Reporting and analysis about scientific research and innovation in Texas
The McDonald Observatory, celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary this year, forges ahead with groundbreaking research and crusades to keep the night skies of West Texas pristine and unadulterated.
In his off hours, one Texas doctor attempts to prove that thought is a measurable thing.
Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin have both bought up a lot of land along the border. Brownsville and Van Horn are not exactly where you'd expect to find the cutting-edge vanguard of private, high-tech space exploration.
Like any political battle in Texas, the ongoing fight over the evolution in the state's science classes features colorful characters worth getting to know.
Ten years ago, Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over East Texas as it reentered the Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts aboard.
The Lone Star state constructed over 36 million square feet of energy-efficient space last year.
Katy Hayes, who lost both her arms and legs to the flesh-eating virus after the birth of her third child, is awaiting a donor match.
The famous astronaut was notoriously shy about granting interviews to the press, but in 2009 he answered a few questions sent to him by senior editor Katy Vine. Here is her unedited Q&A with Neil Armstrong.
Lubbockites say "good morning" on Twitter more than anyone else in the country, according to a study from some Ukrainian software engineers who monitored American tweets.
Heart Stops Beating, the Sundance-featured short film about the Texas Heart Institute's unprecedented "continuous flow device," is reworked into a longer and more detailed version, now called Flatline.
A new UT study says that children of gay parents fare worse than their straight-parented counterparts, igniting a firestorm of backlash.
A new study tracking the habits and health of Texas drivers found that those with longer commute times have bigger waistlines.
Dallas Wiens, the Fort Worth man who received the nation's first full face transplant exactly one year ago, says the surgery has exceeded his expectations.
The formerly reclusive author moonlights as a copy editor, taking his red pen to Quantum Man, a biography of a physicist.
Memorial Hermann Northwest Hospital tweeted videos and photos as medical director of cardiovascular surgery, Dr. Michael Macris, performed a double coronary artery bypass.
Few things are as majestic as the launch of the space shuttle. But after nearly thirty years, NASA is sending up its final orbiters. Here's the view from up close.
Ten years after the Challenger disaster, there are still dark clouds on the horizon for NASA’s space shuttle program.
As the peculiar case of a Fort Bend sheriff’s deputy and his bloodhounds makes clear, the techniques of crime-scene investigation are not as infallible as the TV shows would have us believe. How a misplaced faith in some forensic experts is putting innocent people behind bars.
Thirty years ago, people couldnt believe it: The old man’s elixir boosted crops, ate up sewage, and made the desert bloom. Today half a dozen Texas companies claim the elixir does all that and a whole lot more.
One year ago tejano star Emilio Navaira was nearly killed in a tour bus accident outside Houston. What are we still learning about the experimental medical procedure that may have saved his life?
The lovesick antics of diapered astronaut Lisa Nowak are some combination of funny and sad but seemingly not revealing of anything larger, until you realize that her tragic, tabloidy breakdown says everything you need to know about NASA’s many troubles.
Baylor College of Medicine's Martin M. Matzuk and his collaborators may have discovered the key to a male birth control pill: cripple the sperm's capacity to swim.
With December 21, 2012 rapidly approaching (only 148 days away!), so-called doomsday "preppers" are on the rise in Texas.
At least two news outlets found Texas angles for the Higgs boson discovery at CERN.
A seventy-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton finds itself at the center of a legal battle involving a Dallas auction house, a Houston lawyer, and the president of Mongolia.
Joe Gutheinz has helped recover 79 moon rocks that the government lost track of in the past four decades.
After years of exporting prized dinosaur fossils to some of the world’s best museums, the state will be getting two huge exhibit halls, in Dallas and Houston.
Texas researchers are doing their part to fight malaria by monitoring the spread of a drug-resistant strain of the parasite and breeding a genetically modified goat with malaria-vaccine in her milk.
A study conducted by Texas State University researchers involving vultures and human remains could have big implications for homicide investigators.
Two physics professors at Texas State University believe that a rare lunar event may have flung the icebergs in the ship's path.
A new study from the Baylor College of Medicine finds “active” video games like Wii Sports and Dance Dance Revolution don't lead to an increase in physical activity.
Director Jeremiah Zagar's short film, Heart Stop Beating, which premiered at Sundance, documents another visionary heart surgery procedure out of Houston.
Is the Texas twang disappearing? Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin's Texas English Project pretty much say: "Yup."
Conducting the country’s first successful heart transplant and the world’s first artificial heart transplant made Denton Cooley a household name—and turned one of his closest colleagues against him.
San Antonio's Sandy Wood has been the voice of StarDate for twenty years.
Fiorillo, whose fossil digs take him everywhere from West Texas to Australia, grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. He moved to Texas in 1995 to be a curator of paleontology at the Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, and he is currently at work on a new dinosaur hall
Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman is out to change the way we think about guilt and innocence (and time and novels and, well, neuroscientists). Can he pull it off?
For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by mammoths, those giant, prehistoric creatures that once roamed Texas. So I decided to go looking for them.
A roundup of the latest and greatest scientific research from Texas universities.
The Harvard researcher talks about his new book, The Happiness Advantage, and more.
A roundup of the latest and greatest scientific research from Texas universities.
Forty years ago, the attention to space exploration was constant. And the faces of the exploration gave rise to a group of larger than life individuals—the astronauts.
Can new research predict which soldiers will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder—and which won’t?
Texas parents have the choice to opt their children out of school vaccination requirements based on “reasons of conscience.” But what about the other kids around them?
Despite its status as a public health emergency, is the swine flu just another flu?
Is it the crispiness? The crunchiness? The saltiness? Thankfully, a small cadre of researchers in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Texas A&M has spent much of the past thirty years munching on this question.
A decade of research by this University of Texas at Austin psychology prof has led to new ways of understanding the relationship between individuals and the spaces they inhabit, as he now reveals with Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.Snoop posits that our things open a window onto
Karl Gebhardt and Gary Hill, two astronomers from the University of Texas at Austin, are racing to solve one of the greatest mysteries in science: What is dark energy? How does it work? Can it explain the origins of the universe? There’s only one problem. Dark energy may not actually
Born and raised in Houston, Linke is a third-generation Texan. She has been a professional astrologer since 1971. She also holds a master’s degree in behavioral science from the University of Houston– Clearlake and did her clinical training in marriage counseling and family therapy.The future represents the unknown, and the
How many Aggies does it take to turn one tabby or tin-can-eater into two? The no-joke answer is perhaps a dozen—the number of researchers, students, and staff working under Westhusin in the Reproductive Sciences Laboratory at Texas A&M’s College of Veterinary Medicine. The Plainville, Kansas, native, who has a degree
