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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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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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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Cockrell School of Engineering Associate Professor Adela Ben-Yakar and College of Natural Sciences Assistant Professor Jon Pierce-Shimomura received a competitive $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The grant will fund research that aims to prevent degeneration of the nervous system, which occurs through natural aging and diseases like Alzheimer’s. Photo by Marsha Miller

This article originally appeared on the Cockrell School of Engineering Web site. It was written by Melissa Mixon.

Technology developed by researchers at The University of
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In the last few months, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin dealt with black holes, dead zones and ice kilometers under the surface of Antarctica.

They found that early mammals evolved bigger brains for the sense of smell. They found that alcohol helps a brain to remember.

They made a carbon “sponge” that could store energy and a $1 biosensing diagnostic device that’s self-powered.

They found that teenagers who don’t fit in are less likely to go for higher education.

To help
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One of the most famous science experiments is the one involving Pavlov and his dog in which Ivan Pavlov conditioned the dog to salivate at the sound of a bell.

Addictive drugs affect the brain in a similar but more powerful way, says Hitoshi Morikawa, a neurobiologist in the Waggoner Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research.

“We think addiction is a form of pathological overlearning in which the brain remembers too much the association between certain environmental stimuli and drug-seeking or drug-taking
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Images from functional magnetic resonance imaging scans.

The latest edition of Raw Science at the College of Natural Sciences website provides answers to the questions:

Can weight gain be predicted from looking at your brain with an fMRI?

Are “green” building materials more susceptible to destructive fungal growth?

It also dives into the genomes of radically different species in search of candidate genes for human diseases and tracks the lives of Pakistani paper wasps.

Scientist John Wallingford, left, and surgeon Tim George are teaming up.

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 neuro-surgeon at Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas. Among his patients are children with birth defects.

The scientist and the surgeon have teamed up to find
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Nace Golding

This story is from the College of Natural Sciences and was written by Daniel Oppenheimer.

The human ability to know roughly where in space a sound is coming from is so integral to our experience of the world that it’s basically invisible. A friend calls out our name, and we turn to the left, or turn to the right, and there they are.

Yet that ability, which seems so simple, not only depends on neurons in our brain that are exceptionally
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