News: Research

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

Research

Ultra-Processed Foods Pose Unique Dangers for People With Type 2 Diabetes

Researchers found ultra-processed foods, even diet ones, bring distinct risks for people with diabetes.

Image of red blood cells overlaid with images of a woman's face, potato chips, cola with ice and a woman injecting her bicep with diabetes medication.

Research

Researchers Identify Promising Combination Therapy for Common Blood Cancer

By exploiting the metabolism of cancer cells, researchers can make hard-to-treat cancers more susceptible to existing drugs.

A green tray holds a clear plastic tube with red liquid with a hand covered in a green glove holds a swab in the tube.

Research

UT Astronomers Find JWST Data Conflicts with Reionization Models

Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope spawned a new tension around when a major change in the universe happened.

An abstract pattern of blue, purple and black areas represents the output of a computer simulation of galaxies ionizing hydrogen gas during the epoch of Reionization

UT News

UT Astronomers Race To Capture Image of Exoplanet Near Star

Brendan Bowler was part of a team to help find the lowest-mass/closest-to-its-host-star distant planet ever found.

An astronomical digitialized sky survey shows stellar patches with various levels of brightness. In a pull-out nearby, a circle is labeled JWST, with a brightest section labeled AF Lep b near a host star. Comparison lines nearby indicate how the Jupiter-Sun Distance and Earth-Sun distance compare.

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.