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A standing-room-only crowd in the Wolf Law Building’s Wittemyer Courtroom and nearly 100 others in an overflow room gathered yesterday as EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Colorado Sen. Mark Udall discussed President Obama’s Climate Action Plan at the CU Law School.

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

CU-Â鶹ӰԺ music graduates Joel Schut and Allegra Boggess are helping bring music back to the war-torn central Asian nation.

A new high-tech analysis led by a Â鶹ӰԺ 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.

Â鶹ӰԺ 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. "The moon will be nearly new, so it's an especially good time to see the meteor shower," said Duncan, director of CU-Â鶹ӰԺ's Fiske Planetarium.

The spacecraft for NASA’s Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, mission to Mars being led by the Â鶹ӰԺ has arrived in Florida in anticipation of a November launch. 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.

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 Â鶹ӰԺ geographer has concluded.

A Â鶹ӰԺ team has developed a radically new technique that uses the power of sunlight to efficiently split water into its components of hydrogen and oxygen, paving the way for the broad use of hydrogen as a clean, green fuel.

Spending just one week exposed only to natural light while camping in the Rocky Mountains was enough to synch the circadian clocks of eight people participating in a Â鶹ӰԺ study with the timing of sunrise and sunset. The study, published online today in the journal Current Biology , found that the synchronization happened in that short period of time for all participants, regardless of whether they were early birds or night owls during their normal lives.

Year-round ice-free conditions across the surface of the Arctic Ocean could explain why the Earth was substantially warmer during the Pliocene Epoch than it is today, despite similar concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to new research carried out at the Â鶹ӰԺ. In early May, instruments at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii marked a new record: The concentration of carbon dioxide climbed to 400 parts per million for the first time in modern history.