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No one really knows how the High Plains got so high. Â鶹ӰԺ 70 million years ago, eastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming, western Kansas and western Nebraska were near sea level. Since then, the region has risen about 2 kilometers, leading to some head scratching at geology conferences.

Oil and gas operations in the United States produce about 21 billion barrels of wastewater per year. The saltiness of the water and the organic contaminants it contains have traditionally made treatment difficult and expensive. Engineers at the Â鶹ӰԺ have invented a simpler process that can simultaneously remove both salts and organic contaminants from the wastewater, all while producing additional energy.

A new $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to a coalition of organizations including the Â鶹ӰԺ will be used to help improve wind energy forecasting in mountain and valley regions.

A massive new Â鶹ӰԺ study indicates there is a statistical link between hotter temperatures generated by climate change and the risk of armed conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa. CU-Â鶹ӰԺ Professor John O’Loughlin led a research team that assessed more than 78,000 armed conflicts between 1980 and 2012 in the Sahel region of Africa – a semi-arid belt just south of the Saharan Desert that spans about 3,000 miles and more than a dozen countries from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans.

A new study led by the University of California, Berkeley and involving the Â鶹ӰԺ indicates the current response to wildfires around the world—aggressively fighting them—is not making society less vulnerable to such events.

The Â鶹ӰԺ was ranked second in the world in geosciences this week by U.S. News & World Report. CU-Â鶹ӰԺ trailed only the California Institute of Technology. Rounding out the top five are the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Harvard University and the University of Washington. U.S. News & World Report ranked the top 100 universities in geosciences in 2014 based primarily on their research and reputation.

Former NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless will present Â鶹ӰԺ senior Jeni Sorli with a $10,000 scholarship from the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation during a free public campus event on Thursday, Oct. 30.

NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft has provided scientists their first look at a storm of energetic solar particles at Mars and produced unprecedented ultraviolet images of the tenuous oxygen, hydrogen and carbon coronas surrounding the Red Planet, said Â鶹ӰԺ Professor Bruce Jakosky, the mission’s principal investigator.

NASA has awarded a team led by the Â鶹ӰԺ more than $7 million to study aspects of the origins, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

The perception that Colorado’s Front Range wildfires are becoming increasingly severe does not hold much water scientifically, according to a massive new study led by the Â鶹ӰԺ and Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif.