Â鶹ÒùÔº

For the first time ever, a team led by the University of Colorado Boulder has sequenced the internal bacterial makeup of the three major life stages of a butterfly species, a project that showed some surprising events occur during metamorphosis. The team, led by CU-Boulder doctoral student Tobin Hammer, used powerful DNA sequencing methods to characterize bacterial communities inhabiting caterpillars, pupae and adults of Heliconius erato , commonly known as the red postman butterfly. The red postman is an abundant tropical butterfly found in Central and South America.

Â鶹ÒùÔº from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business will offer free tax preparation services to individuals under the Internal Revenue Service-sponsored Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program. Members of the public who make $52,000 or less are eligible for the service, now in its fifth year at the Leeds School.

The University of Colorado Boulder has been awarded a cooperative agreement worth up to $14.6 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a new technological system to rapidly determine how drugs and biological or chemical agents exert their effects on human cells. The project, called the Subcellular Pan-Omics for Advanced Rapid Threat Assessment, or SPARTA, will be conducted by an interdisciplinary CU-Boulder team led by Research Assistant Professor William Old of the chemistry and biochemistry department.

The University of Colorado Boulder has named Mark Meaney as executive director of the Center for Education on Social Responsibility (CESR) at the Leeds School of Business.

Heralding a new age of terrific timekeeping, a research group at JILA—a joint institute of the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology—has unveiled an experimental strontium atomic clock that has set new world records for both precision and stability.

The University of Colorado Law School announced that Britt Banks has been appointed as Executive Director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment. For over 20 years, Banks has been a leader in the international natural resources sector, as a senior corporate executive, attorney, consultant, researcher and teacher, having most recently taught at Tokyo’s Waseda University. He has previously taught at Colorado Law, where he graduated in 1988, and currently serves on the Center’s Advisory Council.

If you were a shrew snuffling around a North American forest, you would be 27 times less likely to respond to climate change than if you were a moose grazing nearby. That is just one of the findings of a new University of Colorado Boulder assessment led by Assistant Professor Christy McCain that looked at more than 1,000 different scientific studies on North American mammal responses to human-caused climate change.

Computer software similar to that used by online retailers to recommend products to a shopper can help students remember the content they’ve studied, according to a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder. The software, created by computer scientists at CU-Boulder’s Institute for Cognitive Science, works by tapping a database of past student performance to suggest what material an individual student most needs to review.

Two University of Colorado Boulder researchers were among the 15 honored this week by the National Academy of Sciences for their extraordinary scientific achievements. Marvin Caruthers, distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, is the recipient of the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences, and Deborah Jin, an adjoint professor of physics, is the recipient of the Comstock Prize in Physics. Caruthers is being honored for his groundbreaking work on the chemical synthesis of DNA and RNA that made it possible to decode and encode genes and genomes.

University of Colorado Boulder Professor Peter Molnar has been awarded the prestigious 2014 Crafoord Prize in Geosciences by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his groundbreaking research in geophysics and geological sciences.