Over most of the past 40 million years, having a larger brain relative to body size was an advantage for carnivores, increasing the probability that large-brained species survive while other species go extinct, according to a new study from a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.
Plastic pollution has contaminated every continent on Earth. It kills wildlife from whales to sea turtles. Some of the smallest plastic particles, called nurdles, are among the most insidious. It's difficult to even catalog the scope of the problem. But one group of citizen scientists is going to try. And a recent lawsuit against a plastics manufacturer is about to give them a major boost.
A team of researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have solved a decades-old mystery about how DNA organizes itself in the cell. In doing so, the researchers have potentially unlocked clues about a set of rare genetic conditions.
A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Riverside have found a way to produce a long-hypothesized phenomenon—the transfer of energy between silicon and organic, carbon-based molecules—in a breakthrough that has implications for information storage in quantum computing, solar energy conversion and medical imaging. The research is described in a paper out today in the journal Nature Chemistry.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society, has named Mark Raizen, a professor in the Department of Physics, a 2019 AAAS Fellow.
Eric Anslyn, Edward Marcotte and George Georgiou were honored at an event this month honoring the top innovations and inventions of the year to come out of The University of Texas at Austin.
In a sign of the highly competitive environment for top talent in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the Sony Corporation this week tapped Peter Stone, a faculty member in the College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, to lead the newly established Sony AI in the United States.
A widely used class of chemotherapy drugs, called topoisomerase inhibitors, come with some serious downsides: bone marrow damage, reduced blood cell production, diarrhea and heart damage. And some cancers can quickly develop resistance. A new discovery about a second class of drugs might lead to combination therapies that are just as effective, but with fewer downsides.
A noted researcher at the intersection of cancer biology, neurodegeneration and epigenetics, Urbain Weyemi is joining the Department of Molecular Biosciences with the help of a recruitment grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). We connected with Weyemi as he makes the move from Johns Hopkins University to The University of Texas at Austin.
An associate professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin is one of two individuals this year to receive a Sustaining Outstanding Achievement in Research (SOAR) award from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. Johann Eberhart was awarded the eight-year, $7.6 million grant to study the genetic and environmental causes of human birth defects of the head and face, which now occur in up to 5% of all births.
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.
