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Summer blockbuster season is here, and an impressive crop of films feature science concepts. We sat down with scientists at the University of Texas at Austin to find out how close to reality the movie magic really is. So, grab some popcorn as we dust off our Science Truth Detector and see which 2018 films offer up sound science this summer.

​This is the time of year when we in the College of Natural Sciences congratulate and recognize our new graduates. Making it to this point is not an easy feat. As alumni will tell you, it requires years of hard work, meeting aggressive deadlines and learning to thrive in an environment where many different things are coming your way.

This is the month when close to 2,000 students in the College of Natural Sciences will cross the graduation stage and begin a new chapter in their lives. Our hearty congratulations go to all the Class of 2018.

This weekend the University of Texas at Austin celebrates its 135th class of graduates, and there are many amazing individuals among them in the College of Natural Sciences' Class of 2018.

​The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship to 30 University of Texas at Austin students, including four graduate students and four undergraduates from the College of Natural Sciences.

Dr. Fatima Fakhreddine of the College of Natural Sciences has been selected as one of The Alcalde's Texas 10 for 2018. Nominated by alumni and celebrated in the Texas Exes publication, the Texas 10 are dedicated educators who have had an unforgettable impact on the lives of students. Fakhreddine and the other winners this year were chosen from a pool of more than 100 nominees.

André Nahmias (BA '50, MA '52) first encountered what he calls "the ecstasy of discovery" when he was a University of Texas at Austin student. In the intervening decades as an infectious disease research pediatrician, he made a number of discoveries that benefited people with various bacterial and viral infections.

Five faculty members from the College of Natural Sciences have received distinguished Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards totaling $2.1 million from the National Science Foundation.

The University of Texas at Austin has named Paul Goldbart the next dean of the College of Natural Sciences. His appointment will begin Aug. 1, and he will hold the Robert E. Boyer Chair in Natural Sciences.

Three College of Natural Sciences undergraduates have been selected as 2018 Goldwater Scholars. Griffin Glenn, Logan Pearce and Jenna McGuffey are among 208 college students nationwide who received the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, the most prestigious undergraduate scholarship given in the natural sciences, engineering and mathematics.

​Each April, the College of Natural Sciences celebrates undergraduate researchers, and this year is no exception. This week, on Wednesday and Thursday during the 40 Hours for the Forty Acres campaign, the College is raising funds to support student researchers in the award-winning Freshman Research Initiative (FRI). 

The University of Texas at Austin is one of the public universities with the most top-ranked schools and academic programs in the country, according to U.S. News & World Report's 2019 edition of "Best Graduate Schools," released this morning. The university has five programs across campus ranked No. 1 and 49 schools and specialties ranked among the nation's top 10.

One of the world's leading pediatric heart surgeons, Charles Fraser, Jr., M.D., will join the faculty of the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin as professor in the Departments of Surgery and Perioperative Care and Pediatrics. He will also serve as chief of pediatric and congenital cardiothoracic surgery at Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas.

Each year, the American Junior Academy of Science invites the nation's top pre-college researchers to tour a premiere university's campus and meet with the people there who are doing cutting-edge research in scientific labs every day. This year, dozens of high-school scientists-in-training took their tours at The University of Texas at Austin, where they met researchers different from whom they might have expected.

Here, many of the pioneering researchers are only a year or two out of high school themselves. 

It's been six months since Hurricane Harvey slammed into the Texas coast and the students, faculty and staff of the University of Texas Marine Science Institute (UTMSI) in Port Aransas are still working to pick up the pieces of their lives and get their work back on track.