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An international research team involving the °µÍø½ûÇø announced this morning it has found the first direct evidence for a new particle that likely is the long sought-after Higgs boson, believed to endow the universe with mass.

Several hundred people are expected to gather on the °µÍø½ûÇø campus July 12-13 to celebrate the 50 th anniversary of JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) known around the world for its discoveries in atomic, molecular and optical physics. In addition, the president-elect of the American Physical Society will be on hand to officially announce JILA’s designation as an historic physics site.

Across our campus - and throughout the university – editors, programmers and project managers have spent untold hours retooling the electronic infrastructure, policies, and editorial strategy to present a new face of electronic communications for the °µÍø½ûÇø. The result is a suite of three new electronic communication systems for telling the stories of our community and promoting the life of the university in engaging ways.

Five °µÍø½ûÇø engineering students recently returned from Haiti where they introduced a green energy vocational training program, paving the way for a new era of distributed power in the poverty-stricken, earthquake-damaged nation.

Colorado business leaders are less optimistic going into the third quarter than last quarter, according to the most recent quarterly Leeds Business Confidence Index, or LBCI, released today by the °µÍø½ûÇø’s Leeds School of Business. The LBCI’s reading slid from 62.2 in the second quarter to 53.6 in the third, but remained higher than the 10-year average for the index and above the critical neutral mark of 50. A reading greater than 50 indicates positive expectations, while one lower than 50 indicates negative expectations.

Wildfire and Drought Experts at CU-Boulder Wildfire John Daily, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Joint Center for Combustion and Environmental Research, can offer insight into wildfire behavior – how fires start and end, how they spread, and the effects of weather and fuel types. He can be reached by cell phone at 303-775-9576 or john.daily@colorado.edu .

City of Boulder news release Boulder city officials today announced that the annual Ralphie’s Independence Day Blast is canceled due to extremely dry conditions in and around Boulder. The fireworks show had been scheduled for Folsom Field on Wednesday, July 4.

When it came to eating, an upright, 2 million-year-old African hominid had a diet unlike virtually all other known human ancestors, says a study led by the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and involving the °µÍø½ûÇø.

The California condor is chronically endangered by lead exposure from ammunition and requires ongoing human intervention for population stability and growth, according to a new study led by the University of California, Santa Cruz, and involving the °µÍø½ûÇø.

Companies paying celebrities big money to endorse their products may not realize that negative perceptions about a celebrity are more likely to transfer to an endorsed brand than are positive ones, according to a new °µÍø½ûÇø study. Celebrity endorsements are widely used to increase brand visibility and connect brands with celebrities’ personality traits, but do not always work in the positive manner marketers envision, according to Margaret C. Campbell of CU-Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, who led the study.