Science & Technology

<p>Members of the Boulder Chamber, a nonprofit business support and advocacy organization, visited CU-Boulder July 29 to learn about the university’s latest advances in space science and aerospace.</p>
<p>The Aerospace Industry Insights event, held at Fiske Planetarium, brought together local, state and federal officials; CU-Boulder faculty, students and administrators; and leaders from the local business community. The purpose of the event, the first in a series sponsored by CU-Boulder and the Boulder Chamber, was to highlight for the business community CU-Boulder's research and innovation in order to foster continued partnership and economic growth.</p>

<p>Three of the 62 scientists from around the world elected this week as American Geophysical Union Fellows are from the University of Colorado Boulder, tying the university for the most fellows elected in 2014 with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and Oregon State University in Corvallis.</p>
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The CU-Boulder honorees include Professor Anne Sheehan of the Department of Geological Sciences, Professor Shijie Zhong of the Department of Physics and Senior Research Associate Tom Woods of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. </div>

<p>Ruth Ellen Kocher, professor of English and director of the creative writing program at the University of Colorado Boulder, has won a prestigious PEN Literary Award.</p>
<p>Kocher was a co-winner of the PEN Open Book Award for her book of poems titled <em>domina Un/blued.</em> The award recognizes an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of color. Also winning the award was Nina McConigley for <em>Cowboys and East Indians</em>.</p>

<p>A program designed at the University of Colorado Boulder to teach kids to code using video games is being introduced into New York City public schools as part of an initiative to give every student access to computer science education.</p>
<p>Scalable Game Design is a program developed over two decades by CU-Boulder computer science Professor Alexander Repenning to spark an interest in coding among kids by allowing them to design and build their own video games. The idea behind the program, which uses drag-and-drop programming tools, is to combat the widely held notion that computer programming is hard and boring.</p>

<p>Everyone has heard about the harmful effects of pollution on human and plant health, but until recently, visualizing such effects took some imagination.</p>

<p>Playing in schoolyards that feature natural habitats and trees and not just asphalt and recreation equipment reduces children’s stress and inattention, according to a University of Colorado Boulder study.</p>

<p>Coming up in the CU-Boulder’s <a href="http://atlas.colorado.edu/wordpress/?page_id=542" target="_blank">ATLAS Black Box Theater</a> is <a href="http://squareproducttheatre.org/" target="_blank">square product theatre’s</a> production of "SLAB," an adaptation of Denver writer Selah Saterstrom’s forthcoming novel. The story is about a woman’s life in the American South told through her memories and from the slab of her post-Katrina home.</p>

<p>An international team led by the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge and involving the University of Colorado Boulder has a new tool to look for the oldest galaxies in the universe: 32 days of observing time with the Hubble Space Telescope.</p>

<p>Something is amiss in the universe. There appears to be an enormous deficit of ultraviolet light in the cosmic budget.</p>
<p>Observations made by the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, a $70 million instrument designed by the University of Colorado Boulder and installed on the Hubble Space Telescope, have revealed that the universe is “missing” a large amount of light.</p>

<p>Deborah Jin has won the 2014 Isaac Newton Medal, the highest accolade given by the Institute of Physics. She was cited for her experimental work in laser cooling atoms. This work has led to the practical demonstration of universal laws that upderpin fundamental quantum behavior. </p>