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The rate of groundwater contamination due to natural gas leakage from oil and gas wells has remained largely unchanged in northeastern Colorado’s Denver-Julesburg Basin since 2001, according to a new ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Boulder study based on public records and historical data.

When it comes to mitochondrial inheritance, maternal genes rule the day at the expense of paternal ones. But why? A new study, published today in the journal Science and led by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Boulder researchers, sheds new light on a longstanding biological mystery.

A group of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Boulder faculty and students are anxiously awaiting the arrival of NASA’s Juno spacecraft at Jupiter July 4, a mission expected to reveal the hidden interior of the gas giant as well as keys to how our solar system formed.

Seeing the severe damage and massive loss of life from earthquakes led Jenny Ramírez into the field of geotechnical earthquake engineering. Ramirez, who was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, is a doctoral student in civil engineering at CU-Boulder. She now is doing numerical simulations of soil deposits subjected to earthquakes.

A group of Denver high school students who recently descended on the CU-Boulder campus rolled up their sleeves for a week of real-world engineering experience and the opportunity to earn $2,500 scholarships.

Some of the beasts living in Patagonia 13,000 years ago were an intimidating bunch: Fierce saber-toothed cats, elephant-sized sloths, ancient jaguars as big as today’s tigers and short-faced bears that stood 12 feet tall and weighed nearly a ton. But by 12,000 years ago, they had disappeared. What happened?

Global emissions of ethane, an air pollutant and greenhouse gas, are on the uptick again. A team led by CU-Boulder found that a steady decline of global ethane emissions following a peak in about 1970 ended between 2005 and 2010 in most of the Northern Hemisphere and has since reversed. Between 2009 and 2014, ethane emissions in the Northern Hemisphere increased by about 400,000 tons annually, the bulk of it from North American oil and gas activity.

The Milky Way, the brilliant river of stars that has dominated the night sky and human imaginations since time immemorial, is but a faded memory to one third of humanity and 80 percent of Americans, according to a new global atlas of light pollution produced by Italian and American scientists.

For some comets, breaking up is not that hard to do. A new study led by Purdue University and CU-Boulder indicates the bodies of some periodic comets – objects that orbit the sun in less than 200 years – may regularly split in two, then reunite down the road.

A CU-Boulder research team thinks the same type of liquid crystals you see in the display panel of your smart phone may be the key component in a new window coating that could lower energy costs in buildings across the nation.