News

We in the College of Natural Sciences have launched World Changers, a new initiative that aims to celebrate a very special type of human in history: the scientist or mathematician who charted a path forward in which others could follow. 

Allen Bard, a professor of chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin, was announced as the winner of the 2019 King Faisal International Prize in Science. The major international award, which comes with $200,000 and a gold medal from the King Faisal Foundation, is given to individuals who have made outstanding contributions in physics, chemistry, biology or mathematics through original scientific research that brings "major benefits to humanity."

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.

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.

If creepy-crawly, eight-legged types are the stuff of your Halloween fears, you might want to stop reading here.

A chemist at the University of Texas at Austin has been awarded the top prize for chemical physics, given biennially by the American Physical Society. Davarajan Thirumalai received the Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics for his groundbreaking work in developing "analytical and computational approaches to soft-matter systems" and applying these approaches to "the transitional behavior of supercooled fluids and glasses, folding dynamics of protein and RNA biopolymers, and functioning of molecular motors."

In recent weeks, a pair of researchers received two of the biggest prizes in science, the Breakthrough Prize and the Lasker Award. Both women seized the moment to shine a light on something too frequently cast into the shadows—namely that STEM fields need more women and people from underrepresented communities involved and made welcome in their pursuits.

Being a marine scientist entails coping with extremes, from scuba diving deep in the ocean to interacting with living organisms that are among the planet's most mysterious creatures. Nonetheless, Hurricane Harvey was a whole new extreme for The University of Texas's Marine Science Institute. 

A new diagnostic tool has been developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin that can easily, quickly and cheaply identify whether a mosquito belongs to the species that carries dangerous diseases such as Zika virus, dengue, chikungunya or yellow fever. It can also determine whether the bug has come into contact with a mosquito-control strategy known as Wolbachia.