Professor Robert S. Anderson of the University of Colorado Boulder’s geological sciences department and Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research has been awarded the 2014 Hazel Barnes Prize, the most distinguished award a faculty member can receive from the university.

The Rocky Mountain Lighting Academy (RMLA) will offer a one-of-a-kind immersive educational opportunity for lighting professionals this summer at the University of Colorado Boulder. The RMLA’s Summer Lighting Course is scheduled for June 23-27 on the CU-Boulder campus. The course will present the theory of lighting within a practical context, making it directly applicable to the needs of those working in engineering, product development and technical sales positions.

Tremendous growth in enrollments and a changing economic, technological and reputational landscape have prompted the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado Boulder to set two ambitious new goals for the year 2020. Improvements in the college’s “Best Graduate Schools” rankings, released in mid-March by U.S. News & World Report, indicate good progress in the right direction.

A new report led by the University of Colorado Boulder, “Considerations for Climate Change and Variability Adaptation on the Navajo Nation,” synthesizes state-of-the-science information on the region’s climate, water cycle and ecology. And it goes much further, discussing social, legal, economic, infrastructural and other factors that affect people’s vulnerabilities to climate impacts as well as their adaptive capacity, and outlining one approach for how the region’s residents might plan for ongoing environmental change.

A free, downloadable guide for individuals who want to collect baseline data on their well water quality and monitor their groundwater quantity over time was released this week by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Colorado Water and Energy Research Center (CWERC).

The University of Colorado Boulder will test the CU-Boulder Alerts system on Thursday, April 3, to raise awareness of how the campus community will be notified in case of an emergency. The test will include text messages, emails, social media and website announcements. Annual testing of emergency notification systems is required by the Clery Act, a federal law.

A revolutionary University of Colorado Boulder toilet fueled by the sun that is being developed to help some of the 2.5 billion people around the world lacking safe and sustainable sanitation will be unveiled in India this month.

In recent years, palm oil production has come under fire from environmentalists concerned about the deforestation of land in the tropics to make way for new palm plantations. Now there is a new reason to be concerned about palm oil’s environmental impact. An analysis published Feb. 26 in the journal Nature Climate Change shows that the wastewater produced during the processing of palm oil is a significant source of heat-trapping methane in the atmosphere. But the researchers also present a possible solution: capturing the methane and using it as a renewable energy source.

University of Colorado Boulder scientists have found a creative way to radically improve thermoelectric materials, a finding that could one day lead to the development of improved solar panels, more energy-efficient cooling equipment, and even the creation of new devices that could turn the vast amounts of heat wasted at power plants into more electricity.

For University of Colorado Boulder Assistant Professor Gordana Dukovic of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the awards just keep rolling in. Today the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced that Dukovic was one of 126 people in the U.S. and Canada selected for one of the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships in 2014.