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<p>For some comets, breaking up is not that hard to do. A new study led by Purdue �Թ��� 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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

Social scientists and health researchers from across Colorado and neighboring states will soon have abundant U.S. Census and other federal statistical data available to them in a secure setting at the �Թ��� of Colorado Boulder. The National Science Foundation this month awarded $300,000 over three years to CU-Boulder to create the Rocky Mountain Research Data Center (RMRDC), which will be housed in the Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS).

Humans use fire for heating, cooking, managing lands and, more recently, fueling industrial processes.  Now, research from the �Թ��� of Colorado has found that these various means of using fire are inversely related to one another, providing new insight into how people are changing the face of fire.

Injections of the soil bacterium "Mycobacterium vaccae" ("M. vaccae" NCTC 11659) promote stress resilience and improve coping behaviors in mice, according to a new study led by the �Թ��� of Colorado Boulder.

The bread loaf-sized Miniature X-Ray Solar Spectrometer, or MinXSS, CubeSat will be deployed from an airlock on the International Space Station (ISS) at 4 a.m. MDT on Monday, May 16, beginning its journey into space where it will study emissions from the sun that can affect ground-based communications systems.

An octopus tentacle can perform tasks as complex as opening a jar and can continue to function after being severed from its body, thanks to a concentration of neurons in the tentacle itself. Researchers in the <a href="http://correll.cs.colorado.edu/">Correll Lab</a> at CU-Boulder created a robotic hand nearly as dexterous and self-contained, winning the RoboSoft Grand Challenge manipulation competition in Livorno, Italy, April 29-30.

A 3-D animation created by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio using data from the MAVEN mission to Mars is the corporate winner of the inaugural Data Stories video contest sponsored by Science magazine for videos that tell stories about data. The video explains how the solar wind is driving particles from the upper atmosphere of Mars into space, which may have caused the planet to dry out and cool over the eons. 

Honeybees use their wings to cool down their hives when temperatures rise, but new �Թ��� of Colorado Boulder research shows that this intriguing behavior may be linked to both the rate of heating and the size of a honeybee group.

Six grants totaling $250,000 have been awarded to projects supporting CU-Boulder’s Grand Challenge "Our Space. Our Future." which features two major initiatives – Earth Lab and Integrated Remote and In Situ Sensing Initiative (IRISS) – plus more than a dozen related projects.