Experiential learning in the College of Natural Sciences includes the nation's largest effort to involve first-year students in meaningful research, the Freshman Research Initiative (FRI). In the spring, hundreds of first-year students join one of 27 unique research streams for real, hands-on encounters with meaningful research questions that need answering.

Sparks literally fly when a sperm and an egg hit it off. Chemists helped detect how the fertilized mammalian egg releases from its surface billions of zinc atoms in "zinc sparks," one wave after another.

Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and five other institutions have created a molecule that can cause cancer cells to self-destruct by ferrying sodium and chloride ions into the cancer cells.

These synthetic ion transporters, described this week in the journal Nature Chemistry, confirm a two-decades-old hypothesis that could point the way to new anticancer drugs while also benefitting patients with cystic fibrosis.

While the sun and wind provide great alternative energies, the supplies can be highly variable when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Also consider the Achilles' heel of electric vehicles: it can take hours to recharge them.

Researchers at New York University and the University of Texas at Austin have discovered that carbohydrates serve as identifiers for cancer cells. Their findings, which appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show how these molecules may serve as signals for cancer and explain what’s going on inside these cells, pointing to new ways in which sugars function as a looking glass into the workings of their underlying structures.

Mike Ronalter and Adam Kennedy discuss the balance between art and craft in their experience as scientific glassblowers in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin. The glassblowing shop is critical for chemistry researchers, with their daily needs for various shapes and styles of glass for their projects.

President Barack Obama has named College of Natural Sciences chemist Allen Bard a recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award, one of the government’s oldest and most prestigious awards for scientific achievement. 

By caging bacteria in microscopic houses, scientists at The University of Texas at Austin are studying how communities of bacteria, such as those found in the human gut and lungs, interact and develop infections.

The Department of Chemistry in the College of Natural Sciences has received two grants, totaling more than $2.5 million, to help recruit, retain and support graduate and post-doctoral students from groups that are under-represented in the sciences. 

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered a new chemical reaction that has the potential to lower the cost and streamline the manufacture of compounds ranging from agricultural chemicals to pharmaceutical drugs.

By creating a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater, chemists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Marburg in Germany have introduced a new method for the desalination of seawater that consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques. The new method requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery.

Bard is one of 12 eminent researchers who will receive the award at a ceremony in early 2013, announced President Obama on December 21, 2012.