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Todd Ditmire leads the way into his new laboratory below Robert Lee Moore Hall. "We're two floors underground and we're about to go one more floor down to where we're under the high bay," the physics professor says, walking down a flight of stairs. "We're underneath the plaza in front of RLM, three floors underground." He jiggles a key into a lock and swings open the door to a subterranean chamber worthy of a James Bond villain--if... Read more of this story >

Science at the Center of the Storm: It was Sept. 7, 2008, six days before Hurricane Ike, the third most destructive hurricane in U.S. history, crashed into the Texas coast. Ike had already made landfall in Cuba as a Category 4 hurricane, and in the coming days would gather strength over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Read more of this story >

Out on a Limb Liza Shapiro, a physical anthropologist at The University of Texas at Austin, is trying to work out an evolutionary mystery. The mystery: Why do primates who walk on all fours do it differently than most other animals who walk on all fours? Liza Shapiro, a physical anthropologist at The University of Texas at Austin, has worked with a variety of animals, including lemurs and baboons, in her studies of how primates walk. Here is one of her...

What the Future Holds We asked 10 faculty from the College of Natural Sciences a big question: "What development in your field is likely to have the greatest impact on the way that we live over the next 25 years? How?" Here are their answers. Select the faculty names below to jump to the expanded answers. J Strother Moore on machines that think R. Adron Harris on the $1,000 genome Jaquelin Dudley on anti-viral and anti-tumor agents Allen Bard on finding the next...

Defusing Explosive Situations VIDEO Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have been a devastating weapon against United States armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. There have been more than 81,000 IED attacks in Iraq, which have accounted for about two-thirds of the American combat deaths. They have caused an even higher percentage of wounds. For Iraqis, IEDs have caused an estimated 11,000 civilian casualties and more than 600 deaths among security forces. Such weapons are cheap and easy to make, easy to hide...

Assembling the Tree of Life In the beginning Ed Theriot’s contributions to the Assembling the Tree of Life (AToL) project—“the story of life on Earth, in a nutshell”—often begin pretty humbly. “Sometimes we go down to Waller Creek, right on campus, with a turkey baster and a toothbrush, and we suck up algae from the water and scrub it off the rocks,” says Theriot, the director of the Texas Natural Science Center and...