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Â鶹ÒùÔº and employees at the University of Colorado at Boulder are reminded to take precautions with local wildlife in order to avoid contracting contagious diseases. Wildlife-related diseases reported in Boulder County this summer include plague, hantavirus, tularemia and rabies, according to campus and county health officials. The CU-Boulder campus is home to many animals including squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, prairie dogs and bats.

As part of the largest project of its kind in recent years, University of Colorado at Boulder Facilities Management officials have invested $1.2 million to improve the appearance, comfortableness and overall maintainability of campus classroom facilities. Carpeting, paint, new furniture and other upgrades were all part of the campus-wide Classroom Improvement Initiative implemented during the last year, according to Facilities Management Executive Director Jeff Lipton.

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and Olympic gold medalist Frank Shorter will be among the featured readers at the ninth annual "Words to Stir the Soul: Readings from the American West" events presented by the University of Colorado at Boulder's Center of the American West. The programs will be held Sept. 1 at 7 p.m. at the LoDo Tattered Cover Book Store at 1628 16th St. in Denver and on Sept. 6 at 7 p.m. in Old Main Chapel on the CU-Boulder campus. Both are free and open to the public.

University of Colorado at Boulder students out after dark this school year will have a safe, reliable way to get home thanks to the CU NightRide campus program. Formerly known as NightRide/NightWalk, the program provides free, nighttime escorts to CU-Boulder students, staff and faculty around campus and anywhere within the Boulder city limits.

The ninth annual Buffalo Racing Car Show will be held on the University of Colorado at Boulder campus Sunday, Sept. 11, from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. featuring all types of cars from classic to exotic, foreign to domestic and street cars to race cars. Spectators at the car show will serve as judges, and proceeds will benefit the project racecar of the CU chapter of the Society of Automotive Engineers, which also will be on display at the show.

Campus administrators at the University of Colorado at Boulder have begun implementing plans to improve security for the 6,000 servers and 20,000 computers in use on campus, particularly for those that contain sensitive data that is more likely to be targeted in cases of identity theft. Although the full plan will require further review and funding approval to implement, parts of the plan already are under way, according to Bobby Schnabel, vice provost for academic and campus technology.

A new case of unauthorized computer access has been identified at the University of Colorado at Boulder as a result of current investigations and new procedures that were put in place following a series of computer breaches during the last month. The potentially exposed information includes about 49,000 database entries on a server containing ancillary information used by the Registrar's Office. The information is not a primary database of the Registrar's Office.

Note to Editors: Contents embargoed for use until 12:01 a.m. Friday, Aug. 19. The University of Colorado at Boulder was ranked in a tie for 34th among the nation's public universities offering doctoral degrees in U.S. News & World Report's 2006 Best Colleges undergraduate rankings released today. CU-Boulder was tied for 34th with Clemson University, North Carolina State-Raleigh and Virginia Tech. In the ranking of all doctoral universities, public and private, CU-Boulder was tied for 78th with five other schools.

Bipolar adolescents, saddled with biochemical imbalances that make mood swings far more severe than the raging hormones and mood changes common to healthy teens, may have a strong ally in their fight to control the disease.

As expected, the fall 2005 freshman class at the University of Colorado at Boulder will be smaller than last year, with freshmen numbering about 5,000 and overall enrollment projected at about 28,800 degree-seeking students. The 5,000 new freshmen projected for this fall represents a decrease of about 138 or 2.7 percent from the previous year's total of 5,138. Last year the total number of degree-seeking students enrolled was 29,258.