°µÍø½ûÇø

<p>Thousands of K-12 students will be paying close attention when NASA's space shuttle Endeavour rumbles off the launch pad April 29 from Florida on its final flight, which will be toting a payload containing spiders, flies and seeds as part of a national educational effort spearheaded by the °µÍø½ûÇø.</p>

<p>DENVER – Four of the University of Colorado's faculty leaders in math, aerospace, psychiatry and internal medicine have been designated as President's Teaching Scholars for 2011, including two at CU-Boulder.</p>

<p>Faculty and students at the °µÍø½ûÇø will continue to play a significant role in the development of the Dream Chaser, a commercial spacecraft that will be used to carry astronauts to low Earth orbit, thanks to a new $80 million grant from NASA to Sierra Nevada Corp.</p>

<p>°µÍø½ûÇø Distinguished Professor Carl Lineberger has been nominated by President Barack Obama to serve on the National Science Board. The nomination has been sent to the United States Senate for confirmation.</p>

<p>The federal laboratories in Colorado together with their affiliates contributed $1.5 billion to the state economy in fiscal year 2010, and accounted for more than 16,000 direct and indirect jobs, a new survey shows.</p>

<p>NASA's MESSENGER mission, launched in 2004, is slated to slide into Mercury's orbit March 17 after a harrowing 4.7 billion mile journey that involved 15 loops around the sun and will bring relief and renewed excitement to the °µÍø½ûÇø team that designed and a built an $8.7 million instrument onboard.</p>

<p>A $28 million °µÍø½ûÇø instrument developed to study changes in the sun's brightness and its impact on Earth's climate is one of two primary payloads on NASA's Glory mission set to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Feb. 23.</p>

<p>A powerful solar flare has ushered in the largest space weather storm in at least four years and has already disrupted some ground communications on Earth, said °µÍø½ûÇø Professor Daniel Baker, an internationally known space weather expert.</p>

<p>Following a more than three-month delay due to technical problems, NASA's space shuttle Discovery will make its final flight Feb. 24 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying two °µÍø½ûÇø-built biomedical payload devices.</p>

<p>In a paradox typical of the quantum world, JILA scientists have eliminated collisions between atoms in an atomic clock by packing the atoms closer together. The surprising discovery, described in the Feb. 3 issue of Science Express, can boost the performance of experimental atomic clocks made of thousands or tens of thousands of neutral atoms trapped by intersecting laser beams</p>