News

Chemist Jonathan L. Sessler of The University of Texas at Austin has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The academy is the country's most prestigious scientific organization, and election to it is one of the highest honors for American researchers.

Remdesivir is currently the only antiviral drug approved in the U.S. for treating COVID-19 patients. In a paper published this week in Cell Reports, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai showed that four drugs used to treat hepatitis C render remdesivir 10 times better at inhibiting the coronavirus in cell cultures.

Amanda Hager, an associate professor of instruction in the Department of Mathematics, has been awarded the 2021 Jean Holloway Award for Excellence in Teaching, in recognition of her dedication to students. The student body is entirely responsible for the nomination, selection and award processes for the annual award, given exclusively to faculty in the Colleges of Natural Sciences and Liberal Arts.

The tree of life just got a little bigger: A team of scientists from the U.S. and China has identified an entirely new group of microbes quietly living in hot springs, geothermal systems and hydrothermal sediments around the world. The microbes appear to be playing an important role in the global carbon cycle by helping break down decaying plants without producing the greenhouse gas methane.

Using a novel molecular data-storage technique, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin encoded a quote from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park in a series of short polymers, which a third party could read back without prior knowledge of the structures that encoded the passage. Polymers are molecules made of repeating subunits strung together like beads on a string, such as synthetic plastics.

Astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin are set to lead some of the largest programs in the first year of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), including the largest project overall. Set to launch this Halloween, the telescope will become operational by mid-2022. Altogether, UT astronomers received about 500 hours of telescope time in JWST's first year.

This week, students at The University of Texas at Austin will be able to talk with and learn from three Nobel Laureates, who are among the world's top scientists, in a free virtual event April 21-22.

A group of University of Texas at Austin nutrition researchers and educators received a grant from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas to create a digital platform empowering teachers to include nutrition and gardening lessons in outdoor settings in their curriculum. The premise is that when kids have a direct connection to fresh produce — planting vegetables, tending them and watching them grow — they are more likely to make healthy eating choices.

The Association for Computing Machinery has awarded Scott Aaronson the 2020 ACM Prize in Computing for groundbreaking contributions to quantum computing. Aaronson is the David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin.