Further Findings

Psychology undergraduate Martinique Jones has conducted research in Houston schools.

We put the spotlight on several undergraduates who conduct research to mark Research Week, which was April 11-15.

Check out their stories on the Know Web site.

Martinique Jones
Major: Psychology
Research Topic: The African American Dream: A Progressive Discussion of Academic Achievement in African American Students

Margaret Sanders
Major: Plan II and Psychology
Research Topic: The Effect of Categorization on Judgments of Paintings

Zachary Garber
Major: Government
Research Topic: William Lauder’s Impact on the History of Barbados

Jose Ybarra
Major: Human Biology
Research Topic:
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Biologist John Wallingford

In the Getting Started series, Further Findings highlights the paths that some researchers at The University of Texas at Austin took to the laboratory, the library, the field—wherever they do their work.

Biologist John Wallingford’s early interest in science was nurtured by a teacher.

“Alice Kagi,” he says. “She was just fantastic. She was so enthusiastic and so excited.”

Wallingford, an associate professor in the Section of Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology at The University of Texas at Austin, had Kagi for seventh
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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.

It’s been 44 years since “Fantastic Voyage.” That’s the movie in which Raquel Welch and a team of scientists were shrunk to a microscopic size and injected into a man’s bloodstream.

We still can’t do that, but we can model what’s happening inside the human body–and other living things–using powerful computers like the ones at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

The work of some of the researchers who use the center’s resources to study biology is highlighted on the TACC website.

The scientists
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Janice Fischer

As a graduate student in biology, Janice Fischer had rotated through four laboratories and nothing had grabbed her imagination.

In the fifth lab, she found the fruit fly.

“That was it,” she says. “I wanted to stay there and, luckily, they let me.”

For 22 years, Fischer, a professor in the Section of Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology, has been working with the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as her model organism.

This is the first of a series of Further Findings posts
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John Wallingford

For this installment of University of Texas at Austin researchers on video, check out John Wallingford’s talk to the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

Wallingford, a biologist, studies how cells communicate in the early embryo. His CASW talk centers on cilia and its renewed importance.

Note Wallingford’s use of resources. He cites a paper written about cilia in the 1890s.

Find the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S6i6DVW0LM.

The spring 2009 semester has ended and that’s a good time to take another look at some of the research that came out of University of Texas at Austin labs in the past few months.

Here’s a roundup of some of the more interesting discoveries in exercise, psychology, business and statistics.

Add crunch to your post workout recovery

In a study of well-trained cyclists, exercise physiologist Lynne Kammer found that a bowl of whole grain cereal is as good as a sports drink
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Mikhail Matz

The things Mikhail Matz, an assistant professor of integrative biology, and his colleagues were looking for off the island of Little San Salvador in the Bahamas, were creatures with “big eyes, nicely colored and that glow in the dark.”

The scientists were aboard Operation Deep Scope, a research expedition sponsored by the Ocean Exploration program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They explored the deep sea with a submersible vessel looking for things related to the interaction between light
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New posters were recently installed in the display windows on the first floor of the Main Building on The University of Texas at Austin campus.

They focus on four University of Texas at Austin researchers who made significant discoveries and brought new understanding to long-standing questions in their fields.

They are Hermann J. Muller, Linda Schele, Esmond Snell and Americo Paredes.

The poster with this post is about Schele, who studied the Mayan civilization of Central America.

Take a walk though the Main Building to
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