Marine protists are single-celled planktonic creatures that form the base of the marine food web and perform important ecosystem services, including driving photosynthesis and the carbon and nitrogen cycles. Protist communities include energy-producing organisms, such as phytoplankton, that use sunlight or chemical reactions to generate their own food. Protists also include predators, such as microzooplankton, that eat the energy-producing protists.
Lisa Piccirillo received the 2019 Michael H. Granof Award, which recognizes the outstanding Ph.D. dissertation of the year from any UT Austin department. Lisa's Ph.D. thesis, "Knot Traces and the Slice Genus”, written under the supervision of Prof. John Luecke, contains several remarkable results in knot theory, including the theorem that the Conway knot is not slice, i.e., it does not bound a smooth embedded disk in the 4-ball. The Conway knot is notoriously difficult to handle, and was the only knot of at most 12 crossings for which the slice property had not been decided.
Dr. Shelley Payne, director of the LaMontagne Center for Infectious Disease at the University of Texas at Austin, said that by the article’s own admission, an unusual characteristic of COVID-19 is that many carriers are asymptomatic.
“Without very large-scale testing, we don’t know who is infected and who is not,” she said via email.
“Plandemic” -- a slickly-edited, 26-minute interview with a discredited researcher -- has been widely shared on social media. But the video, which YouTube and Facebook are working to remove for violating content standards, contains multiple false or misleading claims, including about the novel coronavirus, experts say.
Wearing a mask can cause harm, vaccines have “killed millions,” the novel coronavirus is not “naturally occurring,” hospitals are “incentivized” to report COVID-19 diagnoses,
Contact tracing and testing are two key weapons in the fight against Covid-19. Judy Maggio talks with Dr. Shelley Payne, director of the LaMontagne Center for Infectious Disease and public health expert, Dr. Marilyn Felkner, about the critical need for the implementation of these practices as Texas begins to re-open.
By MATT LARGEY | KUT • MAY 6, 2020 Pools are among the facilities allowed to reopen Friday under Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s order loosening restrictions imposed to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
For its part, the City of Austin is still considering when it will reopen city pools.
“The Austin Parks and Recreation Department's pools will reopen when they can do so in a manner that does not jeopardize the health and safety of its employees and the community it serves,” the department said in a written statement. “With the help of
