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Tom Cech, Nobel laureate and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at CU-Boulder, will present the next installment of the CU Wizards Series on campus on Saturday, April 24, at 9:30 a.m. in the Chemistry building, room 140. The free presentation, titled "Chemical Reactions, Forward and Backward," is recommended for children in grades five through nine. Reservations are not required.

The department of East Asian languages and literatures has changed its name to the department of East Asian languages and civilizations, according to Laurel Rasplica Rodd, department chair. The department's mission is the teaching of language and culture, as well as a scholarly focus on texts, broadly defined. "While the designation of 'literature' was accurate, if listeners understood literature to mean texts of any sort, it was very easy to misinterpret it and believe that the department only treated "belles lettres" (such as poetry and fiction)," Rasplica Rodd said.

The East Asian Graduate Association will host the second annual EAGA conference on April 15 and 16 at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The title of the conference is "On the Edge: Subversion and Reaction." "The purpose of the conference is to provide a formal, public forum for young researchers nationwide to freely present their research on China or Japan and be reviewed by professional scholars and their peers," said Benjamin Tompkins, a conference coordinator.

Steve Lee, planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), will give a lecture on Friday, April 23, at 7:30 p.m. at the CU Cortez Center. Lee's talk, titled "New Views of Mars," is the third in a series that CU-Boulder is offering this spring in Cortez. His presentation will give an overview of how earlier telescopic and spacecraft observations have been used to explore Mars.

An all-day "Community Forum on Affirmative Action" will be held at the University of Colorado at Boulder on Friday, April 23, in the University Memorial Center. The conference will feature panel discussions by CU-Boulder students, faculty and staff on topics including affirmative action research, policy formation, law and morality and the impact of affirmative action on CU-Boulder. All events will be held in the UMC from 8:45 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and are free and open to the public. The conference is organized by the diversity council of the CU-Boulder sociology department.

Now that CU-Boulder students have discovered the Hard Drive Cafe in the Kittredge Commons complex for weeknight study breaks, Web surfing, socializing and espresso, its staff is trying to draw bigger crowds on the weekend. The six-month-old coffee and computer hangout has received high marks since it opened on Halloween last year. Students are taking advantage of the cafe's pool table, 19 televisions, a wide assortment of coffees, juices, pastries and appetizers, and eight Imac computers for surfing the World Wide Web.

Cable television pioneer Bill Daniels is donating $500,000 to the University of Colorado at Boulder School of Law to establish a scholarship endowment fund. Income from the fund will be used to assist law students who demonstrate a financial need and who have a "commitment to public service." Daniels made the gift in the name of Gene Nichol, CU law professor and former dean of the law school, whom Daniels has long admired.

Keith Basso, professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico, will give a lecture titled "Apache Landscapes and the Oldest Man in Show Low," on Monday, April 26th. The talk will be at 5 p.m. in Old Main Chapel on the University of Colorado at Boulder campus. Basso plans to address how and why people form attachments to places. He also will compare the sense of place of American Indians with those of other residents of a nearby community in central Arizona. The talk is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Center of the American West.

More than 2,000 American Indians and First Nation Peoples from tribes in the United States and Canada will rendezvous at the University of Colorado at Boulder on April 17 and 18 for the third annual "Red Nations Cultural Unity Celebration Contest Pow-Wow." Pow-wow events will be held in the Coors/Events Conference Center.

In the basement of CU-BoulderÂ’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, a monstrous centrifuge sporting an 80,000-pound swinging arm and a box to tote hefty payloads whirls a miniature earthen dam at 200 miles per hour.