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Jet Propulsion Laboratory Director Charles Elachi and his senior management team will be on the ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ campus May 22 to sign a memorandum of understanding with top university officials to continue and broaden a rich tradition of collaboration on space and Earth-science efforts going back nearly 50 years. Elachi will sign the MOU May 22 with CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. Located in Pasadena, Calif., JPL is a federally funded research and development facility managed by the California Institute of Technology for NASA.

Individuals are more genetically similar to their spouses than they are to randomly selected individuals from the same population, according to a new study from the ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ.

A ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ physiology laboratory conducting research to improve locomotion for lower limb amputees, including military service veterans, is being featured nationally as part of 2014 Veterans Affairs Research Week May 19-23.

During two days of intensive airborne measurements, oil and gas operations in Colorado’s Front Range leaked nearly three times as much methane, a greenhouse gas, as predicted based on inventory estimates, and seven times as much benzene, a regulated air toxic. Emissions of other chemicals that contribute to summertime ozone pollution were about twice as high as estimates, according to the new paper, accepted for publication in the American Geophysical Union ’s Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres .

A ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ professor who developed a clever method to measure snow depth using GPS signals is collaborating with Western Slope officials to make the data freely available to a variety of users on a daily basis.

An antioxidant that targets specific cell structures—mitochondria—may be able to reverse some of the negative effects of aging on arteries, reducing the risk of heart disease, according to a new study by the ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ. When the research team gave old mice—the equivalent of 70- to 80-year-old humans—water containing an antioxidant known as MitoQ for four weeks, their arteries functioned as well as the arteries of mice with an equivalent human age of just 25 to 35 years.

The ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ today launched CU-Boulder Crowdfunding, an online pilot platform to help drive the ideas generated by students, faculty and staff. Crowdfunding is the practice of sourcing small contributions from a large number of people to provide funding for a particular project or campaign, usually via the Internet.

A simple sample of the protective mucus layer that coats a frog’s skin can now be analyzed to determine how susceptible the frog is to disease, thanks to a technique developed by a researcher at the ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ. The same method can be used to determine what kind of probiotic skin wash might be most effective at bolstering the frog’s defenses without actually exposing the frog to disease, according to a journal article published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

If you think Neanderthals were stupid and primitive, it’s time to think again. The widely held notion that Neanderthals were dimwitted and that their inferior intelligence allowed them to be driven to extinction by the much brighter ancestors of modern humans is not supported by scientific evidence, according to a researcher at the ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ.

In 2012, temperatures at the summit of Greenland rose above freezing for the first time since 1889, raising questions about what led to the unusual melt episode. Now, a new analysis led by the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the ¾«Æ·SMÔÚÏßӰƬ shows that some of the same weather and climate factors were at play in both 1889 and 2012: heat waves thousands of miles upwind in North America, higher-than-average ocean surface temperatures south of Greenland and atmospheric rivers of warm, moist air that streamed toward Greenland’s west coast.