Science & Technology

<p>The University of Colorado Boulder’s newest residence hall, Kittredge Central, is welcoming students this week for the first time, 53 of whom are engineering students and will be immersed in Spanish through the building’s new Residential Academic Program, or RAP.</p>
<p>Also, the nearby Kittredge West residence hall is reopening this week after being unoccupied last school year while renovations were underway. Both buildings comprise a number of “green” features to improve water and energy efficiency and to reduce the campus’s carbon footprint.</p>

<p>The University of Colorado Boulder and Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction today announced the successful accreditation of their partnership program by the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET.</p>
<p>The partnership program allows students to earn a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from CU-Boulder by taking classes delivered at CMU. The program offers the first-ever baccalaureate engineering degree on Colorado’s Western Slope.</p>

<p>A new high-tech analysis led by a University of Colorado Boulder researcher shows the oldest known petroglyphs in North America, which are cut into several boulders in western Nevada, date to at least 10,500 years ago and perhaps even as far back as 14,800 years ago.</p>

<p><span>The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, mission to Mars will carry just over 1,100 haiku, along with thousands of names, on its journey to the red planet. The haiku were part of a contest, sponsored by the University of Colorado Boulder, asking the public to submit haiku poetry relating to NASA’s upcoming MAVEN mission to Mars.</span></p>

<p><span>The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, mission to Mars will carry just over 1,100 haiku, along with thousands of names, on its journey to the red planet. The haiku were part of a contest, sponsored by the University of Colorado Boulder, asking the public to submit haiku poetry relating to NASA’s upcoming MAVEN mission to Mars.</span></p>

<p>Researchers at JILA have for the first time used an atomic clock as a quantum simulator, mimicking the behavior of a different, more complex quantum system.</p>

<p>University of Colorado Boulder astrophysicist Doug Duncan says this year's annual Perseid meteor shower and its natural nighttime light show will be particularly good as the display becomes visible over Colorado Aug. 10-13.</p>
<p>"The moon will be nearly new, so it's an especially good time to see the meteor shower," said Duncan, director of CU-Boulder's Fiske Planetarium.</p>

<p>CIRES news release</p>
<p><span>On a perfect winter day in Utah’s Uintah County in 2012, scientists from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and colleagues at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tested out a new way to measure methane emissions from a natural gas production field.</span></p>

<p><span>The spacecraft for NASA’s Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, mission to Mars being led by the University of Colorado Boulder has arrived in Florida in anticipation of a November launch.</span></p>
<p>The spacecraft was shipped on Friday, Aug. 2, aboard a U.S. Air Force cargo plane from Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colo., to the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Fla. Lockheed Martin had previously assembled and tested MAVEN in its Littleton, Colo., facility.</p>

<p>Conventional wisdom holds that East Africa’s Maasai pastoralists hunt lions for two distinct reasons: to retaliate against lions that kill livestock or to engage in a cultural rite of passage. But that view reflects mistranslations of Maasai terms and a simplification of their cultural traditions and their relationship with wildlife, a team of researchers led by a University of Colorado Boulder geographer has concluded.</p>