Research lab
Public research university in Boulder, Colorado, known for strong programs in aerospace engineering, physics, ecology, and other sciences.
Caltech-led researchers report that a neural operator predicted a simulated cloud tipping point more than two years ahead, with an error of about 11 days. The PNAS paper uses only simplified models, so the real climate remains untested.
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University of Colorado Boulder engineers made three-colour tattoo inks that UV light switches on and bright light switches off, in a Matter & Light study. Because the pigment stays in the skin, the ink hides a tattoo without removing it, and its safety in people has not been established.
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MBR Explorer, the UAE's asteroid-belt spacecraft, is set to launch in March 2028 and end its tour with a small probe touching the asteroid Justitia. Nature reported that the UAE built the 10 kg probe on its own, where every part of its Hope Mars orbiter was a collaboration.
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Arizona's Court of Appeals vacated Gabriel Horcasitas's 10.5-year sentence because the judge weighed an AI-generated video of his victim. The manslaughter conviction stands, so the new risk falls on whoever builds or plays synthetic media at sentencing.
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Green snow algae absorbing 40% more sunlight than clean snow grow where penguin guano supplies phosphate, a West Antarctic Peninsula survey found. Its senior author says melt projections that omit this effect likely understate how fast ice-free ground will spread.
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CU Boulder economist Jonathan Hughes finds the most competitive national park permits go to visitors from ZIP codes with 3% to 6% higher median incomes. The gap is modest and measured by neighborhood, but it ties park access to how and when tickets are released.
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Cornell's WildFin team found standard vision models still misread fish behavior after tuning on nine hours of reef video that took about 2,000 hours to make. The team blames scarce wildlife footage in model training and is asking ecologists to release their field video, a remedy this study has not yet tested.
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University of Colorado Boulder researchers found feeling rushed tracked anxiety and depression in 646 undergraduates, however full their schedules were. The lead author cautions that the survey cannot establish cause, so it leaves open whether trimming a workload would ease that stress.
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NASA's 2026 NSTGRO roster puts 15 of its 35 titled projects on cislunar operations, resource processing, power and in-space assembly. Half of the remaining 20 go to entry, landing and propulsion, so the cohort reaches well beyond lunar infrastructure.
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Researchers publishing in Nature Geoscience found that two iron oxyhydroxides holding up to 15% water by weight stay stable at core-mantle boundary conditions. That makes the deepest mantle a plausible store of Earth's original water, pending evidence that the minerals exist there.
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Andrew Lucas of CU Boulder and a co-author proved the 2D random-bond quantum Ising model stays ferromagnetic under weak quantum fluctuations. The result, published in Physical Review Letters, confirms a long-standing conjecture in quantum statistical mechanics.
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A team at Nicolaus Copernicus University ran isotopes, DNA and textile analysis on a 17th century Polish burial, and the sequence they report puts the padlock on the toe at interment and the sickle at the throat only after someone dug the grave open again.
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Woods Hole researchers pushed the record of Indian-Pacific coupling back to the early 1600s using corals, tree rings and stalagmites. Only one earlier interval, 1810 to 1850, shows the relationship breaking down.
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Physicists at NIST used superconducting films held near absolute zero to measure X-rays from uranium, plutonium and neptunium in the band where they overlap the gamma rays used for material accounting. Existing gamma detectors can use the new reference values.
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A survey that began in 2000 as one 2.5-meter telescope pointed north now ships optical spectra from both hemispheres with 18 value-added catalogs, which moves the planning question from telescope time to archive tooling.
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Paul Sanchez's group at Colorado Boulder pulled pairs of simulated boulders apart until the fine grains cementing them gave way, and found that grain angularity belongs in the strength law alongside grain size.
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The effect turned up first in a bead-chain simulation with no muscles and no nervous system, which suggests the speed-up is physics rather than something the animal decides, and it points robot designers at body stiffness.
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A Colorado group handed the long perturbation algebra to Claude and spent its own time stress-testing what came back, which is where the useful part sits, because the model's errors got harder to catch as the work went deeper.
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A Science Advances study defines the spring heat waves that strip snowpack and finds they can roughly double melt rates. The affected area in the West has grown by about 40,000 square miles per century.
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A Trends in Ecology and Evolution synthesis names the ecological mechanisms that decide whether a shrinking pond concentrates transmission or strands the parasite before it can spread.
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