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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scientists Observe How New Fears Can Infiltrate Old Memories
The research has implications for understanding post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias.

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...

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.
