AUSTIN, Texas — Inside a green wooden box mounted to a steel fence, a treasure trove of trinkets awaits. Just a few miles north is another goodie box, this time covered in leopard print and inside a craft studio. Farther east, a simple white trinket box sits mounted on a wooden pole, decorated with stars and a crow saying, “Thanks for visiting!”

These boxes, filled to the brim with stickers, keychains, jewelry, collectibles and more, are known as trinket trade boxes. Austin has seen a sudden surge in these boxes over the last few months, and despite their varying locations, one sentiment ties them all together: trinket trading is a fun way to bring a bit of joy to the community.

“Little things that bring people joy is so important right now, which I think a lot of us can agree with, and I’ve seen all sorts of people use the box so far,” said Anna Arocha, whose trinket box is in The Triangle neighborhood downtown. “Little kids and all the way up to people in their 50s and 60s, I’ve seen stop by.”

Trinket trading operates on a simple system of take something, leave something. People can swap a toy car for a lanyard, a bracelet for a Sonny Angel, or a Pokémon card for a rubber duck.

“There was somebody who was just walking by with their kid in the stroller, and there was a finger puppet inside of the box, and I saw her swap something out and walk away with the little finger puppet,” Arocha said. “And it was just such a cute moment to see a mom and a kid enjoy something like that.”

Arocha put her crafting skills to work and made her green wooden box in just one day using craft wood and a wine crate last month. Amy Elms opted for a small, white junction box to ensure it could withstand harsh Texas weather. Ani’s Day & Night on East Riverside, which has a large outdoor space for picnic tables and food trucks, gave Elms permission to place her trinket box on their property in January.

Ally Chavez used her own property, Create! Studio ATX on West Anderson Lane, for her leopard-print box that opened in March.

“There wasn’t a ton up here in the north area, so we just kind of wanted to put it together and put it up for the studio just as a way to connect with the community in a way that no one has to spend money,” Chavez said.

Since their debuts, all three trinket boxes have garnered thousands of interactions on social media. When Arocha posted about the opening of her box in March, she racked up 100,000 views on TikTok. But with the excited comments came a bit of negative attention, and her cameras caught a thief trying to take all the trinkets. Arocha now locks the box at night.

“If somebody wants to do that, so be it,” Arocha said. “We can start over, and if the joy that it brings outweighs that every time, I think it’s worth doing.”

Arocha, Elms and Chavez’s boxes are now registered on a website called Worldwide Sidewalk Joy, alongside all the others in Austin and across the globe, as trinket trading grows to become a kind of new, modern geocaching.

“Honestly, it’s been I think even better than I expected so far,” Elms said. “I’ve had people… visiting Austin from out of town, and they’re making it a stop during their visit. I’ve also had multiple people reach out to me to ask how they can start their own trinket trade box, too, which I really love.”

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Forbes on Friday released its annual list of ‘New Ivies,’ and the University of Texas at Austin made it. This is not UT’s first time on the list; it was included in 2024 and 2025.

It’s important to note the Forbes designation does not make UT an Ivy League School. Schools currently designated as Ivy League are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.

Forbes argued its list was created because a growing number of employers have said they are less likely to hire an Ivy League grad today compared to five years ago. The list is curated by surveying over 100 C-Suite and hiring executives, as well as using data from the 2024 National Center for Education Statistics to gauge if a school fulfilled the criteria to be on the list.

One respondent said instead of prestige, employers are looking for graduates who have “complex emotional intelligence, radical adaptability and visionary creativity to orchestrate AI tools rather than compete with them.”

Forbes said colleges had to meet three criteria to be considered, which included:

• Size: Private schools must enroll at least 3,000 students, and public colleges must have at least 4,000 students enrolled.
• Selectivity: All but one private college had an admission rate of less than 15%; public college admission rates were 50% or less.
• Testing Requirements: At least half the entrants must have submitted either the SAT or the ACT scores

Forbes argued testing requirements indicated academic rigor, as a result. Schools such as the University of California and California State schools were not considered.

When it came to UT meeting the requirements for the list, UT had an undergrad enrollment of 44,663 students with a 27% acceptance rate. When it came to test scores, it had a median SAT score of 1390 and a median ACT score of 31.

For a full list of the public and private schools included in the Forbes 2026 New Ivies list, click here.

Expertise and innovation lit up UT Energy Week. Co-hosted by The University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute and the Kay Bailey Hutchison Energy Center, the annual five-day event brought together energy leaders, researchers, policymakers and students for panel discussions, keynotes, networking and hands-on competitions. The 2026 lineup focused on the challenges and opportunities shaping the energy landscape — from nuclear power and geothermal resources to artificial intelligence infrastructure and critical minerals. 

Across every theme, faculty members and students from UT showcased the depth of their expertise and the impact of their research alongside industry and government experts on the future of energy in Texas.

Derek Haas on the future of nuclear education at UT:

Monday’s nuclear symposium opened with Derek Haas, associate professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, looking at the future of education as Texas and the nation face rising energy demand driven by industrial and technological growth.  

At UT, nuclear research spans energy, security, medicine, materials degradation, robotics, safety and isotope discovery. Students at the undergraduate and graduate levels are working with national laboratories and industry leaders to design molten salt reactors, develop digital twin models that bridge computer simulations with real-world reactors, and study nuclear security. Haas also highlighted the rapid growth of nuclear education at UT, noting that in just a few years the program has expanded from struggling to get the minimum 10 students in each class to waitlisted courses of 48 students across every program and partnerships spanning science, engineering and the humanities. 

Ning Lin on aligning power, water, land and community to de-risk data center growth:

Throughout Energy Week, UT experts tackled the rapid expansion of digital infrastructure, focusing on AI and data centers. Ning Lin, chief economist at UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology, gave a presentation on the COMPASS Consortium’s research on addressing the growing convergence of large-load sectors within shared energy, water, infrastructure, and community systems. This includes data centers, oil and gas, advanced manufacturing, refining, and mining, and provides a framework to optimize strategies for power allocation and building sustainable infrastructure. 

COMPASS stands for collaborative optimization and management of power allocation-surface and subsurface strategies, and aims to bring together industry, communities and policymakers to shape the future of large-load growth. Research by Lin and her team has resulted in the publication of papers that provide a system-of-systems framework that touches on site suitability, permitting and timeline prediction, water resource integration and cooling technology, on-site generation and grid resilience modeling, and community solutions and policy.  

“Texas is facing a generational opportunity,” Lin said. She and her team hope the tools and information they can provide will help the state maximize its potential.

Ken Wisian on using geothermal energy resources to sustainably power AI & data centers:

Ken Wisian is a researcher in the Bureau of Economic Geology, Environmental Division, whose research focuses on geothermal systems for electricity generation. In his presentation at Energy Week, he discussed recent breakthroughs in geothermal energy and its potential to act as an option for on-site generation at data centers.  

“This is the biggest boom in geothermal energy I’ve seen since doing my Ph.D. in the ’90s,” Wisian said. And with the increasing power demand for large-scale digital infrastructure, he thinks geothermal energy may be a solution.  

According to Wisian, geothermal holds great promise, as currently 25% of land on Earth is viable for geothermal energy production. Additionally, geothermal systems can harvest energy from a large subsurface area while having minimal impact to the land’s surface, and it can provide operators the flexibility to drill on-site at data centers. Wisian’s work continues to further geothermal research and development of sites as a sustainable option for large power demand not reliant on the grid. 

President Jim Davis and Alumnus Rudy Garza on the Future of Energy in Texas:

During the panel “Energy Leaders in Dialogue,” President Jim Davis interviewed alumnus and his classmate at UT, Rudy Garza, who is now the CEO at CPS Energy in San Antonio. The pair talked about the challenges facing Texas during the next few years as organic population growth and infrastructure expansion increase energy generation needs, and the creative solutions that could solve them.  

With decades of experience as an energy leader, Garza shared insight into how Texas can invest and prepare for the future. By leveraging strengths across energy sectors, the state can meet its upcoming needs. “A diversified system is the best way to provide reliability,” he said. 

Davis and Garza also discussed the future of energy education at UT and how the University is working to prepare students for careers in energy, including a focus on data-driven decision-making and encouraging students to be lifelong learners. 

Andy Uhler and Brandon Mulder on community support across Texas:

For the past year and a half, Andy Uhler, the Energy Institute’s energy reporter in residence, has traveled across Texas interviewing people for “Phases & Stages: The Texas Energy Story.” The podcast explores stories in towns where various kinds of energy production happens, discussing the growing opportunities and challenges that locals face.  

At Energy Week, Uhler brought along energy journalism fellow Brandon Mulder to record the finale of season one, where they discussed community findings on data centers and new forms of energy generation in rural areas. Uhler’s reporting is helping inform the public and expert researchers about how Texans are adapting to changing energy landscapes.