News

It's been a big year for Texas Science, with news about research, new discoveries, technological advancements and awards making headlines around the world. Here are a few UT Austin science stories that made the news in 2018.

Gold medalists in an astrophysics Olympic-style event, award-winners at a statewide science fair and budding genetic engineers who shared their research 2,000 miles away are among the high schoolers who found success after working closely with members of the Texas Science community in 2018.

Whether you're looking for a gift for a science enthusiast or proud Longhorn in your life, or you're just seeking your next relaxing read, this roundup of recent books by or featuring members of the Texas Science community will come in handy.

Orhi Esarte Palomero, a chemistry graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded a prestigious "la Caixa" postgraduate fellowship. Sponsored by the "la Caixa" Banking Foundation, these fellowships are granted each year to Spanish graduate students studying abroad.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general scientific society, has named computer scientist Peter Stone and two other University of Texas at Austin faculty members as fellows. This year's AAAS fellows – members of the College of Natural Sciences, the Cockrell School of Engineering and the College of Liberal Arts – will be inducted at a February ceremony during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

In findings published today in The Astrophysical Journal, University of Texas at Austin astronomers report that they have stumbled on an extraordinary galaxy that may corroborate a recently contested theory about dark matter.

Urban sophistication has real sex appeal — at least if you're a Central American amphibian. Male frogs in cities are more attractive to females than their forest-frog counterparts, according to a new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Professor Lili Qiu in the Department of Computer Science has been named an ACM Fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery.

A new initiative from the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin aims to drastically improve students' college readiness and success in mathematics. The new initiative, called Launch Years, looks to align K-12 schools and higher education and is supported by a $6.68 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The scientists looking for gravitational waves report that last year they observed four additional ripples in space-time. During about a nine-month period, scientists involved with the National Science Foundation's LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) collaboration and the European-based Virgo gravitational-wave detector encountered eight gravitational waves—twice as many as previously reported—including a newly identified binary black hole that was the most precisely located in the sky to date.