Discovery & Innovation

CU-led study shows pine beetle outbreak buffers watersheds from nitrate pollution

A research team involving several scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder has found an unexpected silver lining in the devastating pine beetle outbreaks ravaging the West: Such events do not harm water quality in adjacent streams as scientists had previously believed.

Oil and gas wells contribute fuel for ozone pollution, CIRES researchers find

Emissions from oil and natural gas operations north of Denver could add to ozone pollution in that region, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES).

Pronunciation of ‘s’ sounds impacts perception of gender, CU-Boulder researcher finds

A person’s style of speech — not just the pitch of his or her voice — may help determine whether the listener perceives the speaker to be male or female, according to a University of Colorado Boulder researcher who studied transgender people transitioning from female to male.

The way people pronounce their “s” sounds and the amount of resonance they use when speaking contributes to the perception of gender, according to Lal Zimman, whose findings are based on research he completed while earning his doctoral degree from CU-Boulder’s linguistics department.

Research by CU-Boulder physicists creates ‘recipe book’ for building new materials

By showing that tiny particles injected into a liquid crystal medium adhere to existing mathematical theorems, physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have opened the door for the creation of a host of new materials with properties that do not exist in nature.

JILA physicists achieve elusive ‘evaporative cooling’ of molecules

NIST news release

Achieving a goal considered nearly impossible, JILA physicists have chilled a gas of molecules to very low temperatures by adapting the familiar process by which a hot cup of coffee cools.

JILA is a joint institute of the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology located on the CU-Boulder campus.

CU involved in two of top 10 breakthroughs in 2012 as judged by Physics World magazine

University of Colorado Boulder faculty and students are part of international science teams that made two of the top 10 breakthroughs in physics in 2012 as judged by Physics World magazine.

CU-Boulder team develops swarm of pingpong ball-sized robots

University of Colorado Boulder Assistant Professor Nikolaus Correll likes to think in multiples. If one robot can accomplish a singular task, think how much more could be accomplished if you had hundreds of them.

Correll and his computer science research team, including research associate Dustin Reishus and professional research assistant Nick Farrow, have developed a basic robotic building block, which he hopes to reproduce in large quantities to develop increasingly complex systems.

Ice-capped Antarctic lake harbors life

A frigid brine, isolated from the outside world for about three millennia underneath a thick layer of ice in an Antarctic lake, harbors life, according to a research team that includes scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder.
 
The finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a hint to how life might be able to thrive in extreme, icy conditions elsewhere in our solar system, such as those found on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, Jupiter’s moon Europa or on Mars.
 

CU-led team receives $9.2 million DOE grant to engineer E. coli into biofuels

A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder has been awarded $9.2 million over five years from the U.S. Department of Energy to research modifying E. coli to produce biofuels such as gasoline.

“This is a fantastic opportunity to take what we have worked on for the past decade to the next level,” said team leader Ryan Gill, a fellow of CU-Boulder’s Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, or RASEI. “In this project, we will develop technologies that are orders of magnitude beyond where we are currently.”

Dated as old as the dinosaurs

An analysis of mineral grains from the bottom of the western Grand Canyon indicates it was largely carved out by about 70 million years ago -- a time when dinosaurs may have even peeked over the rim, says a study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

Pages

Give FeedbackSee More Photos View Photo