The Last Blast
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.
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 Texas researcher is working to fight citrus greening by using bacteria-fighting genes found in spinach.
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.
A recent report gives the state's science standards a ‘C,’ but the State Board of Education chairwoman, a science teacher, is still “pleased.”
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.
The reason so many Texans testified in favor of strong language supporting evolution in the TEKS is because they’re having to play defense and they’re losing.
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
Space, time, and Donald Judd reconsidered.
“It’s funny: I’ve never been scared on a shuttle mission. It’s just the nature of the job. You’re busy, you’re focused, you’re well trained, and you go, ‘You know, if I’m going to die, there’s nothing I can do about it.’”
Spoiler alert: The mythic Marfa lights may not be real. But there’s no way to know for sure, and that’s why they’re cool.
Writer-at-large Jan Reid on entrepreneur Richard Garriott and commercial space flights.
Why Texas could lose the biotech revolution—and end up, once again, an economic also-ran.
The break-up of the space shuttle Columbia was a chilling reminder that the astronauts who dare to dream and risk their lives for the benefit of all mankind are, at the end of the day, mere mortals.
On the strength of a simple if indelicate question—“Who’s the Father?”—Houston’s Caroline Caskey has made a big splash in biotech.
This summer’s hot topic? Weather.
Can Miller Quarles live forever? The 83-year-old Houstonian hopes so—and he’ll pay $100,000 to anyone who will help him.
Good chemistry.
Eating a peanut shouldn’t be a particularly memorable experience, but for Dallasite Mona Cain and countless other allergic Americans, it’s a matter of life and death.
To perfect a promising new gene therapy, doctors at Houston’s M. D. Anderson need time. Unfortunately, that’s one thing people with malignant brain tumors don’t have.