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MEDIA ADVISORY A media tour of the new $31 million ATLAS Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which opened for classes Aug. 28, will feature demonstrations of the building's new broadcast production studio, the black-box performance studio, the video wall and other building features.

Twenty-two percent of the 77 new faculty members hired over the past year at the University of Colorado at Boulder are ethnic minorities, which is expected to raise total numbers of minority faculty on the Boulder campus after faculty numbers are tallied in late October. Tenure-track and instructor-level minority faculty in fall 2005 totaled 194 out of 1,417, or 14 percent. Of the 77 new hires, 60 are tenure-track faculty and of that group, 25 percent are Asian, Hispanic, American Indian, African American or multiracial.

The University of Colorado at Boulder School of Journalism and Mass Communication will host a homecoming celebration and open house on Saturday, Oct. 7, from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Armory building on campus. The public event will include a tour of the student-run Campus Press multimedia newsroom and Mal Deans memorial in addition to a panel discussion titled "New media. New audiences. New journalism?" A light lunch also will be served. The Campus Press is an online daily newspaper.

A surprising new University of Colorado at Boulder study indicates winds circling high above the far Northern Hemisphere have a much greater impact on upper stratospheric ozone levels than scientists had thought. According to Associate Professor Cora Randall of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the winds allowed near-record amounts of ozone-destroying nitrogen oxide gases, collectively known as NOx, to descend some 30 miles to the top of Earth's stratosphere in March 2006.

The University of Colorado at Boulder this week began offering the nation's largest music subscription service, including more than 2.2 million legally downloadable songs, to all residents of its campus residence halls, Family Housing and the Bear Creek Apartments at no charge. Ctrax, used by more than 75 universities nationwide including Yale, Duke and UCLA, features an extensive catalog from all of the major record companies and thousands of independent labels. The collection includes 100,000 artists and 23 different genres.

CU-Boulder's 2006 Homecoming festivities kick off Friday, Oct. 6, with a parade through Boulder's University Hill neighborhood at 4:30 p.m., followed by a pep rally at 5:15 p.m. and a free outdoor concert with The Motet at 7 p.m. The annual event celebrates a return to campus for University of Colorado at Boulder alumni, most of whom will attend CU's gridiron matchup with the Baylor Bears on Oct. 7. Game time is at 1:30 p.m. and tickets are still available.

CU's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research and its founding director, Roger A. Pielke Jr., will be awarded a prestigious Eduard Brückner Prize Oct. 9 at the German Climate Conference in Munich, Germany. Pielke and his colleagues at the policy center -- and at collaborating institutions around the world -- have spent the last five years examining how to move beyond political gridlock, which many scientists say is slowing U.S. action on climate change.

New and returning students at the University of Colorado at Boulder are reminded to take precautions with local wildlife in order to avoid contracting contagious diseases. Wildlife-related diseases reported in Boulder County this summer included cases of animal plague and rabies, according to campus and county health officials. The CU-Boulder campus is home to many animals including squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, prairie dogs and bats.

University of Colorado at Boulder psychology Professor Marie Banich has been awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar grant to collaborate with a group of university researchers in Italy on human brain research. She will travel to the University of Verona during the 2007 spring semester. Banich is the director of CU-Boulder's Institute of Cognitive Science and studies the neural architecture of the human brain, focusing on how different regions in the brain work together allowing us to focus our attention.

The Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado at Boulder has issued letters to a number of students whose names and other information were stored on two computers that were found to be missing during the school's move to temporary quarters last May.