Features

Today’s medical technology can recognize tumors smaller than a fingernail, decode your DNA to predict future illness and even read a person’s mind by identifying electronic patterns in the brain. “Medical advances seem like wizardry,” said Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “But pull back the curtain, and sitting at…   » Continue Reading

About 7,800 students will graduate from The University of Texas at Austin at the 127th spring commencement this Saturday, May 22. Students from around the world with diverse cultural backgrounds, students who have faced adversity, and students who have conquered their dreams will come together to share in the spirit of commencement. Each student has…   » Continue Reading

For Hans Hofmann, the quest for the genetic building blocks of human behavior begins with a small fish. Consider this scene: A subordinate male cichlid fish decides he’s ready to challenge a dominant male for territory and for the favor of fertile females. They fight. The subordinate male wins. And just like that, they switch.…   » Continue Reading

Mark Helper looked out the windshield of his pressurized lunar rover at a gray otherworldly landscape that stretched in every direction as far as he could see. With time running short, he and his teammate drove on across the rubble-strewn floor of a vast impact crater. They stopped and Helper used the vehicle’s robotic arm…   » Continue Reading

You know you’re a good marketer when you can attract tourists to your town for a regatta — and the nearest navigable body of water is almost 1,000 miles away. Alice Springs, a city in the Australian Outback, took on the challenge and created the quirky Henley-on-Todd Regatta in 1962 to celebrate a couple of…   » Continue Reading

During the last century, scientists at The University of Texas at Austin played a large role in eliminating the nutritional deficiency diseases that were devastating to children’s development with discoveries of vitamins like B5 and B6 and folic acid. Today, a multi-disciplinary group of university researchers from the College of Pharmacy and College of Natural…   » Continue Reading

When President Barack Obama announced his Race to the Top program in the summer of 2009, the national conversation seemed to focus solely on one issue, teacher incentive pay. Journalists, politicos and academics rushed to the podium to throw their two cents in, some asking whether there should be teacher incentive pay and others asking…   » Continue Reading

Camille Parmesan’s new, big idea in conservation biology–the “assisted colonization” of species threatened by climate change–is a product, in roughly equal parts, of cynicism, experience and hope. Parmesan, an associate professor of integrative biology, wasn’t cynical at all when she first got involved, in the mid-1990s, with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…   » Continue Reading

A Salvadoran woman is promised a good job as a child care worker and ends up as a brothel worker or unpaid domestic servant. An American child runs away from an abusive home and is prostituted for sex by a pimp. Dr. Noël Busch-Armendariz, associate professor of social work, says human trafficking — selling people…   » Continue Reading

Teaming Up Against Birth Defects: John Wallingford and Tim George work at different ends of the biomedical-health-care spectrum. Wallingford is a scientist doing basic research at The University of Texas at Austin. Using frogs and mice as models, he studies how embryos develop and what can go wrong in development. George is a pediatric neurosurgeon at Dell Children's Medical Center. Among his patients are children with birth defects.