News

It's been six months since Hurricane Harvey slammed into the Texas coast and the students, faculty and staff of the University of Texas Marine Science Institute (UTMSI) in Port Aransas are still working to pick up the pieces of their lives and get their work back on track.

The act of learning causes connections between brain cells, called synapses, to expand their capacity to store information, according to a new discovery from neuroscientists at The University of Texas at Austin, the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences and The University of Otago in New Zealand.

Three awards totaling $3.19 million from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) will support cancer research in The University of Texas at Austin's Departments of Molecular Biosciences and Chemistry.

Using a novel imaging technique, a team of U.S. and German researchers found that wiggling the walls of a box packed with sand-sized glass spheres causes the spheres to form crystal structures similar to those formed when liquids freeze. By increasing the order among grains, the grains took up less space. One possible application would be to pack sand or other granular material more densely to save on shipping costs.

The Winter Olympics — a fantastic competition that tests the limits of human performance in a variety of sports — bears a close resemblance to some events underway on the Texas Gulf Coast where, at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, researchers are testing the limits of fish. They may not win a gold medal, but the scores in these games can reveal which fish are most likely to succeed in the game of life.

​Four faculty members from the University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences have received 2018 Sloan Research Fellowships, which honor outstanding early-career scientists in eight fields.

Researchers from across the world are coming to Austin this week for one of the most important scientific gatherings of the year — the 2018 AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Annual Meeting. Among them are some remarkable undergraduate students from The University of Texas at Austin who will be presenting original research at the conference.

Two UT Austin College of Natural Sciences faculty members have been named 2018 Cottrell Scholars by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA). This marks only the third time that a university has received two awards in the same year since they were first given in 1994.

Mike Ryan knows a lot about how circumstances can lead to a change of perspective. Take, for example, the tiny túngara frog, which lives in the jungles of Panama. He may not seem like much, with his mottled brown skin covered in bumps and whiney song. But put this little amphibian at the center of decades of research, and it turns out he can open up a world of discovery, both for Ryan and for dozens of scientists he's helped to train over the years, with new insights into how animals become beautiful – at least to each other. These lessons may also help humans better understand how our own ideas of beauty correspond with those in the animal kingdom.

When Samantha Pliego started her freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin in the College of Natural Sciences, things went well. Mostly.

"I did struggle in that first biology class," said Pliego, who is now a sophomore.