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An astronomy team led by the Â鶹ӰԺ using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has zeroed in on a wild intergalactic construction project -- a cluster of early galaxies just starting to assemble only 600 million years after the Big Bang.

A team of researchers led by the Â鶹ӰԺ has used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to uncover a cluster of galaxies in the initial stages of construction -- the most distant such grouping ever observed in the early universe. In a random sky survey made in near-infrared light, Hubble spied five small galaxies clustered together 13.1 billion light-years away. They are among the brightest galaxies at that epoch and very young, living just 600 million years after the universe’s birth in the Big Bang. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles.

Summertime hail could all but disappear from the eastern flank of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains by 2070, says a new study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Â鶹ӰԺ’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

If you are college-age or younger, you might just live to see the day when hail disappears from the eastern flanks of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. A new modeling study involving the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, a joint institute of the Â鶹ӰԺ and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, indicates hail will likely cease to fall in those locales by the year 2070, a result of rising temperatures.

A team of Â鶹ӰԺ engineers will travel to Haiti this month to support the growth of green energy on the two-year anniversary of the country’s devastating earthquake. Engineering professors Alan Mickelson and Mike Hannigan and graduate student Matt Hulse will be in Haiti Jan. 8-16 to collaborate with the Neges Foundation school at Leogane to create a vocational training program on the installation, operation and maintenance of renewable energy systems.

How did insects get their hearing? A new study of 50-million-year-old cricket and katydid fossils sporting some of the best preserved fossil insect ears described to date are helping to trace the evolution of the insect ear. According to paleontologist Dena Smith of the Â鶹ӰԺ's Museum of Natural History and University of Illinois Professor Roy Plotnick, who collaborated on the new study at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, or NESCent, in Durham, N.C., insects hear with help from some very unusual ears.

A new study led by the Â鶹ӰԺ could be a wake-up call for parents of toddlers: Daytime naps for your kids may be more important than you think.

A team of researchers led by the Â鶹ӰԺ recently discovered the first prehistoric bronze artifact made from a cast ever found in Alaska, a small, buckle-like object found in an ancient Eskimo dwelling and which likely originated in East Asia.

When considering giving money to humanitarian crises people often donate in response to events that grab their immediate emotions, according to a recent study by CU-Â鶹ӰԺ psychology professor Leaf Van Boven. "The question we wanted to answer with our study is what is the impact of people's emotions on their decisions to make charitable donations," Van Boven said. "We demonstrated that people act on what is immediately emotionally arousing to them. In other words, they respond to what makes them upset in the here and now."

Â鶹ӰԺ Provost Russell L. Moore today named Robert Boswell as CU-Â鶹ӰԺ vice chancellor for diversity, equity and community engagement effective Jan. 1, 2012.