Community Edition - Jan. 2, 2022

The long road of recovery and healing in many local neighborhoods is just beginning. As this recovery begins, we have decided to begin the spring term on Monday, Jan. 10, with fully remote instruction for the first two weeks of the semester.

CU Boulder stands with the hundreds of campus community members impacted by the Dec. 30 fires in Boulder County.

In the coming days and weeks, you may learn intimately of friends and colleagues who were directly impacted by the recent Boulder County fires. Professional counselor Stanley Ly gives advice on reaching out and offering support.

Expand your cultural understanding by learning languages with ALTEC. Registration for non-credit classes is open, and this year, ALTEC is offering the standard price until Jan. 16—enroll today. Plus, learn language basics in the new free foundations course.

New CU Boulder research suggests that in highly vaccinated regions, including Colorado, most infections will soon be breakthrough cases, and money spent on testing the unvaccinated could be better spent on other public health measures.

Recent data reveal U.S. news coverage of climate change reached an all-time high in October and November. The language is also changing, with more intense words and phrases being used in the news to describe the phenomenon, such as “climate catastrophe” and “climate emergency.”

The decades-in-the-making James Webb Space Telescope will observe light from the dawn of the universe and may even detect the gases swirling in the atmospheres of alien planets.

Professor Greg Rieker and Ryan Cole have developed an experiment that recreates the climates of planets beyond our solar system right in the lab. By reaching the same high-temperature and high-pressure conditions found on many exoplanets, the instrument can map their atmospheres, which could help humanity detect life outside our solar system.