News Headlines

A group of University of Colorado Boulder faculty and students are anxiously awaiting the arrival of NASA’s Juno spacecraft at Jupiter July 4, a mission expected to reveal the hidden interior of the gas giant as well as keys to how our solar system formed.

Seeing the severe damage and massive loss of life from earthquakes led Jenny Ramírez into the field of geotechnical earthquake engineering. Ramirez, who was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, is a doctoral student in civil engineering at CU-Boulder. She now is doing numerical simulations of soil deposits subjected to earthquakes.

Diego Fierro, 13, hopes to be a mechanical engineer someday. And thanks to a LEGO Robotics: Space Challenge camp at the University of Colorado Boulder, Diego took one step closer to that dream this week. “I’ve never built anything with LEGO Mindstorms before,” Diego explained, as he programmed the robot’s next move. “It’s cool because it gives me an idea of how a machine works, how every piece is important and has a job.”

A group of Denver high school students who recently descended on the CU-Boulder campus rolled up their sleeves for a week of real-world engineering experience and the opportunity to earn $2,500 scholarships.

Some of the beasts living in Patagonia 13,000 years ago were an intimidating bunch: Fierce saber-toothed cats, elephant-sized sloths, ancient jaguars as big as today’s tigers and short-faced bears that stood 12 feet tall and weighed nearly a ton. But by 12,000 years ago, they had disappeared. What happened?

Global emissions of ethane, an air pollutant and greenhouse gas, are on the uptick again. A team led by CU-Boulder found that a steady decline of global ethane emissions following a peak in about 1970 ended between 2005 and 2010 in most of the Northern Hemisphere and has since reversed. Between 2009 and 2014, ethane emissions in the Northern Hemisphere increased by about 400,000 tons annually, the bulk of it from North American oil and gas activity.

The ability to understand and empathize with others’ pain is grounded in cognitive neural processes rather than sensory ones, according to the results of a new study led by University of Colorado Boulder researchers.

New findings examine the aftermath of the Gorkha earthquake, which struck Nepal on April 25, 2015.

The Milky Way, the brilliant river of stars that has dominated the night sky and human imaginations since time immemorial, is but a faded memory to one third of humanity and 80 percent of Americans, according to a new global atlas of light pollution produced by Italian and American scientists.

The perpetually ice-covered lakes in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys preserve the dissolved remnants of black carbon from thousand-year-old wildfires as well as modern day fossil fuel use, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.