College of Natural Sciences, UT Austin

Although it’s often said that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, there’s been little evidence to back that up until now.

New research by UT Nutritional Sciences doctoral student Emma Rose Brown at The University of Texas at Austin has shown that teens who ate breakfast took in more nutrients and consumed less daily fat and sugar than those who skipped it, especially if those foods were higher in protein.

Teens who Start the Day with Breakfast, Especially Foods with Protein, Eat Better Overall Teens who ate breakfast took in more nutrients and consumed less daily fat and sugar than those who skipped it, a University of Texas at Austin study found.

Physicists have revealed the origin of a possible runaway black hole: two supermassive black holes smashed together, spawning gravitational waves that gave the resulting black hole a powerful kick, like the recoil of a fired canon.

Read the paper in Physical Review Letters: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/fm3n-sy3f

The study was led by Tousif Islam, an incoming postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas at Austin's Weinberg Institute, with Jay Wadekar of the Weinberg Institute and Tejaswi Venumadhav of UC Santa Barbara.

Their findings could help physicists interpret expected observations from an upcoming space-based gravitational wave observatory called LISA.

The mysterious object, shown here in an artist’s impression, first got the attention of astronomers when they noticed a strange streak of stars in a Hubble Space Telescope image that was then later captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The runaway black hole was kicked out of its home galaxy and is now racing through space at supersonic speed.

Illustration credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI).

On this day in 1969, humans took their first steps on the Moon. This accomplishment took years of work by a multitude of people, including Texas Science alum Frances “Poppy” Northcutt.

Northcutt (B.A. Mathematics, 1965), a Distinguished Alumni Award winner in our college Hall of Honor, worked as a return-to-earth specialist on the Apollo space program early in her career. With the flight of Apollo 8, she became the first woman in an operational support role to work in NASA’s Mission Control Center. She calculated the trajectories that would bring the crew home on every subsequent Apollo mission, too, including the fateful Apollo 13 flight. Northcutt and the rest of the mission operations team received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for the rescue of Apollo 13 and its crew.

The clip featured here is part of a CBC interview with Northcutt on July 16, 1969. Find the rest of the CBC interview at txsci.net/NorthcuttCBC and meet more alumni from The University of Texas at Austin who played a part in the Moon Landing at txsci.net/CNSApollo50th.

Using a disco ball in space and lasers, scientists have confirmed one of Einstein’s weirdest predictions: rotating objects (like Earth) drag spacetime around them. They measured “frame dragging” with the highest precision ever. Learn more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10715-0

The team includes Richard Matzner, a physicist at The University of Texas at Austin.

-with UT Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics and Agenzia Spaziale Italiana

LARES-2 satellite measures frame-dragging effect around the Earth - Nature Using LARES-2, LAGEOS and GRACE satellites, researchers measured Earth’s frame-dragging with unprecedented precision, strongly confirming general relativity, constraining alternative gravity theories, and improving measurements of Earth’s tides.

A Summer at CERN

Roopa Bindingnavele spent last summer on a mission in a rural Indian village. The recent UT math and Plan II Honors alum was there to find out, with help from the UT President’s Award for Global Learning, what impact a new library had on the youth of the village.

Read her postcard about the experience at txsci.net/Roopa