News

A new study from researchers at The University of Texas at Austin has found that some antivirals are useful for more than helping sick people get better — they also can prevent thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of virus cases if used in the early stages of infection.

​At the end of each May, the College of Natural Sciences celebrates another year's graduates, their impact at UT and the positive change they'll bring the world. This year's graduates were extraordinary, making countless contributions on the Forty Acres and in their communities. For them, the College of Natural Sciences missed having a live event this spring but instead held our first virtual commencement celebration. High-profile scientists, friends and faculty, as well as students themselves, joined in a day especially for recognizing and honoring our newest graduates.

A new pandemic model of COVID-19 shows the positive role social distancing can play in preventing the spread of the illness in areas across the state. The report by researchers in The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences projects significantly higher numbers of cases of infection, hospitalizations, intensive care unit admissions and deaths in 22 Texas communities under scenarios in which social distancing measures are moderate.

Although this is a time of increased physical distancing between people, there remains real potential for human connection and greater awareness of the things that still tie us together, says Stephen Russell, director of the College of Natural Sciences' School of Human Ecology. 

UPDATE: Revised model projections were released on April 6. Read the full report.

Since 2012 a pandemic-planning tool developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin has helped public health officials plan for the consequences of a deadly and virulent virus. Now the pandemic modeler who developed the toolkit is studying COVID-19 and has built a new model to project the spread of COVID-19 across the U.S. She has teamed up with Dell Medical School to assess the potential impact of the pandemic in the Austin-Round Rock area.

​The University of Texas at Austin's public-facing programs on campus and at museums, schools and science centers are currently suspended to help slow the spread of the coronavirus, the agent causing the COVID-19 pandemic.

As The University of Texas at Austin's Master of Science in Nutritional Sciences Online prepares to accept applications for the next academic year, it does so with a new partnership under its belt. The Department of Nutritional Sciences has announced it will link up with online learning provider edX to make UT's nutritional sciences master's degree offerings available on the edX platform.

Allan MacDonald, a professor of physics at The University of Texas at Austin, has received the 2020 Wolf Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking work in a field known as twistronics, which holds extraordinary promise to "lead to an energy revolution," according to the Wolf Foundation announcement today.

Out of the lab and into the marketplace. That could be the catch phrase for a growing number of UT Austin science students and faculty. They are pouring creativity and hard work into new efforts to bring UT science into new realms.

A mother's obesity in pregnancy can affect her child's development years down the road, according to researchers who found impaired motor skills in preschoolers and lower IQ in middle childhood for boys whose mothers were severely overweight while expecting them. A team of nutrition and environmental health researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Columbia University found that the differences are comparable to the impact of lead exposure in early childhood.