Funded entirely with private support from more than 355 donors, the Jackson School of Geosciences’ new Holland Family Student Center opened June 15 during a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Jackson School on the central university campus. “We are here today to celebrate something amazing that all of you have done,” Dean Sharon Mosher told the…
Releases & Features
The nation’s food supply may be vulnerable to rapid groundwater depletion from irrigated agriculture, according to a new study by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere. The study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paints the highest resolution picture yet of how groundwater depletion varies across…
Researchers from Harvard University, The University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere have found evidence that the evolution of birds is the result of a drastic change in how dinosaurs developed. Scientists have long understood that modern birds descended from dinosaurs. Rather than take years to reach sexual maturity, as many dinosaurs did, birds sped…
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has selected a team of four students from The University of Texas at Austin to compete against seven other university teams in the 2012 National Geothermal Energy Student Competition. Three geothermal industry experts selected the winning proposals from a pool of national candidates. The DOE is awarding $10,000 in…
The European Space Agency recently announced that it will send a space probe to Jupiter and its large icy moons Callisto, Ganymede and Europa. Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics, including Don Blankenship, senior research scientist, are part of the science team designing and operating a radar instrument for the…
Using ice-penetrating radar instruments flown on aircraft, a team of scientists from the U.S. and U.K. have uncovered a previously unknown sub-glacial basin nearly the size of New Jersey beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) near the Weddell Sea. The location, shape and texture of the mile-deep basin suggest that this region of the…
The ExxonMobil Foundation has given a record $1.19 million to The University of Texas at Austin as a match of gifts made by the company’s employees and retirees during the past calendar year. The donation is the largest matching gift the university has ever received and the largest that the ExxonMobil Foundation gave to any institution…
International energy company Statoil has awarded fellowships to eight graduate students from The University of Texas at Austin, funding their research in geology, geophysics and petroleum engineering. Fellowships will last two to three years, depending on the length of the student’s degree program. Statoil will contribute a total of $5 million to the work of…
See shipwrecks, deep sea life and gas seeps in the Gulf of Mexico during an expedition led by University of Texas at Austin scientist Jamie Austin. Live video feeds from remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) with high-definition cameras put anyone with an Internet-enabled computer right in the middle of the action.
How many live viruses can your cup of water have in it before you decide not to drink it? In the Netherlands, the law requires that municipal drinking water must be so clean that the theoretical risk of viral infection is less than one in 10,000 people per year. That translates to no more than…
