Campus News Briefs — Spring 2018

John Grisham Liked It 

Bestselling novelist John Grisham found an article by Colorado Law professor Paul Campos so compelling, he calls it the inspiration for his latest book, The Rooster Bar.

As Grisham — author of the The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client and other huge bestsellers — publicized the new book late last year, he repeatedly cited Campos’ 2014 nonfiction article in The Atlantic, telling CBS This Morning that it “really opened my eyes. It was a great piece. The novel was quickly born from that.”

Campos’ article, “The Law School Scam,” is about the perils for students and society of expensive for-profit law schools with questionable admissions standards.

Three students attending a fictional for-profit law school are at the center of The Rooster Bar.

After the book came out, Grisham sent Campos a copy and a note.

“It was nice, needless to say, to have a story like that featured in a John Grisham novel,” Campos told the Boulder Daily Camera.

Let’s say you see a great white shark and you are scared and your brain wants to form a memory of what’s going on. You have to make new proteins to encode that memory ”

— CU Boulder scientist Charles Hoeffer, on his recent research about the role of the protein AKT.

Soft Robots 

CU Boulder engineers are developing a new breed of “soft” robot that can handle fragile objects, such as fruit, yet also lift heavy ones, such as a jug of water. Made of various elastic materials and liquids and powered by electricity, the versatile, self-healing robots depend on something like artificial muscle to generate “the adaptability of an octopus arm, the speed of a hummingbird and the strength of an elephant,” said Christoph Keplinger, the mechanical engineering professor whose research group leads the work.

For more details, see CU Boulder Today online.