Further Findings

It’s called the “Silver Tsunami” – the swelling number of baby boomers surpassing age 65. As medical advancements extend their lives, they’re expected to live well into their 80s and 90s – outlasting any generation in American history.

But among Americans over 80 – who represent the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population – half are debilitated with a neurodegenerative disorder. Of this group, 5.4 million now have Alzheimer’s Disease. By year 2050, that number is expected to balloon to
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Supernova remnant 0509-67.5 was searched for a left-behind partner star without success. (NASA)

J. Craig Wheeler has studied the exploding stars called supernovae for more than four decades. Now he has a new idea on the identity of the “parents” of one of the most important types of supernovae — the Type Ia, those used as “standard candles” in cosmology studies that led to the discovery of dark energy, the mysterious force causing the universe’s expansion to speed up.

Wheeler lays out
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Dr. Kevin Dalby, professor of Medicinal Chemistry, and Scarlett Ferguson, a postdoctoral fellow in the College of Pharmacy, at work in Dalby’s lab. (Marsha Miller)

Cancer researcher Kevin Dalby says he thinks scientists are on track to find a cure for cancer one day.

Make that cures for cancers.

There are so many ways for cells to go bad and become cancerous that anti-cancer therapies will need to include customized agents to modify various cancer-causing targets. Dalby, a professor in the College of
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Peter Onyisi is a new assistant professor in the Department of Physics. He was part of the team working with the Large Hadron Collider that confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson particle.

Physicist Peter Onyisi arrives as a new assistant professor in the College of Natural Sciences with an extraordinary feather already in his cap. He was part of the team at CERN working with the Large Hadron Collider that confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson particle.

Daniel Oppenheimer in
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Pictured are Kelly Daniels, Christopher Frei, assistant professor, and Julieta Scalo

It takes an average of 24 years for a discovery in a scientist’s laboratory to become a medication at a patient’s bedside.

To speed up that process, the College of Pharmacy at The University of Texas at Austin and three other University of Texas System institutions have begun a Translational Science Ph.D. program to spur communication between the basic scientist and the physician and points in between.

“This program will lead to well-trained
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Hurricane Katrina is still teaching lessons seven years after it struck the Gulf Coast.

The hurricane upended the lives of thousands of New Orleans residents. It forced people from their homes and neighborhoods and the city where families had lived for generations.

In one of the most extensive examinations of the aftermath of the hurricane, a team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin tracked a group of hurricane survivors evacuated to Austin and their experiences with service organizations from
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The UT^2 game bot, created by two University of Texas at Austin Department of Computer Science graduate students and a professor, won the Humanlike Bot Competition at the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2012).

Jacob Schrum, Igor Karpov, and Prof. Risto Miikkulainen designed the game bot as part of their research into artificial intelligence (AI).

The UT^2 bot is the first winning bot in the history of the Humanlike Bot Competition to be judged as human more often than half the human players
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Singing mice are not your average lab rats. Their fur is tawny brown instead of the common white albino strain; they hail from the tropical cloud forests in the mountains of Costa Rica; and, as their name hints, they use song to communicate.

A male singing mouse. Photo courtesy of Bret Pasch.

Steven Phelps, an associate professor in the Section of Integrative Biology at The University of Texas at Austin, is examining these unconventional rodents to gain insights into the genes that
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The “tongues of dragon flame” captured in this image are the leaked charge that emerges from the Z Machine when it fires. Images courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories.

To re-create the surface of a white dwarf star, University of Texas at Austin astronomer Don Winget starts with roughly the electricity needed to power a few TV sets for the evening. He runs that through a ring of big old generators, all pointing inward toward the center of a machine more than 100
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Robert Hebner, director of the university’s Center for Electromechanics (CEM), conducts research in a large algae growth demonstration facility for biofuels. The facility is located adjacent to CEM.

It’s theoretically possible to produce about 500 times as much energy from algae fuels as is needed to grow the fuels, according to a new study by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

However, limited by existing technology, the researchers found in a separate study that their algae growing facility is getting
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