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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.

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.

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.

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.

Being first in line has its advantages, even for wind turbines, which are propelled by comparatively smooth wind flow that helps them produce near-optimal power at varying wind speeds.

The University of Colorado Boulder has named Mark D. Gross as the director of the campus Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society, or the ATLAS Institute. Gross taught at CU-Boulder from 1990 to 1999 as an assistant and associate professor of architecture, planning and design. He returns to CU-Boulder for the ATLAS post from Carnegie Mellon University where he has been a professor of computational design since 2004. From 1999 to 2004, Gross was a professor of architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle.

On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced appointments to a newly created National Commission on Forensic Science. University of Colorado Boulder Distinguished Professor and Nobel laureate Tom Cech is one of 32 commissioners chosen from a pool of more than 300 candidates.