Editor’s note: A 30 column is a chance for departing senior staffers to say farewell and reflect on their time spent in The Daily Texan’s basement office. The term comes from the old typesetting...
Editor’s note: In this recurring column, science writer Robert Starr rounds up the previous week’s top science stories. Have a suggestion? Send a tweet to @RobertKStarr, and your link...
Cigarette use in teenagers fell by over 40 percent from 2011–2014, according to a survey the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FDA released this past month. That’s the good news.
The...
Editor’s note: In this recurring column, science writer Robert Starr rounds up the previous week’s top science stories. Have a suggestion? Send a tweet to @RobertKStarr, and your link might...
Editor’s note: In this recurring column, science writer Robert Starr rounds up the previous week’s top science stories. Have a suggestion? Send a tweet to @RobertKStarr, and your link might...
You may not understand why you dreamed about riding Bevo naked down Sixth Street last night, but neither do the best scientists in the field of
dream research.
Scientists have several theories on why...
Editor’s note: In this recurring column, science writer Robert Starr rounds up the previous week’s top science stories. Have a suggestion? Send a tweet to @RobertKStarr, and your link might...
Editor’s note: In this recurring column, science writer Robert Starr rounds up the previous week’s top science stories. Have a suggestion? Send a tweet to @RobertKStarr, and your link might...
With Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” hitting the top of the charts, it was only a matter of time before scientists looked into whether “boys like a little more booty to hold...
Editor’s note: In this recurring column, science writer Robert Starr rounds up the previous week’s top science stories. Have a suggestion? Send a tweet to @RobertKStarr, and your link might...
Editor’s note: In this recurring column, science writer Robert Starr rounds up the previous week's top science stories. Have a suggestion? Send a tweet to @RobertKStarr, and your link...
1920s stage performer Harry Kahne, “The Man with the Multiple Mind,” had an act in which he would write five words on a chalkboard simultaneously, using chalk in both hands, both feet and his...
Editor’s note: In this recurring column, science writer Robert Starr rounds up the previous week’s top science stories. Have a suggestion? Send a tweet to @RobertKStarr, and your link might...
Editor’s note: In this new recurring column, science writer Robert Starr will round up the previous week's top science stories. Have a suggestion? Send a tweet to @RobertKStarr, and...
Editor’s note: In this new recurring column, science writer Robert Starr will round up the previous week's top science stories. Have a suggestion? Send a tweet to @RobertKStarr, and your...
When the “Are you still watching ‘Glee’?” message pops up on your TV after 10 straight hours of powering through the second season, it’s hard not to think Netflix is judging...
Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series on blood donations. The first installment focused on what happens during the blood donation process. The second focuses on what happens to blood...
Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series on blood donations. The second installment, which focuses on what happens to blood after it has been donated, will run in the paper tomorrow.
Doctors...
A 2012 Huffington Post article named UT the number one “Most Sexually Liberated College” in the country. While this distinction has yet to make it into the Longhorn promotional materials for...
As a child, Yoel Stuart played with snakes. Now as a postdoctoral researcher at UT, he plays with anole lizards as a scientist.
A recent study he worked on has received a lot of attention after his...
With the iOS 8 update this week, UT students can now use their new iPhones to purchase snacks at vending machines across campus, and this is in addition to the set of features that allows owners to communicate...
ACL kicked off with a bang last weekend and will conclude this weekend with its raucous embodiment of the “work hard, play hard” UT mentality. In our world of Spotify, earbuds and iPhones,...
When classes are graded on a curve, friends can turn to foes. Two students can study together, but there’s often still an element of distrust. When one of the students tells another a piece of information,...
Of all the myths that strike fear into incoming freshmen — hours of dry textbook reading, choosing the wrong major, ending up with a homicidal roommate — none inspire more terror than the dreaded “Freshman...
From love letters hesitantly passed across middle school classrooms to cryptic prescriptions scrawled by doctors, handwriting has long been overanalyzed. Statements like, “Look at the way he...
The average social media stream as of late has been overrun with people, across all ages, genders and backgrounds, taking the “ice bucket challenge.” The specifics of the challenge vary, but...
Back in 2010, Austin was home to the Ultimate Typing Championship, where the winner, Sean Wrona, typed an extremely difficult passage full of unusual symbols and punctuation with an average speed of 124...
“Write drunk; edit sober” is often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, even though he never said it. Still, there may be something to the sentiment. Hemingway was certainly known for his indulgences...
Science doesn’t need to justify itself. Much like climbing Mount Everest because it was there, there’s a solid amount of research that was done just because the scientists could. A stand out...
After a tough winter full of snow, ice, thunder, sleet and other weather phenomena we didn’t know existed, Austin has finally made it to summertime. With day after day of 90+ degree weather...
“Be careful what you click” — so begins the first lesson of Internet browsing. That link from a friend could very well be exactly what she says it is, but, then again, it might not be....
While we, the humans, may sit in awe on Fourth of July, admiring the rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air, many dogs don’t feel the same patriotism. It’s not difficult to see...
Babies yawn. Animals yawn. In a way, fish yawn, and so do fetuses, though there’s some debate on the subject. You yawn when you’re bored in class or when you’re tired at the end of a...
For whatever flaws “Orange Is the New Black” may have had during the first season — and there weren’t many — the diversity and energy of the cast weren’t among them....
Final exams are almost here, which means it’s time to choose between sacrificing either sleep or study time, unless there’s some way to combine the two. Maybe, just maybe, if you listen to...
In 1971, Martha McClintock published a pilot study in Nature science journal as a sole author. This is an impressive feat, even for tenured professors, but she pulled it off as an undergraduate. The...
If you walked around Western Washington University during the spring of 2009, you might have noticed a clown unicycling around the plaza.
But, then again, you might not have.
The clown was...
The jazz legend Charlie “Bird” Parker once told an interviewer that he put in at least 11 to 15 hours a day on his saxophone for more than three years. That is more than the 10,000 hours writer...
A study published in the now defunct Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results featured researchers showing several pictures of people interacting to a subject who sat inside an fMRI machine that...
A runaway trolley heads down the tracks, aimed at five innocent bystanders. In front of you lies a switch. Pulling it diverts the trolley to another track, where it will only hit one person. You have five...
Everything in Australia is backward: Its winter is our summer, cars drive on the left side of the road, mammals lay eggs and toilets flush in the opposite direction.
Well, not quite on that last...
Feb. 12 of every year marks Darwin Day, a holiday celebrating the anniversary of the birth of the famous scientist who offered what is, arguably, the single greatest theory of modern times. Natural selection...
The triplewart seadevil can grow to 44 centimeters long, according to FishBase, but no male of the species exceeds 7.3 centimeters. The male finds a female seadevil, attaches himself to her and impregnates...
Upon first arrival, Austin can be something of a shock. A pleasant one, but not one without its little quirks that we put up with, like strange roads that never lead where one wants them to and intense...
The AIDS epidemic continues to devastate the world, particularly in Southern Africa, where the World Health Organization estimates that some countries have infection rates as high as 26 percent. Without...
Maybe these gifts are better asked for than given on a college budget.
Google Chromecast, Amazon.com, $35
When you’re spending time with your family, you might be stuck having...
In a 1971 study, experimenters asked a subject to rate paintings alongside a confederate who pretended to be part of the study. During a break, the confederate would leave and come back with two sodas,...
Fifty years ago, Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old high school dropout, brought a high-powered rifle up to the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository and with three shots, changed the course of...
Comparing yourself to others is a recipe for low self-esteem. There’s an illusion that comes from comparing ourselves to those around us and it’s not just psychological: It’s mathematical.
In...
The problem with most factoids is that they aren’t true. No, people don’t swallow eight spiders per year, NASA didn’t spend millions of dollars developing a pen that worked in space while...
Walking into a math department is like walking into a boys’ club. Many in the field offer explanations for why this is, which range mostly from the offensive to the extremely offensive. Whether pointed...
For movie buffs, the month of October means one thing: 31 days of horror movies. With tons of horror flicks to choose from, The Daily Texan is going to be providing a daily horror recommendation. Whether...
Every year, around this time, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt releases its “Best American” books, which compile articles from the previous year into collections that are well worth seeking out. These...
Atoms are small. Very small. If all 7 billion people on earth were the size of a hydrogen atom, and they all hugged each other tightly to form a giant ball, that ball would still only be about 1 billionth...
In one corner, we have prominent astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, well-known for his books about the
universe.
In the other, we have evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who popularized the “selfish...
There’s an old joke about an engineer, a physicist and a philosopher who end up in Scotland and see a black sheep.
“Sheep here are black,” says the engineer.
“Some sheep here...
There were a number of questions on everyone’s minds on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, but most of them weren’t related to engineering. Planes hit tall buildings and then, later that day, those...
Let’s go back a few years to 1968, when Stanley Kubrick released his revolutionary sci-fi flick “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which gave viewers one of the most iconic cinematic renditions...
It’s an unfortunate truth that every serial killer series, no matter how good, will ultimately be compared to Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter novels. On the surface, Chelsea Cain’s anti-hero,...
The development of the blogging world over the past decade or so has resulted in an explosion of wonderful popular science writing. Science news coverage was once limited to only the most significant stories,...
Twins are a staple of film and literature, often used as a device to show two sides of the same character — a sort of alternate reality, where two people spent at least the first nine months of their...
One of the biggest news stories of the summer is something that shouldn’t come as any surprise to even the least paranoid among us: Big Brother is watching. The National Security Agency spies on...
The International Journal of Modern Physics published a strange paper in 2008. In it, the authors proposed that the reason the Higgs Boson, sometimes called the “God Particle,” remained so...
Remember last year when all the banks around the world merged into one? What about Paris Hilton’s unexpected marriage? Or how about when a solar star dwarf, whatever that is, broke off from the sun,...
Check out Daily Texan Multimedia's portrayal of this week's Science Scene.
The past 100 years have shown a major shift in the public’s perception of marijuana. What we now understand to...
The final month of the semester is upon us and that means that campus, once full of eager and excited faces, is now a horde of sleep-deprived zombies running on autopilot.
The college rule of thumb...
Nothing makes a child giggle harder and more dependently than toilet humor. Somewhere on his path to adulthood, however, after constant parental scoldings, an external maturity develops. But that affinity...
Last week, cosmologists made a stunning discovery: The universe is nearly 100 million years older than we had previously thought. Although that sounds like a lot, it’s less than a 1 percent adjustment...
After the long week at school following spring break, we’re ready for the weekend. For many of us, that means heading down to Dirty 6th and drinking socially with our friends while meeting new people...
Despite the persistent myth, men don’t think about sex every seven seconds: The truth isn’t that simple. The median number of times men think about sex in a given day, according to a study...
You’re tired all of the time. Or maybe you’re suffering from back pains that, no matter how many doctors you’ve seen, can’t be cured. That must be because you’re stuck in...
This past week, a 55-foot-wide meteor flew over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, leaving a trail of smoke in the Siberian skies and producing a shock wave powerful enough to shatter windows and injure...
Valentine’s Day is the time of the year when those in relationships express their love for each other, and the rest of us feel nothing but resentment toward them. Our best bet is to just sit it out....
As you read this, two Voyager spacecrafts are traveling through the darkness of space at nearly twenty times the speed of the fastest airplane ever built. On board, they each contain a golden record. These...
During the height of the Cold War, a conspiracy theory developed, with proponents insisting that the safety of our water supply was at risk. A fluoridation process, which the Soviets clearly devised, put...
Physicists are known to tackle the big problems: How did the universe originate? What is the nature of matter, energy and time? How can we make the rules that work for very small objects (quantum mechanics)...
As the spring semester begins and classes resume, our winter vacation now remains only in our memories. These memories form an important part of who we are, and it can be surprising how often gatherings...
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Your Genes and Your Birth
We often wonder what makes us who we are: is it the genes our parents gave us, the way...
A step closer to the male birth control pill
Drug companies are eager to produce a male birth control pill, which would allow men to take a daily medication that would prevent unwanted pregnancies in...
Check out Daily Texan Multimedia's portrayal of this week's Science Scene.
Most of us are born with 46 chromosomes, but because of genetic defects some people are born with one more. This “trisomy”...
Make up your Mind
Split-brain patients — those who have had the connection between the hemispheres of their brains severed to prevent seizures — act normally except in specially designed...
Check out Daily Texan Multimedia's portrayal of this week's Science Scene.
A study published a month-and-a-half ago came to the conclusion that a specific variety of genetically modified corn...
Football is among the most violent of college sports, even with all the protective gear each player wears, and no season goes by without its share of injuries. Of most concern are the long-term risks,...
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While Gangnam Style sweeps the nation, our science Ph.D. candidates have been hard at work trying to present their research...
There is a stereotype of the first-time novelist who writes as if he’ll never have another shot, cramming everything he possibly can into his debut novel because he has nothing to lose. Michael Chabon...
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Dual identities intertwine
The United States is often thought of as a melting pot, a potpourri of cultures provided...
Cancer myths prevail
The results of a recent survey, reported at the ESMO (European Society for Medical Oncology) 2012 Congress in Vienna, show that the general population is uninformed when it comes...
Check out The Daily Texan Multimedia's video portrayal of this week's Science Scene.
Sexism Strong Even in Science
Science is an overwhelmingly male field, and despite active efforts, the...
Arousal suppresses disgust
Sex is gross, at least when looked at objectively, but it’s also a necessity for humans to propagate. The problem is, we have also evolved a disgust mechanism, which...
DNA Encyclopedia Rewrites Our Understanding of the Human Genome
The first results from the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) have been published this past week in 30 papers spread across three separate...
Emotional recovery hastened by alcohol:
Got a really tough semester ahead of you? Lay off the drinking or you may still have nightmares about it years from now. A recent experiment sought to investigate...
One of the arguments in favor of organic farming is that it’s more environmentally sustainable.
However, a review published in Nature suggests, as with many issues in the environmental world,...
There was a time when The Beatles were just a bunch of starry-eyed teens staying up past their bedtime to play a gig for whoever would hire them. And although they eventually became a worldwide sensation,...
A research group, which published its findings in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences, believes data from the Viking 1 and 2 spacecrafts that landed on Mars in 1976 suggest that...
Christopher Hitchens never followed the rules of polite dinner party conversation. Boisterous, argumentative, stubborn and, most frustratingly, often right, he had a way of making his views — often...
New Method of HIV Prevention May Be Cost-Effective
A new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggests that a pill given to the right population could reduce the spread of HIV in a cost-effective...
After the worst year-long drought on record, along with the hottest month recorded in the state’s history (July 2011), Texas has still not taken the hint and appropriately prepared itself for climate...
Music, it often seems, is the most abstract of the art forms. Even the paintings of Kandinsky or Pollock seem more comprehensible than this mysterious medium where sounds float in midair and combine together...
Any thriller’s going to require a certain amount of suspension of disbelief to enjoy the plot, but author Scott Sigler prides himself in minimizing that as much as possible. His latest novel, “Nocturnal,”...
By looking at the way that water flows through the brain, several researchers have been able to put together a clear and beautiful picture of the nerves in the human brain. Though these nerves have been...
