A nearly $7 million grant from NASA is supporting research to develop approaches to detecting extraterrestrial life, and two University of Texas at Austin faculty are part of the interdisciplinary scientific team.
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.
Last year, Texas saw a particularly deadly flu season. Now, there is a new Federal Drug Administration-approved treatment, Xofluza, designed to catch the flu in its early stages and stop it from spreading. The drug is thanks in large part to professor emeritus Robert Krug's basic research, undertaken almost 40 years ago.
A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin has demonstrated a new way to sequence proteins that is much more sensitive than existing technology, identifying individual protein molecules rather than requiring millions of molecules at a time. The advance could have a major impact in biomedical research, making it easier to reveal new biomarkers for the diagnosis of cancer and other diseases, as well as enhance our understanding of how healthy cells function.
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.
In a pair of papers out this week, scientists at the University of Texas at Austin made new discoveries about a remarkable naturally occurring system known as CRISPR.
James P. Allison, a world-renowned pioneer of cancer immunotherapy, has been awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine jointly with Tasuku Honjo "for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation."
Last year, University of Texas at Austin alumnus Michael Young won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the molecular mechanism behind circadian rhythms. Circadian clocks are critical for the health of all living things, acting as the internal timekeepers in plants and animals that help to synchronize functions like eating and sleeping with our planet's daily rhythm of light and dark.
Read our publication, The Texas Scientist, a digest covering the people and groundbreaking discoveries that make the College of Natural Sciences one of the most amazing and significant places on Earth.
