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The Gill Foundation recently pledged a $20,000 matching grant to benefit gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender programs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Over the next year, the CU Foundation will raise funds to match the gift.

The University of Colorado at Boulder expects to begin construction of its planned $63.5 million Visual Arts Complex in late March with completion of the 170,000-square-foot building scheduled during the 2009-10 academic year. The new structure will replace the aging Sibell Wolle Fine Arts Building, which will be razed in late December after nearly a century as a campus landmark. Campus art experts believe the new complex will enable students and faculty to synthesize art, art history and high technology and establish a vital new hub for creative expression in Colorado.

The University of Colorado at Boulder will be one of three schools featured in an in-depth look at the 2007 Solar Decathlon competition by the Discovery Home Channel/Planet Green network. The one-hour program, called “Solar Showdown,” will air Monday, Dec. 17, at 6 p.m. MST and again at 9 p.m. MST on the Discovery Home Channel, a digital cable-only network. The show is expected to air three more times on Dec. 18 and is part of a preview of the new Planet Green network, which will replace Discovery Home in early 2008.

New observations by NASA's Cassini spacecraft indicate the rings of Saturn, once thought to have formed during the age of the dinosaurs, instead may have been created roughly 4.5 billion years ago when the solar system was still under construction.

While two new studies by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences predict wetter storms for the Arctic and for the Northern Hemisphere because of global warming, whether or not this means more net precipitation depends on the latitude.

The 2007 melt extent on the Greenland ice sheet broke the 2005 summer melt record by 10 percent, making it the largest ever recorded there since satellite measurements began in 1979, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder climate scientist.

Colorado's economy will experience modest growth in 2008, and should outpace the national economy, according to economist Richard Wobbekind, of the University of Colorado at Boulder's Leeds School of Business. Wobbekind's announcement was part of the 43rd annual Business Economic Outlook Forum hosted Dec. 10 by CU-Boulder's Leeds School of Business and Compass Bank.

Alaska's Columbia Glacier, one of the most rapidly shrinking glaciers in the world that recently reached the mid-point of its projected retreat, is the subject of a new book by a University of Colorado at Boulder glaciologist.

Much of the gaseous mass of the universe is bound up in a tangled web of cosmic filaments that stretch for hundreds of millions of light-years, according to a new supercomputer study by a team led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences is teaming up with NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory, one of the nation's pre-eminent research labs, to offer a new, competitive fellowship to earth science graduate students at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The fellowship will allow students to pursue a master's degree or doctorate in one of 10 CIRES-affiliated departments at CU-Boulder while simultaneously working with the world-class research team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration labs in Boulder.