Further Findings

Namkee Choi, professor in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin, is helping older homebound adults deal with depression with the Internet, a laptop and face-to-face communication. Yes, there is an app for that.

Use of methamphetamines is on the rise nationally after a decrease a few years ago, according to university researchers.

Use of meth dropped significantly in 2007 and 2008 after laws limiting the availability of pseudoephedrine went into effect made it much harder to obtain key ingredients.

Jane Maxwell, a senior research scientist in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin, is concerned that programs to help people addicted to methamphetamines continues.

However, indicators of meth use – reported
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Imagine what it would be like to shave 10 hours from your workweek. How would you make the most out of your free time? Would you tackle that home improvement project? Attend to that pile of laundry? Or take a nap in the backyard hammock?

Economics Professor Dan Hamermesh.

According to a new economics study, co-authored by Daniel Hamermesh, professor of economics at The University of Texas at Austin, people are more likely to put those household chores aside and practice
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It seems that the only time astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin took a break from finding new planets and bigger black holes during the fall 2011 semester was when university geologists edged in with evidence of a lake under the surface of Saturn’s moon, Europa.

As busy as those researchers were, the semester also brought discoveries in green energy, Parkinson’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, concealed handguns and the relationship between children’s happiness and their parents.

Here’s a look at
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Namkee Choi credits her grandmother for her career as a social work professor and for her focus on older adults.

Choi, a professor in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin, grew up in a South Korean village in the years after the Korean War combat ended.

Namkee Choi, professor in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin.

“We saw a lot of poverty,” she says, “especially in the wintertime. Peasants would run
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State Sen. Kirk Waton, Alexa Stuifbergen, dean of the School of Nursing, and Earl Maxwell, chief executive of the St. David’s Foundation, marked the foundation’s endowment of a health-care research center.

Over the past decade, researchers from across The University of Texas at Austin have received small grants from the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research in Underserved Populations, which is in the School of Nursing.

The researchers used this money – about $600,000 altogether – to undertake small pilot
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Life expectancy in the United States is on the rise – but not for everyone. Although many older Americans are healthier and more prosperous than any previous generation, rates of gains are inconsistent between the genders and across education levels and racial and ethnic groups.

Graduate student researchers at the Population Research Center (PRC) are working toward understanding these health disparities that continue to persist and grow in the United States, and to help extend our most precious resource: human life.

To help
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Adela Ben-Yakar, an engineering professor, and Jon Pierce-Shimomura, a neurobiology professor, have teamed up to develop technology to test drugs for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Scientific collaborations across disciplines can be great when they happen.

Researchers bring different skills, expertise and perspectives that can illuminate hard problems.

But just bringing different disciplines together can be a hard problem in itself, despite work being done by universities to break down the siloes that contain them.

So we wondered how Adela Ben-Yakar, a professor in the
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Moms are tops in muriquis monkey society. Photo by Carla B. Possamai; provided by K. B. Strier.

If you are a male human, nothing puts a damper on romantic success like having your mother in tow. If you are a male northern muriqui monkey, however, mom’s presence may be your best bet to find and successfully mate with just the right girl at the right time.

In a study of wild primates, reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy
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Several weeks ago, 10 University of Texas at Austin professors sat down with CSPAN host Peter Slen to talk about their books.

Julia Mickenberg

Those interviews have started to run on Book-TV, which appears on CSPAN-2 on weekends.

CSPAN is the cable television enterprise that covers the U.S. Congress and offers other public affairs programming. It turns CSPAN-2 over to interviews with non-fiction authors on weekends.

This weekend (Nov. 19-21, 2011) BookTV will feature interviews with three UT Austin professors, following two that appeared last weekend. More
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