing to find its prey, but with human-generated noise on the rise, scientists are examining how bats and other animals might adapt to find their next meal. According to a new study, when noise masks the mating calls of the bat's prey, túngara frogs, the bat shifts to another sensory mode—echolocation.