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Are you ready to get your hands on science? At the Texas Science Festival happening now there are many free opportunities for lifelong learners and school children and youth to try something new, from peering through telescopes to crafting inventions of their own making to handling bones, fossils and replicas of dinosaurs, mastodons and more. The celebration kicked off this week and runs through March 4. In addition to more than a dozen virtual events, this year's festival includes several in-person events with interactive components.

Astronomers on a historically ambitious and massive galaxy-mapping mission have activated more than 10,000 amateur scientists in 85 countries to help in their quest. Now they hope to significantly scale up their volunteer force for a unique project that could reveal for the first time the nature of dark energy.

The University of Texas at Austin and its College of Natural Sciences will renovate and upgrade one of the most historic visitors' spots on campus, the Texas Memorial Museum.

A newly renovated and reimagined space for exploring the science of marine life and ecosystems is now open to the public, free of charge, on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas, Texas. The Patton Center for Marine Science Education offers exhibits, aquaria and programming like keeper chats and fish-feeding demonstrations for visitors to enjoy.

Seeking to ignite a love of discovery and technology in learners right from the start, a team at The University of Texas at Austin has launched a new resource to help families, schools and youth connect to the university's offerings in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) that are especially for children, teens and their teachers.

FORT DAVIS, Texas — The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory will hold its first Dark Skies Festival Friday, April 29, and Saturday, April 30. The festival will include daytime and evening events for the whole family, plus the debut of the new "Preserving Dark Skies" exhibit in the Frank N. Bash Visitors Center. Both the exhibit and the festival are funded by Apache Corporation.

Finding new strategies to battle COVID or cancer, developing tools for the fight against climate change, working to understand a human brain transformed by alcoholism or Alzheimer's disease—this is just a small sample of the type of work scientists at UT Austin do every day. It can be a lot for the individuals involved, with plenty of setbacks and stress along the way. Researchers, like so many people, could use a break right about now.

PORT ARANSAS, Texas – Plastic pollution in marine environments has no border. The waters of the United States and Mexico are inextricably linked through currents of the Gulf of Mexico and with them flow marine debris. One source of marine debris of concern are plastic pellets, or nurdles. Now with new support from the NOAA Marine Debris Program and the Matagorda Bay Mitigation Trust, the Nurdle Patrol citizen science program is expanding across the United States and into Mexico.

Today we're doing something a little different. We're bringing you an excerpt from another great podcast produced here at the University of Texas at Austin, called TX512. It's about all things UT Austin and Texas.

This May 8, 2021 the Bay Education Center, which is operated by the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve, a program of the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, will reopen and showcase its new exhibits. Like many museums and nature centers on the Texas coast, the Bay Education Center was struck a double blow with Hurricane Harvey and then the pandemic.