News

Evolutionary biologist Nancy Moran, a professor in the College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, has been chosen as the inaugural winner of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution's Lifetime Contribution Award.

Dan Goldman (Ph.D. Physics '02), a physicist at Georgia Tech, is exploring how animals move on tricky surfaces like sand, bark, leaves and grass. The New York Times produced two videos on his research, which revealed how sidewinder snakes climb up sand dunes and how the sandfish lizard "swims" through sand. Tomorrow, he's delivering a talk to undergraduates at UT Austin titled "Robophysics: Physics Meets Robotics." We recently chatted about his work.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin successfully culminated years of work when a drug they engineered for the treatment and prevention of inhalational anthrax — the anthrax antitoxin obiltoxaximab — received approval March 21 from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The University of Texas at Austin will participate in a new $317 million partnership to accelerate innovation in high-tech, U.S.-based manufacturing involving fibers and textiles, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced today.

​The National Science Foundation has announced that they will be awarding 28 prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships to University of Texas at Austin students, including seven College of Natural Science graduate students, two current undergraduates and a recent alumnus. 

Imagine a world where cars run on fuel derived from water instead of gasoline. Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere are developing methods for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen that could someday power hydrogen fuel cells. One key challenge has been the high cost of catalysts, chemicals that shepherd the electrolytic reaction.

​Collecting data about school discipline encounters involving LGBT students could help policymakers and educators create a safe learning environment for LGBT teens, suggests a new research brief co-authored by Stephen Russell, Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences at UT Austin, in collaboration with the Equity Project at Indiana University. 

To study diseases, biologists often make models, for example, a rat with a disorder similar to Alzheimer's. With a good model, they can tinker with different variables and see if anything halts the disease, without the ethical limits of experimenting on actual humans. But scientists studying an especially nasty bacterium that tends to invade and breed out of control in the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis (CF) kept hitting dead ends in their search for a good model.

​A group of scientists from UT Austin's Finkelstein Laboratory, headed by assistant professor in Molecular Biosciences Ilya Finkelstein, have imaged proteins which repair DNA and gained new insights into how the body regulates DNA repair. The research, which uses novel single-molecule imaging techniques partially developed by Finkelstein, could lead to a better understanding of how cancerous cells repair their DNA.

More cities than previously assumed could soon grapple with the Zika virus if two species of mosquitos are found to be equally effective carriers of the disease, a University of Texas at Austin disease ecologist and his colleagues argue in the current edition of The Lancet Infectious Diseases.