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NEWS TIP SHEET A University of Colorado at Boulder law professor is available to comment on the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case in the countdown to, and aftermath of, this Thursday's preliminary hearing. Law Professor Christopher Mueller, an expert on trial procedure and the rules of evidence, can be reached for comment at (303) 492-6973. Also available for comment are:

The University of Colorado at Boulder's Volunteer Reader Program, which records textbooks onto tape for blind, dyslexic and other visually or cognitively impaired students, is looking for volunteers. "We receive about half of our texts from organizations like Reading for the Blind and sometimes it's possible to get an electronic version of a text, but that still leaves many, many books that are not available or not of use to those students with other reading challenges," said Howard Kramer, Assistive Technology Lab coordinator for Disability Services.

An interdisciplinary conference on Celtic culture will take place Oct. 23-25 at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Center for British and Irish Studies on Norlin Library's fifth floor. The conference is free and open to the public. Registration begins at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 23.

New findings by the University of Colorado at Boulder indicate tiny footpaths traveled by Costa Rican people 1,500 years ago were precursors to wide, deep and ritualistic roadways 500 years later leading to and from cemeteries and villages.

Christine Yoshinaga-Itano has been appointed interim associate vice chancellor for the Office of Diversity and Equity at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Provost Phil DiStefano announced. "I am very pleased that Professor Yoshinaga-Itano is willing to take on this important leadership position on the campus," DiStefano said. "She has the respect of faculty from around the campus and has served as a mentor and role model to numerous women and faculty of color since she has been at CU-Boulder."

An electric pickle, a self-burning candle and an imploding 50-gallon drum will be some of the highlights of the Oct. 18 CU Wizards show "Too Hot to Handle." University of Colorado at Boulder faculty members Janet deGrazia of chemical engineering, Brian Argrow of aerospace engineering and Jean Hertzberg of mechanical engineering will present the show at 9:30 a.m. in Cristol Chemistry and Biochemistry Building room 140. The show is aimed at students in grades five through nine and is free and open to the public.

'Genius Grant' is Worth $500,000 to Researcher Deborah Jin, 34, a physicist at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colo., and adjoint assistant professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU-Boulder), has been named a 2003 winner of a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the "genius grant." The fellowship is awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago. Jin is a fellow of JILA, a laboratory run by NIST and CU-Boulder.

A team of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder has taken another step in the quest to build a compact, tabletop x-ray microscope that could be used for biological imaging at super-high resolution. By firing a femtosecond laser - a laser that generates light pulses with durations as short as 100 trillionth of a second - through a gas-filled tube called a waveguide, they were able to create more efficient "laser-like" beams in regions of the spectrum that were previously inaccessible.

Walter Hickel, the former governor of Alaska who served as secretary of the interior for two years under President Richard Nixon, will speak at the University of Colorado at Boulder on Oct. 15. Hickel will speak at 7 p.m. in the Eaton Humanities Building, room 1B50, in a conversation with CU-Boulder history and environmental studies Professor Patricia Limerick and law Professor Charles Wilkinson.

Family Weekend, the annual fall event that welcomes families of University of Colorado at Boulder students to campus will take place Oct. 10-11. The event draws about 4,000 parents and family members from across the United States and from several foreign countries to participate in a variety of activities. In order to help the visitors get around town, the city of Boulder is providing free Hop bus passes.