Maria A. Croyle Two UT Austin faculty members have been awarded with 2024 Hill Prizes, which accelerate high-risk, high-reward research ideas with significant potential for real-world impact. Funded by Lyda Hill Philanthropies and announced by TAMEST (Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science & Technology), the Hill Prizes are given in five categories: medicine, engineering, biological sciences,…

DNA sequencing has become routine, but the roles of individual genes can be hard to be pin.Credit: Peter Menzel/SPL How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology Philip Ball Pan Macmillan (2024) For too long, scientists have been content in espousing the lazy metaphor of living systems operating simply like machines, says science…

Text from the Herculaneum scroll, which has been unseen for 2,000 years.Credit: Vesuvius Challenge A team of student researchers has made a giant contribution to solving one of the biggest mysteries in archaeology by revealing the content of Greek writing inside a charred scroll buried 2,000 years ago by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The…

Scientists joined climate activists in challenging the UK government’s fossil-fuel policies in London in September 2023.Credit: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty When Science Meets Power Geoff Mulgan Polity (2023) Relations between scientific communities and governments are often tense — think back to how science advisers were both given a platform and criticized during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although…

Accusations of plagiarism, including alleged misuse of ChatGPT, should not be made lightly.Credit: Alexandre Rotenberg/Alamy I have just been accused of scientific fraud. Not data fraud — no one accused me of fabricating or misleadingly manipulating data or results. This, I suppose, is a relief because my laboratory, which studies how global change reshapes ecological…

With African investment in research and development (R&D) still well below the global average, African higher-education and research institutions rely on grants from outside the continent. This is not ideal, but it will be inevitable until African countries follow through on their promises to spend more on research. Most research grants are merit-based — intended…

The beautiful thing about fractals, the self-repeating patterns found throughout nature, is their enchanting repetition which runs infinitely deep. Zoom in on the branching found in objects like fern fronds and snowflakes and you’ll see they repeat in miniature – sometimes all the way down to atomic and quantum matter. Mesmerizing as they are, such…

Britain likes to think of itself as a nation of animal lovers – though from the beast of Bodmin to XL bullies, we seem just as attached to lurid accounts of their unpredictable menace. Naturalist Chantal Lyons has a diagnosis for what she calls our “national zoophobia”. It’s “a symptom of our isolation”: as a society, we simply don’t have enough contact with…

Listen to this article 00:00 11:28 Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration. Conservationists can be quite conservative. It is right there in the name, after all. They like things the way they used to be, in a better past, real or imagined. Their thinking can be slow to change. One…

Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk, has launched a long-awaited clinical trial.Credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Neuralink, the company through which entrepreneur Elon Musk hopes to revolutionize brain–computer interfaces (BCIs), has implanted a ‘brain-reading’ device into a person for the first time, according to a tweet posted by Musk on 29 January. BCIs record and decode…