Further Findings

Michael Telch’s lecture at CASW.

Prof. Michael Telch’s project on post traumatic stress disorder is the subject of the story on The University of Texas at Austin home page.

Telch went into more detail about the project in a lecture at the meeting of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. The meeting was held on campus in October.

The lecture can be seen at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2389987.

Other lectures from the conference are at http://casw.org/new-horizons/new-horizons-2009-stream.

David Stuart

If the world does end in 2012, do not blame it on the ancient Mayans.

The current disaster movie “2012″ apparently says the world ends in 2012 because that’s when the Mayan calendar ends. Other 2012-end-of-the-world scenarios also bring the Mayan calendar into it.

David Stuart, a Mayan expert at The University of Texas at Austin, has worked with the Mayan text that some say heralds the end of the world. And he says it’s not so.

In a Q and A
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Eric Pianka and Gisela Kaufmann–Photo by Carsten Orlt

Sometimes it pays to read those old magazines gathering dust in doctors’ offices. That turned out to be Eric Pianka’s version of being discovered by a talent scout.

Pianka, a biologist who holds the Denton A. Cooley Centennial Professorship at the University of Texas at Austin, is the expert guide in “Lizard Kings,” a part of the Nova series on PBS. It will be shown on KUT at 7 p.m. Oct. 20, 2009.

And it’s
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Here’s the video of the nano test tube experiment conducted in the lab of Brian Korgel, professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

The video shows gold moving up the length of a germanium nanowire, which was encased in a carbon nano test tube, at high temperature. The image has been magnified 100,000 times and the video’s speed has been greatly increased.

John Goodenough

John Goodenough, whose work led to the lithium ion battery off of which your laptop is running right now if it’s not plugged in, was interviewed by Eric Berger, who covers science for the Houston Chronicle.

Goodenough, a professor of mechanical engineering, recently won the Enrico Fermi Prize.

Check out the Q&A at Berger’s SciGuy blog.

Prof. Kim Fromme in the Bar Lab.

You go to a bar on Austin’s Sixth Street to see and be seen. You go to the Bar Lab to be watched. You go to both to drink.

The Bar Lab is exactly that: A bar laboratory. It’s where Kim Fromme, a professor in the Department of Psychology, and her students conduct research on college students and drinking.

It looks like a small neighborhood bar might look if it was staffed with a cleaning crew
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R. Dayne Mayfield

The people who use their brain to think ahead about donating their brains to science do R. Dayne Mayfield a big favor.

Mayfield, a researcher at the Waggoner Center for Addiction and Alcoholism Research, uses the brain tissue to study the genetic impact of alcohol on the brain.

READ MORE about ADDICTION research at www.utexas.edu on Oct. 5, 2009

The more he knows about the donors, the better the information obtained from the donors’ tissue.

The plan-ahead donors fill out a questionnaire detailing
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Teams of computer scientists at several universities including The University of Texas at Austin are battling each other on disappearing and reappearing digitized data.

John Markoff, a computer reporter for the New York Times, has the story.

He was on campus last week (Sept. 17, 2009) interviewing Bob Taylor, the university alumnus who played a big role in developing he Internet and other tools of the digital age.

There’s also a university press release on Unvanish.

Vanish, created by researchers at the University of Washington,
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George Pollak

The experiment began in a backyard barn. Instruments used included sophisticated recording equipment. A strong regimen of statistical analysis capped it off.

The result: evidence that suggests that male bats sing songs with distinguishable syllables and phrases to attract females, and in some cases, to warn other males to stay away. The paper written about the study was published in PLOS One.

The research was a collaboration of the owner of the barn, Barbara Schmidt-French of Bat Conservation International; George Pollak, a
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Daniel Hamermesh

Prof. Daniel Hamermersh, a professor in the Department of Economic, manages to use a bit of biology to explain the impact of long-term unemployment on the economy in an interview on the College of Liberal Arts Web site.

Do you expect the trend toward long-term unemployment to continue?

My guess is the percentage of long-term unemployment will keep on rising for a while. While the recession bottoms out it takes a while for people to get hired again. It’s like a rat
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