Further Findings

Steven Weinberg

Physicist Steven Weinberg, the Jack S. Josey-Welch Foundation Chair in Science and Regental Professor, is featured in the PBS program, “The Elegant Universe.” The program is based on the book of the same title by physicist Brian Greene. It’s about string theory.

Find the “Elegant Universe” at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html and the transcript at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3012_elegant.html.

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.

Tanya Paull

What is an example of evolution at its finest, when an elegant efficiency is selected over time, that you’ve come across in your research?

That’s the question The Bulletin of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute posed to four of its investigators. One of them is Tanya Paull, an associate professor in the Section of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology.

Here’s her answer:

“I think the perfect microcosm of efficient evolution is the virus.

A virus uses every nucleotide of its nucleic acid, sometimes many times over,
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Whenever I see a scientific study about water on Earth, I check to see if it involves the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE).

GRACE is a NASA mission run by The University of Texas at Austin and the German Aerospace Center. Byron Tapley, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, is GRACE’s principal investigator.

Since the start of GRACE in 2002, data it has collected have generated scores of papers about the Earth’s climate and water resources.

The latest projects
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Ron Oliveira and James Tunnell

The skin cancer probe being developed in James Tunnell’s lab was featured on KEYE-TV-Channel 42 on the 10 p.m. newscast on July 20, 2009. KEYE’s Ron Oliveira went to Tunnell’s lab in the Biomedical Engineering building to interview Tunnell and Naras Rajaran, one of the graduate students working on the project.

See the video from KEYE.

The optical probe is designed to determine of a spot on the skin is benign or cancerous. If it’s not benign, the spot
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The research consortium known as MCC died a long time ago, though it was the spark that fueled Austin’s rise as a technology center. Now the last visible reminders of the company are being removed.

The name of the company’s former headquarters building is being changed from the MCC building to the West Pickle Research building. It’s at 3525 W. Braker Lane, across MoPac Boulevard from the main Pickle Research Campus.

The new name reflects the building’s ownership by The University of
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