Campus News

Pieter Johnson, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at CU-Boulder, is having a pretty good year. He and a co-researcher have won an award recognizing outstanding contributions to ecology, and he has been named an Early Career Fellow by the Ecological Society of America.

Surface meltwater draining through cracks in an ice sheet can warm the sheet from the inside, softening the ice and letting it flow faster, according to a new study by scientists at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Two University of Colorado Boulder faculty members have received prestigious CAREER Awards from the National Science Foundation. NSF Faculty Early Career Development, or CAREER, Awards recognize talented young faculty members with grants to support outstanding research projects and to encourage the integration of teaching and research.

Many photographs of the Southeast’s Smoky Mountains show layers of tall hills, shading to purples and grays in the distance. Tiny particles in the atmosphere help create the effect, which makes for stunning pictures. But human-caused enhancements of those fine particles also contribute to poor air quality in the Southeastern U.S., and may help explain why the region has not warmed like the rest of the nation.

The amount of dust being blown across the landscape has increased over the last 17 years in large swaths of the West, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder. The escalation in dust emissions — which may be due to the interplay of several factors, including increased windstorm frequency, drought cycles and changing land-use patterns — has implications both for the areas where the dust is first picked up by the winds and for the places where the dust is put back down.

A chemical reaction between iron-containing minerals and water may produce enough hydrogen “food” to sustain microbial communities living in pores and cracks within the enormous volume of rock below the ocean floor and parts of the continents, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder. The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, also hint at the possibility that hydrogen-dependent life could have existed where iron-rich igneous rocks on Mars were once in contact with water.

University of Colorado Boulder students, along with experts from government and industry, will focus on student research and topics including energy storage and cooperation with China during the fourth annual Energy Frontiers conference April 4. The event, organized by the CU Energy Club, is free and open to the public and will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Glenn Miller Ballroom of the University Memorial Center. The conference includes a poster session, panel discussion, catered lunch and a career fair.

Steven Hayward has been appointed the first Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy, the University of Colorado Boulder announced today. Hayward, Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Fellow at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University in Ohio, will begin his one-year appointment in the fall.