Science & Technology

<p>A CU-Boulder student team is shooting for the moon and beyond with a tiny satellite under development that has just taken another step closer to launch. As one of the top five teams selected by NASA, the team of 10 graduate students will continue developing a small CubeSat satellite about the size of a shoebox called the CU Earth Escape Explorer (CU-E3) with a $30,000 award from NASA.</p>

<p>Students at CU-Boulder, who built a dust counter for the New Horizons mission to Pluto, have been eyeing the data for decade now. And the results are showing the solar system really is pretty barren if you put aside the planets, rings, moons, comets and asteroids.</p>

<p>For some Paralympic sprinters, having the inside track is not always a good thing. A new CU-Boulder study shows lower left-leg amputee athletes sprinting in the inside lane of an indoor track ran about 4 percent slower than athletes with right-leg amputations.</p>

<p>“Upside-down rivers” of warm ocean water threaten the stability of floating ice shelves in Antarctica, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center. The study highlights how parts of Antarctica’s ice sheet may be weakening due to contact with warm ocean water.</p>

<p>NASA has selected CU-Boulder researcher Raina Gough to join the Mars Curiosity rover mission as a participating scientist; she hopes to expand the science team’s search for evidence of liquid water.</p>

<p>What are the odds of filling out a perfect NCAA Tournament bracket, picking all 63 games correctly? According to University of Colorado Boulder Professor Mark Ablowitz, former chair of the Department of Applied Mathematics, they are breathtaking: Try about one in 9.22 quintillion.</p>

<p>INC Classroom Outreach sends teams of CU-Boulder students into local schools to teach kids about the brain. They provide lessons on sleep, nutrition for the brain, emotions, head injury and general brain structure. The program is an extension of a large-scale effort to increase public awareness of brain research.</p>

<p>Like an albatross scanning for pods of squid in a vast ocean, molecules on solid surfaces move in an intermittent search pattern that provides maximum efficiency, according to new research from the University of Colorado Boulder.</p>

<p>A $4 million bequest from the estate of a couple committed to the standardization of telecommunications will help establish the first endowed chair in the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program (ITP) at the University of Colorado Boulder.</p>
<p>The pioneering program is part of the College of Engineering and Applied Science and integrates law, policy, business and engineering.</p>

<p>University of Colorado Boulder researchers have demonstrated the use of the world’s first ultrafast optical microscope, allowing them to probe and visualize matter at the atomic level with mind-bending speed.</p>