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A sounding rocket launching from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia Aug. 23 will be carrying two University of Colorado Boulder student-built payloads and a pair of other payloads developed by students from Virginia Tech, Baylor University and the University of Puerto Rico.

The University of Colorado Boulder will play a key role in a NASA mission launching this week to study how space weather affects Earth’s two giant radiation belts known to be hazardous to satellites, astronauts and electronics systems on Earth.

An interdisciplinary team of student and faculty engineers from the University of Colorado Boulder has won a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for its proposal to develop a solar-biochar toilet for use in developing countries throughout the world. The grant is part of the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, or RTTC, initiated by the Gates Foundation to address a sanitation challenge affecting nearly 40 percent of the world’s population.

University of Adelaide news release In a major breakthrough, an international team of scientists from the University of Adelaide and University of Colorado Boulder has proven that addiction to morphine and heroin can be blocked, while at the same time increasing pain relief. The team has discovered the key mechanism in the body’s immune system that amplifies addiction to opioid drugs. Laboratory studies involving rats have shown that the drug (+)-naloxone will selectively block the immune-addiction response.

¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ System news release DENVER – Work by University of Colorado faculty garnered $815.3 million in sponsored research funding in fiscal year 2011-12, a rise of nearly $22 million over the previous fiscal year. The preliminary figures indicate one of the highest research totals in ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ history; the only higher total came in fiscal year 2009-10, when one-time federal stimulus dollars contributed to a final tally of $884.1 million. Last year’s total was $793.5 million.

An international research team led by the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Helsinki has discovered a surprising new chemical compound in Earth’s atmosphere that reacts with sulfur dioxide to form sulfuric acid, which is known to have significant impacts on climate and health.

If you’re a planetarium junkie in the Boulder area, your experience is about to get a major upgrade. The astrophysical and planetary sciences department, home to Fiske Planetarium, announced today the launch of a complete upgrade to the projection and other presentation systems that power the planetarium’s big-screen experience. The remodel will turn the dome of the planetarium into an all-encompassing video theater.

A tiny satellite designed, built and tested by University of Colorado Boulder students to study solar flares may launch as early as Aug. 14 from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, Calif.

Despite sharp increases in carbon dioxide emissions by humans in recent decades that are warming the planet, Earth’s vegetation and oceans continue to soak up about half of them, according to a surprising new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The Later Stone Age emerged in South Africa more than 20,000 years earlier than previously believed -- about the same time humans were migrating from Africa to the European continent, says a new international study led by ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ-Boulder researcher Paola Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History .