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Jupiter-size planets orbiting close to their stars have upended ideas about how giant planets form. Finding young members of this planet class could help answer key questions. For most of human history our understanding of how planets form and evolve was based on the eight (or nine) planets in our solar system. But over the last 25 years, the discovery of more than 4,000 exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, changed all that.

As terrifying as the current pandemic is, scientists believe some of the hundreds of other known coronaviruses in bats might also have the potential to make the cross-species leap into humans, as this one probably did. Scientists are already thinking about ways to prevent another coronavirus from spiraling out of control. Basic research published in the journal Science provides evidence that an antibody therapy that's effective against all SARS-like coronaviruses is possible.

University of Texas at Austin molecular biosciences assistant professor Xiaolu 'Lulu' Cambronne was one of 22 early career scientists selected to join the 2020 class of Pew Biomedical Scholars.

The datasets used by many software applications can be represented as graphs, defined by sets of vertices and edges. These graphs are rich with useful information, and can be used to determine patterns and relationships among the stored data. This process of discovering relevant patterns from graphs is called Graph Pattern Mining. A team of Texas Computer Science (TXCS) researchers advised by Dr. Keshav Pingali has done groundbreaking work to make these programs more efficient and accessible. Their work was recently accepted to Very Large Databases (VLDB) 2020, one of the premier conferences in computer science.

Two faculty members from the College of Natural Sciences have received distinguished Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards totaling $1,075,000 over 5 years from the National Science Foundation.

​ A new study performed by a University of Texas at Austin researcher found that snacking on hummus in the afternoon can improve diet quality, curb hunger and desire to eat, and even improve alertness throughout the day when compared to consuming high sugar snacks or eating no snack at all.

The country's first peer-reviewed study of a COVID-19 treatment that transfuses blood plasma from recovered patients into critically ill patients shows 19 out of 25 patients improving, including 11 discharged from the hospital.

Fritz Benedict has used data he took over two decades ago with Hubble Space Telescope to confirm the existence of another planet around the Sun's nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, and to pin down the planet's orbit and mass. Benedict, an emeritus Senior Research Scientist with McDonald Observatory at The University of Texas at Austin, will present his findings today in a scientific session and then in a press conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

In response to high demand for professionals with scientific and technical training to understand and work with massive amounts of data, The University of Texas at Austin is set to launch a new online master's degree program in data science. Pending final approval by UT System and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the new program will be a collaboration between the Department of Computer Science, ranked among the top 10 programs in the country by U.S. News and World Report; the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences, one of the university's newest and fastest-growing departments; and online learning company edX.

A new study from researchers at The University of Texas at Austin has found that some antivirals are useful for more than helping sick people get better — they also can prevent thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of virus cases if used in the early stages of infection.