News: Research

Read the latest news from the College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin

Jackson School of Geosciences

The ‘Lost’ Prehistoric Cats of Natural Bridge Caverns

Melissa Kemp is part of a team studying recently recovered cat fossils from a Texas cave that are about 11,500 years old.

The silhouette of a person standing inside a large cavern

Research

AI Trained on Evolution’s Playbook Develops Proteins that Spur Drug and Scientific Discovery

EvoRank offers a new and tangible example of how AI may help bring disruptive change to biomedical research and biotechnology more broadly.

A colorful ribbon with twists and turns represents the three-dimensional structure of a molecule

Department of Computer Science

Keeping Up with AI’s Increasingly Complex Networking Demands

A new framework called Transcraft makes the process of designing and implementing new network stacks simpler and more adaptable.

A portrait of three men

McDonald Observatory

Early Dark Energy Could Resolve Cosmology’s Two Biggest Puzzles

Michael Boylan-Kolchin and others show “early dark energy” might help solve the Hubble Tension and explain why there are more early galaxies than expected.

Views of the early universe from a computer model

Research

Carbohydrate Polymers Could be a Sweet Solution for Water Purification

In Cassandra Callmann and her team’s proof-of-concept, the sticky materials removed heavy metals including cadmium and lead.

A test tube with a small amount of blue liquid

Research

Newly Discovered Antimicrobial Could Prevent or Treat Cholera

Natural antimicrobials called microcins are produced by bacteria in the gut and show promise in fighting infection.

There are two images side-by-side. In the image on the left, a dark ring separates a blue disk in the middle from a field of grey surrounding the disk. The image on the right is similar, except there is no dark ring.

UT News

Newly Discovered Antibody Protects Against All COVID-19 Variants

Researchers have discovered an antibody able to neutralize all known variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as well as similar coronaviruses.

An artist's rendering of identical virus particles, spheres with protruding proteins, floating in a space.

Research

Scientists Observe How New Fears Can Infiltrate Old Memories

The research has implications for understanding post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias.

Image of a neuron overlaid with images of a dog, a dog toy and a park

Research

In-Person Contact Linked With Lower Levels of Loneliness in Older Adults

Despite our hopes for technological ways to bridge connections between older adults and social partners, phone and digital contact cannot alleviate loneliness in the same...

A younger man with dark hair and a beard, left, sits beside an older man with white hair. The younger man has his arm around the shoulders of the older man. Overlaid on the image are digital distortion lines.

Research

Dark Matter Experiment Sets New Sensitivity Record

The world’s most sensitive dark matter detector still hasn’t found evidence of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, but the search continues.

A large white cylinder in the middle of scientific equipment and a person in a white, full-body cleanroom suit stands nearby for scale