Category: News
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Comet Robotics aims for Mars
Unnathi Prakash | Mercury Staff Through the jungle of 3D printer filament, wires and scattered tools, hidden in the UTD Makerspace lab is a rover built for Mars. Founded to develop battle bots, Comet Robotics has embarked on its newest project to compete in the Mars Society University Rover Challenge. Officially founded in 2021 as…
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Rate My Professors: the backbone of Comets’ course selection
Aysha Bader | Mercury Staff One month into the new semester, Comets’ incoming expectations about their classes and professors formed through websites like Rate My Professors have been affirmed, challenged or complicated. Despite occasional discrepancies between the website’s ratings and students’ actual experiences, UTD students overwhelmingly use and trust Rate My Professors, marking its importance…
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FNCS rocks Dallas with weekend of high-stakes gaming
Mar Ologban | Mercury Staff The Fortnite Championship Series, commonly known as FNCS, was held at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth the weekend of Sept. 7 and 8. One hundred of the world’s best players from around the globe arrived at the arena to compete for $2 million in total prizes in the biggest competitive…
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Senate Report: SG to increase Comet Cupboard support
Caden Brenner | Student Government Editor’s Note: Senate Reports are written by Student Government senators unaffiliated with The Mercury and seek to inform Comets about Student Government’s activities. During the Sept. 10 Student Government meeting, senators passed two motions to bring back a campus-wide fundraising competition that brings more items — and more awareness —…
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AI advancements leave UTD community torn on use, ethics
Aiyana Newcomb | Mercury Staff Artificial intelligence, having evolved rapidly from answering simple questions to generating lifelike videos, has become impossible to ignore. The earliest version of ChatGPT was released by OpenAI in June 2018; the latest milestone, DALL-E 3, released in Oct 2023, can now create detailed and realistic images including faces and intricate…
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First day floods at Capella Hall
The fourth floor of Capella Hall, formerly Residence Hall North, experienced significant flooding in a hallway and multiple dorm rooms Aug. 19 after a major valve broke during a water shutoff for a shower repair. A TikTok video posted by marketing freshman Livy Ker of her dorm and hallway flooding has accumulated over 2.3 million…
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Spikes in western racism are affecting everyone, even UTD students
As anti-immigration and anti-Muslim riots erupted in the UK and hate against Black and Arab individuals escalate in the U.S., UTD students speak about their experience with marginalization. ABC reported that after false information about the suspect in a stabbing spree being an “Islamist migrant” spread online and resulted in anti-immigration riots, Nura, a mother…
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Fighting pain through the gut microbiome
The Gut, Brain, Pain Lab, an on-campus research lab, is tackling the problem of treating chronic pain without relying on addictive substances like opioids. The lab, run by BBS professor Kate Sadler and staffed by eight undergraduate, graduate-level and Ph.D. researchers specifically works to address the pain caused by sickle cell anemia — a disease…
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Benson announces resignation
President Richard Benson sent out a schoolwide email Aug. 26 announcing the UT System has accepted his resignation and is beginning to look for a new president. Benson, who became UTD’s fifth president in 2016, said in the email he expects the search to take “the better part of the 2025 academic year.” He will…
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Lunar rover to the moon
Correction, Sept. 6: A previous version of the article incorrectly spelled an instance of “Comet Aerobotics.” Comet Aerobotics, a new branch of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics at UTD, became the first UTD team to compete in NASA’s 2025 Lunabotics Competition by building a lunar rover that could help advance NASA’s Artemis moon…