News

Friday, 09 January 2015

Harrington Fellowship Supports Three Natural Sciences Graduate Students

Harrington Fellowship Supports Three Natural Sciences Graduate Students

Three winners of the university's most prestigious fellowship program, the Donald D. Harrington Fellows Program, are currently working in the College of Natural Sciences. The three graduate students—from California Institute of Technology, Georgia State and The University of Texas at Austin—are researching how planets form beyond our solar system, how our brains make associations between rewards and the environments in which we get them, and how corals respond and adapt to changes in their environment.

Monday, 05 January 2015

Peter Onyisi is Having a Smashing Time Hunting Particles

Physicist Peter Onyisi, assistant professor in the College of Natural Sciences, was part of a team at CERN working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that discovered something that looked like the Higgs boson particle.

Tuesday, 16 December 2014

7 Research Breakthroughs This Year You May Have Missed

It's that time of year again. No, I don't mean the time for mistletoe, reindeer and maxed-out credit cards. It's time for the annual "best of" lists. You can find lists of the year's best movies, books, songs, hairstyles, cars, wines … there are even lists of best of lists. Here at the University of Texas at Austin, we are complete geeks for scien...

Monday, 15 December 2014

For a Big Impact, Go Small: An Introduction to CNS Cornerstones

Every week, as Sneha Patel stood in front of the roughly 20 freshmen she mentored and gave tips on how to navigate college, she would see a lot of heads nodding—but not in the back of the room. There sat one girl, always with her headphones on, not participating. Patel was surprised when the student signed up for one of the individual sessions she offered to each of her mentees. She probably won't even show up, Patel thought. When the student did arrive for her meeting, she was very quiet at first. Then something shifted.

Thursday, 11 December 2014

Computer Scientists at UT Austin Crack Code for Redrawing Bird Family Tree

A new computational technique developed at The University of Texas at Austin has enabled an international consortium to produce an avian tree of life that points to the origins of various bird species. A graduate student at the university is a leading author on papers describing the new technique and sharing the consortium’s findings about bird evolution in the journal Science.

Monday, 08 December 2014

Brackenridge Field Lab Shines in National Report

Jacob Heiling (BS '13) was already interested in biology when he started working as a greenhouse assistant at the Brackenridge Field Laboratory (BFL) as an undergraduate. The time he spent watching butterflies interact in the greenhouse sparked his interest in studying species interactions, and that led to an independent research project on the chemical ecology of bird-dispersed fruits.

Thursday, 13 November 2014

Georgiou Named Inventor Of The Year By UT Austin

The University of Texas at Austin has honored two scientists who have made important contributions to the medical field, George Georgiou and James McGinity, with its Inventor of the Year Award.

Monday, 03 November 2014

Compared with Apes, People’s Gut Bacteria Lack Diversity, Study Finds

The microbes living in people’s guts are much less diverse than those in humans' closest relatives, the African apes, an apparently long evolutionary trend that appears to be speeding up in more modern societies, with possible implications for human health, according to a new study.

Tuesday, 02 December 2014

Capping Decades of Searching, Scientists Observe Elusive Particle That is its own Antiparticle

Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and Princeton University have observed an exotic particle that behaves simultaneously like matter and antimatter, a breakthrough that could eventually enable powerful computers based on quantum mechanics.

Tuesday, 28 October 2014

Learning May be Improved by Mental Rest and Reflection

According to a new study by Margaret Schlichting and Alison Preston, which may have implications for approaches to education, brain mechanisms engaged when people allow their minds to rest and reflect on things they've learned before may boost later learning.