Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Tor Wager, director of CU Boulder’s Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab. Photo: Stephen Collector/The New York Times/Redux

Expecting less pain can lead to less pain

Oct. 1, 2012

What you don’t know won’t hurt you, goes the old canard, but what you believe can make a difference when it comes to pain relief, and not just in a subjective way. When you expect that a drug or placebo will relieve pain, and it does, it’s not simply a matter of fooling your brain.

Cover of book by Keith Maskus

Patent, copyright protection picture changing in globalized economy

Oct. 1, 2012

It seems, at first blush, to be something of a no-brainer: strengthening protections on American intellectual property rights (or IPRs) — on everything from drugs to music to technology — would be a boon to the national economy. After all, we hardly want unscrupulous governments and businesses in Brazil, China,...

Brian Talbot

A strategy to deal with moral relativism in students

Oct. 1, 2012

In certain political and religious circles, the notion of moral relativism — that there is no objective “right” or wrong, only individual opinions — is not just anathema, not merely abhorrent. It is the very root of decadence and the collapse of civilization. “What’s right for you may not be...

When biomass burns, including during wildfires, it releases a pollutant that can cause health problems at high concentrations. Photo credit: NOAA.

CU helps to smoke out an air pollutant’s hot spots

May 1, 2012

When biomass burns, including during wildfires, it releases a pollutant that can cause health problems at high concentrations. Photo credit: NOAA. A smoke-related chemical may be a significant air pollutant in some parts of the world, especially in places where forest fires and other forms of biomass burning are common,...

Leaf Van Boven

Boys don’t cry, at least as far as they recall

March 1, 2012

When former U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder tearfully announced in 1987 that she would not seek the nomination for president, many analysts suggested that such a display of emotion made her unqualified. But what if all our tightly held stereotypes about “emotional” females and stoic males are wrong?

15-year-old Zach Huey, in black shirt, and his twin brother, Nate, have been studied since the age of 4 by researchers at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado Boulder. CU photo by Glenn Asakawa.

Researchers do double-take on childhood learning

March 1, 2012

Nate and Zach Huey are identical, 15-year-old twins, who, like most twins, are somewhat dissimilar. But the twins but have much in common. Both like Japanese comic books called Manga. Both read voraciously and have a vocabulary that shows it. And both have been studied since the age of 4 by researchers at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Stefan Leyk

With clear uncertainty, prof maps disease through space and time

March 1, 2012

When most people think of maps, they think National Geographic, Rand McNally or — more likely these days — Google. Maps show us where places and objects are and sometimes, what they look like. They can be two-dimensional or three-dimensional, and whether they represent the inside of a human brain,...

Former CU-Boulder postdoctoral researchers Amy Miller ( blue coat) and Katie Suding (black coat) are shown here with other members of a research team conducting a study involving nitrogen deposition on the tundra of the Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research site west of Boulder. (Photo courtesy William Bowman, INSTAAR)

High alpine ecology threatened by climate change

March 1, 2012

Former CU-Boulder postdoctoral researchers Amy Miller ( blue coat) and Katie Suding (black coat) are shown here with other members of a research team conducting a study involving nitrogen deposition on the tundra of the Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research site west of Boulder. (Photo courtesy William Bowman, INSTAAR) A...

Bozena Welborne, who earned her Ph.D. from CU-Boulder last year, is now an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno.

‘Pious’ Muslims, Christians share wary eye of government

Dec. 1, 2011

Imagine, if you will, a meeting of minds between Ayn Rand and Mohammed… Public surveys in recent years consistently have found that concerns about “radical Islam” are higher among conservative Christians in the United States than among many other religious groups. According to a 2007 Pew survey, in fact, among...

Thomas Andrews

A bird’s (and mule’s) eye view of U.S. history

Dec. 1, 2011

Thomas Andrews has a knack for framing American history unconventionally. In his award-winning book “Killing for Coal,” Andrews traced the central role of coal in Colorado’s economic growth, environmental change and social conflict. Now he’s turning his scholarly gaze toward another little-acknowledged actor in American history: animals. “Paying attention to...

Pages