News

The City of Austin has issued a citywide boil water notice. You should not drink the water without boiling it first. For our campus community that means you should not drink water from any of our sinks, water fountains, or showers.

Over the last six years, faculty, staff and students from across the College of Natural Sciences have submitted hundreds of images from their scholarly research for our annual Visualizing Science competition, and these images have been viewed by tens of thousands of people. The submitted images, often beautiful and stunning, are the ones that spoke to their creators, inspiring and informing them as they followed their scientific passions.

The world's most widely used weed killer may also be indirectly killing bees. New research from The University of Texas at Austin shows that honey bees exposed to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, lose some of the beneficial bacteria in their guts and are more susceptible to infection and death from harmful bacteria.

A complex genetic analysis has biologists re-evaluating some long-held beliefs about the way societies evolved following the invention of agriculture—by six-legged farmers.

Using genetic samples and computer simulations, evolutionary biologists have made a glass-half-full forecast: Corals in the Great Barrier Reef have enough genetic variation to adapt to and survive rising ocean temperatures for at least another century, or more than 50 years longer than previous estimates have suggested.

With spring gardening season in full swing, Natural Sciences researchers have suggestions for the perfect vegetable garden, flower bed, lawn or landscape. In fact, scientists with the University of Texas at Austin can help you do more than have a great looking and productive yard: they've got tips that would help the local environment and maybe even the gardeners themselves.

​In the latest peer-reviewed publication on the potential impacts of a border wall on plants and animals, conservation biologists, led by a pair of scientists from The University of Texas at Austin, say that border walls threaten to harm endangered Texas plants and animals and cause trouble for the region's growing ecotourism industry.

The University of Texas at Austin is one of the public universities with the most top-ranked schools and academic programs in the country, according to U.S. News & World Report's 2019 edition of "Best Graduate Schools," released this morning. The university has five programs across campus ranked No. 1 and 49 schools and specialties ranked among the nation's top 10.

Alex Wild manages the Biodiversity Center and Integrative Biology Department's Entomology Collection, which houses 2 million specimens of insects, including the world's largest collection of cave-dwelling invertebrates. The collections are focused on Texas and Mexico, with smaller holdings from Trinidad, the Galápagos Islands and elsewhere. A skilled photographer, Wild also oversees Insects Unlocked, a public domain photography project.

The city's only known year-round resident peregrine falcon is getting a global audience. The bird, nicknamed Tower Girl, lives atop the University of Texas at Austin Tower and has a handful of avid fans who love to watch one of the world's fastest animals dive through the skies above campus. And now, UT's Biodiversity Center has launched a live-streaming webcam so that viewers around the world can observe everyone's favorite local raptor in real time.