Academics

The Colorado economy continues to grow at a modest pace in 2012, positioning the state among the healthier in growth nationally, according to economist Richard Wobbekind of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business. Midway through the year, Colorado’s job growth rate is up to about 1.6 percent -- a gain of about 35,000 jobs in 2012 if the pace holds steady.

An international research team involving the University of Colorado Boulder announced this morning it has found the first direct evidence for a new particle that likely is the long sought-after Higgs boson, believed to endow the universe with mass.

Several hundred people are expected to gather on the University of Colorado Boulder campus July 12-13 to celebrate the 50 th anniversary of JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) known around the world for its discoveries in atomic, molecular and optical physics. In addition, the president-elect of the American Physical Society will be on hand to officially announce JILA’s designation as an historic physics site.

Five University of Colorado Boulder engineering students recently returned from Haiti where they introduced a green energy vocational training program, paving the way for a new era of distributed power in the poverty-stricken, earthquake-damaged nation.

Colorado business leaders are less optimistic going into the third quarter than last quarter, according to the most recent quarterly Leeds Business Confidence Index, or LBCI, released today by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business. The LBCI’s reading slid from 62.2 in the second quarter to 53.6 in the third, but remained higher than the 10-year average for the index and above the critical neutral mark of 50. A reading greater than 50 indicates positive expectations, while one lower than 50 indicates negative expectations.

When it came to eating, an upright, 2 million-year-old African hominid had a diet unlike virtually all other known human ancestors, says a study led by the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and involving the University of Colorado Boulder.

The California condor is chronically endangered by lead exposure from ammunition and requires ongoing human intervention for population stability and growth, according to a new study led by the University of California, Santa Cruz, and involving the University of Colorado Boulder.

Companies paying celebrities big money to endorse their products may not realize that negative perceptions about a celebrity are more likely to transfer to an endorsed brand than are positive ones, according to a new University of Colorado Boulder study. Celebrity endorsements are widely used to increase brand visibility and connect brands with celebrities’ personality traits, but do not always work in the positive manner marketers envision, according to Margaret C. Campbell of CU-Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, who led the study.

For the first time, a consortium of researchers organized by the National Institutes of Health, including a University of Colorado Boulder professor, has mapped the normal microbial makeup of healthy humans.

It’s no secret that Mars is a beaten and battered planet -- astronomers have been peering for centuries at the violent impact craters created by cosmic buckshot pounding its surface over billions of years. But just how beat up is it?