Campus News

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.

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? Really beat up, according to a CU-Boulder research team that recently finished counting, outlining and cataloging a staggering 635,000 impact craters on Mars that are roughly a kilometer or more in diameter.

NIST news release Like many new measurement tools, the laser frequency comb seemed at first a curiosity but has found more practical uses than originally imagined. The technique for making extraordinarily precise measurements of frequency has now moved beyond physics and optics to advance biomedicine by helping researchers evaluate a novel instrument that kills harmful bacteria without the use of liquid chemicals or high temperatures.

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?

A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder looking for organisms that eke out a living in some of the most inhospitable soils on Earth has found a hardy few. A new DNA analysis of rocky soils in the Martian-like landscape on some volcanoes in South America has revealed a handful of bacteria, fungi and other rudimentary organisms called archaea, which seem to have a different way of converting energy than their cousins elsewhere in the world.

An international research team led by the University of Colorado Boulder has generated the first laser-like beams of X-rays from a tabletop device, paving the way for major advances in many fields including medicine, biology and nanotechnology development.

Seven University of Colorado Boulder graduate students and alumni will go abroad during the 2012-13 academic year to pursue a variety of studies, research and teaching projects as grantees of the prestigious Fulbright program. Their proposed subjects range from exploring desertification knowledge in Mali and the impact of collaboration with a foreign development agency, to studying medieval Islamic philosophy in Egypt and its potential to inform debates in Anglo-American moral philosophy.

The University of Colorado Law School on June 6-8 will host the Natural Resources Law Center’s 2012 Martz Summer Conference, “A Low-Carbon Energy Blueprint for the American West” in the Wolf Law Building. Former Gov. Bill Ritter, executive director of the Center for the New Energy Economy, will be the keynote speaker. Ritter’s keynote address will provide an overview of the trends and future of energy in the upcoming decades.

University of Colorado Boulder students and faculty have been selected to develop a remotely operable, robotic garden to support future astronauts in deep space. The project is one of five university proposals selected to participate in the 2013 Exploration Habitat (X-Hab) Academic Innovation Challenge led by NASA and the National Space Grant Foundation.