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Three University of Colorado Boulder undergraduates have been awarded prestigious Goldwater Scholarships for 2014. The scholarships, which are worth up to $7,500 each, are awarded annually to sophomores and juniors across the nation on the basis of high academic merit. The 2014 winners from ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä-Boulder are Jasmine Brewer, a junior in engineering physics, Brennan Coffey, a junior in chemical engineering and applied mathematics, and Ryan Dewey, a junior in astrophysics and physics.

University of Colorado Boulder alumnus and NASA astronaut Steve Swanson will blast off with two Russian crewmates for the International Space Station March 25, his third mission to the orbiting facility.

The Orion Nebula is home to hundreds of young stars and even younger protostars known as proplyds. Many of these nascent systems will go on to develop planets, while others will have their planet-forming dust and gas blasted away by the fierce ultraviolet radiation emitted by massive O-type stars that lurk nearby.

NIST news release JILA physicists used an ultrafast laser and help from German theorists to discover a new semiconductor quasiparticle—a handful of smaller particles that briefly condense into a liquid-like droplet. JILA is a joint institute of ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Heralding a new age of terrific timekeeping, a research group at JILA—a joint institute of the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology—has unveiled an experimental strontium atomic clock that has set new world records for both precision and stability.

Ana Maria Rey, a theoretical physicist at JILA, a joint institute of the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has been honored by the White House with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

A University of Colorado Boulder research center will launch two payloads aboard Orbital Sciences Corp.’s commercial Cygnus spacecraft to the International Space Station on Dec. 18, including a biomedical antibiotic experiment and an educational K-12 experiment involving ant behavior in microgravity.

NIST news release JILA researchers have developed a method of spinning electric and magnetic fields around trapped molecular ions to measure whether the ions’ tiny electrons are truly round—research with major implications for future scientific understanding of the universe.

A $671 million NASA mission to Mars led by the University of Colorado Boulder thundered into the sky today from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 1:28 p.m. EST, the first step on its 10-month journey to Mars. Known as the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission, the MAVEN spacecraft was launched aboard an Atlas V rocket provided by United Launch Alliance of Centennial, Colo. The mission will target the role the loss of atmospheric gases played in changing Mars from a warm, wet and possibly habitable planet for life to the cold dry and inhospitable planet it appears to be today.

A $671 million NASA mission to Mars being led by the University of Colorado Boulder is approaching its official countdown toward a planned Nov. 18 launch after a decade of rigorous work by faculty, professionals, staff and students.