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When climate change threatens sacred sites

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:05:02 +0000

When climate change threatens sacred sites Rachel Sauer Mon, 05/11/2026 - 16:05

Tiffany Plate

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder PhD candidate Chilton Tippin assesses how a warming climate is affecting not just humans, but also our archaeological record

In southwestern Colorado, just north of Mesa Verde National Park, sits the scenic—and historic—Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, or CANM. The sprawling monument spans more than 175,000 acres of pinyon-juniper woodlands, salt-desert scrub, big sagebrush plantations and riparian zones.

CANM also happens to be home to critical pieces of Southwest history, including an estimated 30,000 habitation sites, field houses, kivas, shrines, artifact scatters, sacred springs and masonry towers that date as far back as the Paleo-Indian period (10,000–14,500 years ago).

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder PhD candidate Chilton Tippin (left) spent months with farmers whose livelihoods depend on the Rio Conchos, a tributary of the Rio Grande in Chihuahua, Mexico. (Photo: Eduardo "Lalo" Talamantes)

But the monument’s location in the high desert makes the landscape, and these historical sites, especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. In the summer of 2025, Chilton Tippin, a �鶹��Ѱ�� anthropology PhD candidate, helped map out exactly how warmer weather and heavy rainstorms could impact these culturally significant structures.

The resulting Climate Change Impact Assessment, which was done with Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) colleagues Kira Clark-Wolf and Christy Miller Hesed, was published in January 2026. The project was funded through the Rapid Climate Assessment Program from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center.

The assessment laid out projections for CANM’s climate future—including many more days with temperatures above 90°F, more days of drought that could lead to increased wildfire risk and more intense and frequent extreme-rainfall events that can cause flooding and erosion.

“This is kind of the initial stepping stone that will hopefully catalyze discussions between the Bureau of Land Management and tribal partners to begin the long planning process for how they're going to adapt the landscape to absorb shocks from climate change,” says Tippin.

Projections and partnerships

To create the projections in the report, Tippin worked from information provided by archaeologists at CANM that pinpointed the exact location of known historical sites. He then used Climate Toolbox to produce climate projections from 20 different models. He compared those projections to literature covering similar projections to come up with general metrics such as how much daily temperatures might increase and how many days the area might go without rain (thus increasing wildfire potential).

At CANM, climate projections show that heat indices will register above 90°F an average of 35 days per year in the 2050s (up from 6 days in the 1990s). (Graphic: climatetoolbox.org)

“We found that most of the stone towers are embedded in pinyon-juniper habitats,” says Tippin. If the climate models and the literature are all saying that the pinyon-juniper forests will be more vulnerable to fire, he says, then they have a better idea of the threats those towers are likely to be facing over the next 50 to 100 years.

“Then CANM can make climate adaptation and forest management decisions so that they can fulfill their mission of protecting not just stone towers, but the kivas, and wiki-ups, and room blocks, too.”

Those decisions would not be made, however, without meaningful input from CANM’s 26 tribal partners whose ancestral presence is reflected in thousands of habitation sites across the landscape.

In cases like these, that knowledge is imperative to take into account. “These are places where their ancestors dwell,” says Tippin. “These heritage sites are part of this living cultural landscape.”

In fact, in the Pueblo worldview, these structures are also deeply spiritual places. “For many Pueblo people, the towers themselves, as well as the materials and rocks within them, are imbued with sentience,” says Tippin. “They're alive, and they themselves have spirit. And the natural course of things is for them to go through processes of decay and reintegration into the ecology.” As a result, a Pueblo person whom Tippin consulted suggested that adapting the habitats in which structures are embedded would be a more culturally appropriate approach than directly shoring up the structures themselves.

Exploring climate-caused conflict

Tippin was tapped to lead the CANM assessment not just for his social science research skills but also for his previous work with indigenous people in the Southwest—much of which he did for his dissertation (completed Spring 2026).

While Tippin’s PhD research is not directly focused on the climate change impacts of historical sites, it still very much explores its impacts on humans, especially in relation to water insecurity. His interest in water interactions stemmed from his childhood in El Paso, Texas, where he spent a lot of time playing in the Rio Grande. Tippin’s experiences with the river and other natural landscapes inspired a lifelong desire to examine, and tell stories, about human interactions with nature.

Chilton Tippin spent several days touring Canyons of the Ancients National Monument’s significant historical sites, including Moose Tower, which was built by Ancestral Puebloans in the late 1200s. In 2020, an extreme rainfall event caused the tower’s west wall (not pictured) to collapse. The storm’s timing and intensity are characteristic of convective rainfall, a type of extreme weather event increasingly linked to climate change in the Southwest. (Photo: Chilton Tippin)

Tippin spent his first few post-college years doing just that, working as a reporter in Wyoming after earning his undergraduate degree in journalism. “For the longest time, I've wanted to tell stories about people and how they interact with the environment, with a specific lens on environmental disputes and conflict,” he says.

So, for his doctoral research, Tippin returned to the Rio Grande and its watershed. The river now sees markedly less flow—thanks in part to a warming climate and diminishing snowpack in the Rocky Mountains—and he wanted to explore the ways those low flows are affecting people who rely on it in one way or another.

To do so Tippin spent a year at three field sites that are all hydrologically connected to the Rio Grande. He first spent several months in Taos, NM, where he teamed up with Puebloans working to protect their traditional uses of water.

Next was El Paso and Juárez, Mexico, where the Rio Grande has become completely militarized. He spent time with the people of the Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo who have a ceremonial relationship with the river, as well as first responders helping deliver water to migrants. “That piece of the dissertation looked at the juxtaposition of this river, which is the bringer of hope and life to the desert and a ceremonial site for the Tigua people,” Tippin says. “How is this same river also the site of widespread, racialized migrant death and violence?”

The final months he spent with farmers along the Rio Conchos in Chihuahua, Mexico, where the river sustains farmers’ agricultural output. In this final site, specifically, Tippin saw how drought and climate change are already causing civil unrest.

In 2020 a rebellion arose among farmers there who were protesting a 1944 treaty that requires Mexico to deliver a certain amount of water from the Rio Conchos to Texas.

“I was in Chihuahua amid that backdrop and came to understand how this megadrought is insinuating itself into people's day-to-day lives,” he says. It was amazing to see how these farmers could mobilize themselves to protect their agricultural water, he says.

Continuing the work

Tippin’s next steps will be to pursue his interest in the human dimensions of climate change through a postdoctoral appointment with the U.S. Geological Survey. He’ll work closely again with the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center on applied climate-adaptation social science projects.

Part of this postdoctoral work will be to assess how past research projects have been executed in the field; another part is to help ensure agencies like the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Department of Fish and Wildlife have access to the latest climate science when they’re making decisions about land and water management.

In the meantime, he hopes that the climate assessment he performed at CANM can be used to help evaluate similar natural and historic sites.

“It's a niche area within the world of climate change adaptation research,” he says. “But it's just another indication of how climate change is this all-encompassing threat multiplier that affects a lot of things that people find to be valuable.”  

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder PhD candidate Chilton Tippin assesses how a warming climate is affecting not just humans, but also our archaeological record.

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Top image: Bureau of Land Management

Come for the beer, stay for the science

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 08 May 2026 00:07:52 +0000

Come for the beer, stay for the science Rachel Sauer Thu, 05/07/2026 - 18:07

Rachel Sauer

The May 11 Earth on Tap event at Rayback Collective in Boulder, open to all, invites scientists and non-scientists to gather for discussions of climate research

It started, as good things often do, with CAKE. In this case, that’s the Climate Action Knowledge Exchange, a group formed by �鶹��Ѱ�� atmospheric and oceanic sciences (ATOC) graduate students Max Elling, Dora Shlosberg and Josh Gooch. They noticed, the further they progressed in their studies, that there are “a lot of different people working in climate, but not necessarily working together,” explains Shlosberg, a PhD student.

If you go

What: Earth on Tap

When: 5:45-7:30 p.m. Monday, May 11

Where: Rayback Collective, 2775 Valmont Road in Boulder

Who: All are invited

Learn more

So, they formed an interdisciplinary outreach group, CAKE, to break down silos and build partnerships between scholars, industry professionals and community members. From there, CAKE began collaborating with ATOC’s existing Outreach Committee, a group dedicated to educating the public on Earth science through engaging and interactive learning. Outreach teaches children through their SEEDS program, bringing live demonstrations on Earth-system science to local elementary schools.

Then, last semester, they began discussing what more they could be doing to involve adults in science, particularly those who aren’t professional scientists but are science curious.

Earth on Tap organizers express that there has been a lot of misinformation spread about science, and there is sometimes an element of mystery among the public as to what it is local scientists do. Earth on Tap aims to break down these barriers and connect people of all backgrounds to the science being done in their own backyard.

The key is to make it fun, says ATOC PhD student Maggie Scholer. But how?

The answer: Beer.

Not to make the science go down easier, but as a tool to bring science out of the lab and field research sites and into spaces where all are welcome, where community grows, where learning can happen with a chocolate stout and a shared plate of sliders. So, that’s how Earth on Tap came to be.

An event at which all ages are welcome—though you’ll have to show ID if you want that beer—Earth on Tap features climate scientists discussing their research with a focus on how it applies to and affects the broader community.

The second Earth on Tap will be from 5:45-7:30 p.m. Monday, May 11, at the Rayback Collective in Boulder. Kyle Manley, an interdisciplinary climate scientist, and Molly Wieringa, a postdoctoral fellow with the National Center for Atmospheric research, will discuss fires and public land recreation as well as sea ice and polar climate engineering.

Telling science stories

Monday’s Earth on Tap topic is especially timely, Josh Gooch says, because he and his ATOC colleagues frequently discuss how “to communicate how abnormal this winter has been and contextualize it to the future. Each week we have a weather discussion that one of our professors leads, and we get these branching discussions of, ‘If we make up the precipitation deficit in the future, what does that mean in terms of more fuel for wildfires?’ So, one of our goals (with Earth on Tap) is to set the context of what current weather events that are occurring on the Front Range may lead to in future seasons. That’s a concern that a lot of people share.”

Max Elling, an ATOC PhD student and researcher in the Oceans and Climate Lab, notes that the Boulder area is interesting because of its large population of scientists as well as its population of non-scientists, who are nevertheless involved in Earth science, yet there still can be a disconnect between the research that’s happening in this area and what community members know about it.

“With Earth on Tap, we’re learning more about what people are curious about,” Elling says, adding that he and his colleagues are learning to better understand their audiences and tailor their outreach style accordingly.

“We have an inherent language that we use as scientists, certain acronyms, and we’re taught to present at conferences where everyone is aware of this language,” Gooch says. “We need to be more aware of situations where an audience member might not be as familiar because they don’t interface with these things every day.”

Jonah Shaw, a post-doctoral associate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) who spoke at the inaugural Earth on Tap in January, adds that all of his communication training in graduate school was in a conference environment, which doesn’t necessarily translate to climate discussions over beers at the Rayback.

“Something that I think is really important when you’re communicating within a scientific field is a story, but it becomes even more important when you’re communicating with the general public,” Shaw says. “It’s meeting people where they are, so for me, instead of talking about what I do on a day-to-day basis, I talked about a satellite mission I worked on, the story of that mission. I was talking about the narrative aspects and connecting with people’s experiences, and I was incredibly excited to see how well attended it was by non-scientists. Everyone is in their own realm and able to connect (with the science) in their own way.”

Scholer says that Earth on Tap organizers learn from event to event how to better involve audience members in the presentation, including trivia questions with prizes and QR codes that people can scan to submit questions if they’re not inclined to raise their hand. Ideally, she adds, people will come to Earth on Tap and have a great time and be more inclined to take climate action when opportunities arise.

“I think, especially in atmospheric science, ideally the outcome of what we do in the field is actionable for policy makers,” says ATOC PhD student Lucas Howard. “I think having the public more informed about not just the science in terms of outcomes, in terms of uncertainty, but the process of what goes into generating the science, can only have good downstream effects.”

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The May 11 Earth on Tap event at Rayback Collective in Boulder, open to all, invites scientists and non-scientists to gather for discussions of climate research.

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Winning films commemorate �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder at 150

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:05:12 +0000

Winning films commemorate �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder at 150 Rachel Sauer Thu, 05/07/2026 - 17:05

Student filmmakers participating in the 150 Years of �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder film competition had five minutes or fewer to tell a story from the university's expansive history

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the �鶹��Ѱ��--a milestone that is inspiring both reflections on those first 150 years and visions of what the next 150 might bring.

To commemorate and celebrate �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder's first 150 years, the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts issued a challenge to students: Create a film that's three to five minutes long, incorporates archival material from University Colorado Publicity Collections and/or photographs from the �鶹��Ѱ��Campus Building Collections and tells a story from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder's first 150 years.

The winning films by Doug Conway and Benjamin Albuisson incorporate both historical photos and videos, telling stories of a spot in Boulder, Colorado, where communities grew, where ideas flourished and where innovation with potential to change the world happened.

Winning film by Doug Conway

Winning film by Benjamin Albuisson

Honorable mention film

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Student filmmakers participating in the 150 Years of �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder film competition had five minutes or fewer to tell a story from the university's expansive history.

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Hot ponds can help amphibians fight infection—or make things worse

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 07 May 2026 16:35:45 +0000

Hot ponds can help amphibians fight infection—or make things worse Rachel Sauer Thu, 05/07/2026 - 10:35

Blake Puscher

New research from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder finds that temperature differences between ponds can influence the severity of chytridiomycosis, a deadly fungal disease linked to global amphibian declines

Amphibian populations, including frogs, toads, salamanders and newts, have been declining globally since the 1980s. Many species have even gone extinct.

There are several potential causes for this decline, but one contributor is disease. For example, infection by parasitic flatworms can cause frogs to grow extra limbs, making it harder for them to evade predators. Another prominent amphibian disease called chytridiomycosis has been specifically linked to amphibian declines. It is caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd.

In a study comparing the temperatures of ponds to their level of infection over time, researchers Brendan Hobart and Valerie McKenzie, a �鶹��Ѱ�� professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, discovered that Bd thrives on hosts within a specific range of temperatures and level of temperature variability, above or below which infections are not as severe. This relationship was found to be driven primarily by differences between ponds rather than seasonal differences.

Valerie McKenzie, a �鶹��Ѱ�� professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, worked with PhD graduate Brendan Hobart and other research colleagues to study how temperature affects amphibians' susceptibility to fungal infections.

Hobart worked on the study as a PhD student at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and has since completed his PhD and moved on to a research scientist position at the University of Wisconsin. Another �鶹��Ѱ��PhD student, Timothy Korpita, was also involved, along with several people from the National Wildlife Health Center. McKenzie is the principal investigator of the McKenzie Lab.

What makes Bd unique?

Fungi grow on substrates, which are surfaces that provide them with the nutrients they need to develop their reproductive structures and release spores. Some of these spores will end up in new substrates, beginning the next generation. Instead of growing on decaying biological material or living plants like many other species of fungi, Bd’s substrate is the skin of a living animal, specifically an amphibian. Additionally, rather than releasing spores that float through the air, Bd propagates using zoospores, which can swim short distances through the water using their whip-like tails.

“They are microscopic,” McKenzie says, “and they will attach themselves to a skin cell, then penetrate and go inside. They use amphibian skin cells as a place to replicate themselves, rupture that skin cell and let out more zoospores that can go on to infect nearby skin cells or go in the water and infect other individuals.”

Bd’s ability to spread from one pond to another is still something of a mystery, however.

“We still do not understand all the mechanisms by which it is getting spread,” McKenzie says. “People have made guesses that it could be birds that land in the pond water picking up some of these zoospores in their feathers and then fly off and land in another pond.” Even their ability to infect different hosts is surprising, considering that the zoospores can swim only one or two centimeters, but they are able to chemically target molecules found on amphibian skin to make the most of this short range.

Regardless of how the fungus gets around, its strategy is clearly effective, as it has infected a large number of diverse amphibians. According to McKenzie, there are something like 8,000 species of amphibians, which is only slightly fewer than the number of mammalian species.

“This one fungal pathogen is causing declines, or is predicted to cause declines, in maybe a third of amphibians. Imagine if COVID, for example, was causing massive die-offs of not only humans, but all kinds of mammals, like squirrels, whales, wolves, cats, dogs. That is sort of what is happening to amphibians with this fungus. It is unprecedented for what one pathogen can do.”

Bd is dangerous for amphibians because it targets their skin, which they rely on for many purposes, like balancing hydration. According to McKenzie, disruption to the skin can result in secondary organ failure. The disease can be more or less severe for different species, but there are many species that have been seriously affected worldwide. Bd is currently most prominent in the Americas—particularly the Central and South American tropics—eastern Australia and east Africa, but may spread to other parts of the world over time.

How temperature influences infections

Previous research into Bd has singled out thermal conditions, meaning the temperature of the habitats that hosts live in, as key drivers of host outcomes. Particularly, the variability of temperatures and the mean (average) temperature are important variables. “Temperature is the ultimate determinant of most or all biological processes,” Hobart says.

“It is especially relevant to ectotherms”—cold-blooded animals do not produce their own heat—"and their pathogens because their body temperature largely fluctuates with the environment,” Hobart says.

Salamander populations, along with other amphibian populations, have been in decline since the 1980s. Among the causes for these declines is the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd. (Photo: Iuliu Illes/Unsplash)

This study is directed toward exploring the relationship between temperature and infections further, particularly by separating changes in temperature into seasonal and among-site components. To do this, the researchers measured temperatures and Bd infections of eastern newt populations across 20 ponds in Wisconsin over the course of two years.

“All of these ponds were within a few miles,” Hobart says. “From a broad scale perspective, they all have the same climate. If you were to look up a weather forecast on an app, it would be the same for all the ponds, but the actual conditions are very different depending on things like how much tree cover there is over the pond, how clear the water is, how much stuff is floating on the surface, all these different biotic and abiotic factors.”

These differences lead to significant variation in pond-to-pond water temperature, and they are what the study covered rather than gradients in temperature within a given pond.

When the researchers looked at the temperature variability and average temperature, they found that both changed at the same time, or in other words, covaried. According to Hobart, this is because the ponds with the most variable temperature also tended to be the warmest. For this reason, the two variables were combined into a thermal mean and variability index (MVI), which ranged from cool and stable to hot and variable temperatures. When combined with infection data obtained by capturing, swabbing and releasing newts, this index was shown to have a non-linear relationship with infection load (meaning not only whether the fungal disease was present but also how much was on the animals’ skin).

Considering thermal variation both over time and between ponds, infection load was highest at middling MVI values, declining similarly when the index either increased or decreased from there.

“It is this primary hump-shaped relationship,” Hobart says. When the variations over time and space were separated out, the spatial variation resembled the overall relationship very closely, while the temporal variation looked different. “That is what produced this finding that variation from site to site was driving the overall pattern.”

“This one fungal pathogen is causing declines, or is predicted to cause declines, in maybe a third of amphibians ... It is unprecedented for what one pathogen can do.”

Implications for conservation

Considering how severe the effect of Bd has been on amphibian populations, anything people can do to reduce infections is of interest. The results from this study suggest that changing the temperature of a pond could be an effective way of doing this, but it is not as simple as it sounds.

Like many fungi, Bd does best within a limited range of temperatures, which is about 23–28 degrees Celsius or 73–82 Fahrenheit, according to the researchers. At middling MVI values, the temperature is right for Bd, and there is even some evidence that Bd handles temperature variability better than its hosts, giving it an additional advantage.

However, once the temperature increases out of Bd’s ideal range, the benefits of variability cannot counteract the unfavorable heat, especially because amphibian immune responses often increase in strength at these temperatures. On the other hand, when the temperature is low, Bd does not get any advantage from variability and is also outside of its ideal temperature range.

This means that, depending on the starting conditions, the severity of Bd infections in a pond might be diminished by either increasing or decreasing the temperature, but in some cases, changing the temperature would only make things worse.

“It has been suggested,” Hobart says, “that one could cut down trees around a pond to let more light in and make that pond hot. In principle, that seems like a fine idea.” However, “if you did not know where you were on that index, and you cut down a bunch of trees, you could inadvertently increase infection.”

In other words, if a pond’s temperature is middling, increasing it could help with infections, but if the pond is cooler to begin with, it could bring the thermal MVI into the range where Bd thrives.

“There have been a lot of studies looking at the relationship between temperature and this amphibian pathogen,” McKenzie says. For example, there was recently a study that involved building masonry brick “saunas” that frogs can crawl into to heat up and kill off the Bd. “I think what this study shows is that what works for one site may not be applicable for another site, even if that site is relatively close and similar.”

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Politicians talk climate change on X

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:54:02 +0000

Politicians talk climate change on X Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/05/2026 - 10:54

Bradley Worrell

Study by �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Meaghan Daly looks at how members of Congress framed their arguments for or against taking action on climate change on the popular social media site

For members of Congress, the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has become one of the most direct ways to communicate with constituents about their thoughts on climate change, allowing them to choose how to address the issue in an unfiltered way.

“X allows politicians to communicate directly and informally with the public, and posts occur much more frequently than polished press releases, so it provides a unique window into how politicians frame climate change in direct engagement with constituents in real time,” explains Meaghan Daly, a climate communications scholar in the �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of Environmental Studies whose research focus includes climate communication and media studies.

In a new study, Daly and her co-authors analyze posts on X by members of Congress, finding that while few U.S. lawmakers now reject the science of climate change outright, conservative members tend to frame the issue in ways that discourage or delay meaningful action. Rather than denying the problem, their messages emphasize economic costs, question the feasibility or redirect responsibilities to other countries, Daly says.

Meaghan Daly is a climate communications scholar in the �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of Environmental Studies whose research focus includes climate communication and media studies.

Drawing from more than 13,000 climate-related messages in 2021 from members of Congress on X, the study co-authors found a spectrum of political climate communication that ranges from active obstruction to concrete advocacy, with a large “murky middle.”

“This research challenges the idea that climate communication is just pro-climate or anti-climate,” Daly says. “It’s more complex than that, and those nuances matter when we’re trying to understand why action does or doesn’t happen.”

In a recent interview with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, Daly talks about why X offers a uniquely powerful lens for studying political climate communication and how these messaging strategies differ by party. Her remarks have been lightly edited for style and grammar and condensed for space.

Question:How did this paper come together?

Daly: I’m a member of the Media and Climate Change Observatory, headed by Max Boykoff in the Department of Environmental Studies. We’ve been doing global monitoring of media coverage of climate change for about 15 years now across newsprint, radio and television.

One of my co-authors, Lucy McAllister (assistant professor at Denison University and a research associate with the Department of Environmental Studies at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder), is also part of that group. We’ve worked on several projects over the years, including media coverage in legacy news outlets across five countries over time. Our other co-author, Siddharth Vedula (associate professor at Miami University), has also been a long-time collaborator. All three of us received our doctorates from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, and the team brought together a strong mix of qualitative and quantitative research backgrounds.

For this paper, we noted in our 2021 study on newspaper coverage that, while climate denial used to be common, more recently fewer people deny climate change outright. Instead, there’s been a shift toward questioning the feasibility of taking action.

About six years ago, a group of scholars published a paper about what they called ‘discourses of delay.’ That paper was preliminary, and in our 2021 study we noted the need to follow up and examine these discourses in greater detail—particularly how they interface with the public in the political sphere. There hadn’t been a comprehensive study of how U.S. politicians communicate about climate change on social media, so we wanted to see how these discourses of delay manifest in political communication.

But we then expanded that framework because we didn't want to just look at how is climate action being delayed, but also how is climate action being advanced, by U.S. politicians. We wanted to have this entire spectrum, looking from delay to action and everything in between, and how politicians are approaching this issue and communicating with the public about it.

Question:Why did you choose to focus on the January to December 2021 timeframe for members of Congress posting on X about climate change?

Daly: We chose 2021 because a lot was happening. The Biden Administration had recently rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement, and multiple major pieces of legislation—what became the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as Build Back Better—were being actively discussed. That gave us a rich dataset and a good microcosm for understanding how climate conversations were being framed and the range of communication strategies being used.

Question:You collected more than 13,000 posts from politicians on X that were related to climate change but then focused on a much smaller subset. How confident are you that the smaller sample represents the broader dataset?

Daly: We started with about 600,000 posts and used an initial screening with established search terms from prior research to ensure they were actually about climate change, which produced a sample of about 13,000 posts. From there, we applied a randomized sampling method stratified by month, since discussion topics ebb and flow over time.

We also conducted six rounds of pilot testing to refine the codebook. Throughout, we ran randomized spot checks and maintained over 80% inter-coder agreement. The final randomized sample had 1,075 posts. Across the pilot and final analysis, we coded a total of 2,844 posts, or 21% of the total sample, which for a qualitative study is quite comprehensive and gives a detailed understanding of communication strategies.

Question:It sounds like the discussion about climate change has moved beyond whether the science is accurate to whether it is feasible to take action to address the issue?

Daly: Yes, absolutely. We saw very few posts questioning the existence of climate change or the science itself. Instead, many posts emphasized downsides—potential economic damage, harm to the fossil fuel industry or job losses. Others redirected responsibility, asking why the U.S. should act if other countries aren’t doing so. Why should we have to be the ones who are taking the lead or paying to implement some of these policies when the rest of the world isn't doing the same?

We also saw a lot of posts pushing non-transformative solutions—unproven technologies, ‘clean coal’ or these fossil fuel–based approaches that are ostensibly less polluting but, in practice, typically aren’t.

Also, we saw postings that we should only rely on things like incentives rather than government regulation or policy mandates that we act on climate change. Basically, arguing we should only have voluntary approaches to addressing climate change, rather than requiring action. So, solutions that aren’t at the scale needed to address climate change.

Question: If a conservative politician talks about job losses or other potential downsides of addressing climate change on X, how do you differentiate between them raising valid questions versus engaging in what could be considered delaying tactics?

Daly: We do know that there are always trade-offs in climate policy. We’re not trying to say that we don’t need to acknowledge those trade-offs.

For example, in making the argument that, as we shift away from fossil fuels and toward more renewable energy technologies, we need to make sure that those people who were working in those industries and relied on it for their livelihoods are not left behind. That’s something that I think is very important to acknowledge and that can get lost in this conversation.

We need to make sure that this is a fair transition, and that those people are connected with jobs and new opportunities in these emerging sectors that are going to create new types of jobs. That comes along with other policy components like retraining, and that’s not treated as a bad thing in our codebook.

"This study is a starting point for understanding how politicians communicate about climate change and how they might improve that communication to advance action," says Meaghan Daly. "One key takeaway is connecting climate discussion to specific actions so people don’t feel the problem is overwhelming and unsolvable." (Photo: iStock)

The way we addressed this is: If people are talking about these downsides, but they are not acknowledging the gravity of climate change at the same time—because it is this massive problem that is going to affect us all in really deep ways that are integral to how we live—that’s when we felt it qualified as delaying rather than simply acknowledging there are trade-offs in all climate policies.

Question:For those members of Congress who have been proponents of taking action on climate change, what kinds of messages did they post?

Daly: Posts promoting climate action emphasized benefits and co-benefits—health, ecosystems and quality of life. Many argued that because the U.S. has historically contributed the most to the problem, it should lead globally, especially as the country rejoined the Paris Climate Accord. There were also many posts highlighting legislation being passed or developed, budget allocations and building systems and structures for action. We describe this as ‘grounded optimism’—linking climate discussion to concrete legislative or on-the-ground action, rather than vague future hope.

Question:Do you know whether some arguments were more effective than others, either on the pro-action or delay-action side?

Daly: I think that’s a great question. This study didn’t address effectiveness in terms of public response, but I think that’s an important next step for future research.

Question:Did you find differences among members of Congress by age, race or ethnicity when it came to posting on X about climate change?

Daly: Yes. Politicians of color were more likely to post about climate change, likely because they represent constituencies on the front lines of climate impacts. Older politicians were also more likely to post about climate action, possibly because their longer tenure gives them more leeway to address controversial issues.

Question:You say in the paper that climate obstructionism can be intentional or unintentional. What do you mean by that?

Daly: One key contribution of the study is identifying what we call the ‘murky middle.’ Some communication strategies can support action or delay depending on context. For example, ‘all talk, little action’ was previously categorized as a delay (tactic), but talking about climate change does raise issue salience. However, simply talking isn’t enough—if it’s not paired with concrete strategies, people may feel overwhelmed and disengage. Posts in this category acknowledged climate change but weren’t attached to pathways for action, which can inadvertently contribute to delay.

Question:Are you planning follow-up work on this topic?

Daly: Yes. Our next step is to apply this typology over a longer timeframe. We’re exploring mixed-methods approaches, including using large language models to apply our codebook at scale, because manual coding is extremely time-intensive.

This study is a starting point for understanding how politicians communicate about climate change and how they might improve that communication to advance action. One key takeaway is connecting climate discussion to specific actions so people don’t feel the problem is overwhelming and unsolvable.

The research also challenges the idea that climate communication is simply pro- or anti-climate. It’s more of a spectrum, which opens up important avenues for future research.

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Study by �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Meaghan Daly looks at how members of Congress framed their arguments for or against taking action on climate change on the popular social media site.

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Rethinking what fruit flies taught science to ignore

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:52:38 +0000

Rethinking what fruit flies taught science to ignore Rachel Sauer Mon, 05/04/2026 - 10:52

Cody DeBos

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Donna Goldstein seeks to understand radiation risk through a butterfly’s wings and, yes, the humble fruit fly

In the 1940s, geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky flew over a cluster of tropical islands off the coast of Brazil and saw not nature but a laboratory. Trained in the famous “fly rooms” of Columbia University, he released irradiated fruit flies onto those islands and tracked what happened as they reproduced across generations.

What he and his colleagues discovered has shaped the way scientists and regulators view radiation’s genetic effects for nearly eight decades.

Whether that work should still be considered the gold standard is the question �鶹��Ѱ�� anthropologist Donna Goldstein and University of South Carolina anthropologist Magdalena Stawkowski are now asking.

Donna Goldstein, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder professor and department chair of anthropology, partnered with colleague Magdalena Stawkowski to trace how the assumptions handed down through decades of fruit fly research have shaped understanding of radiation risk.

Unsettling settled science

Goldstein’s career has taken her from the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro to politically charged pharmaceutical battlegrounds in Argentina. Much of her work stems from a long-standing drive to explore Cold War–era science around radiation and its effects on humans.

Her latest paper, “Of Epistemes and Insects: How Drosophila and Butterflies Shape Our Understanding of Radiation Risk,” co-authored with Magdalena Stawkowski, was published this spring in the Journal of the History of Biology.

“We are basically trying to read into what’s considered settled science and maybe do a little bit of unsettling,” Goldstein says.

“I’m on a charge to understand what we know about the nuclear age, and also to understand the science of that era and what we might have missed in terms of the kinds of studies we were doing around radiation risk and harm to humans.”

Drosophila all the way down

The fruit fly is the go-to organism in genetic research for practical reasons. It is small, breeds fast and shares some 75% of the genes that cause disease in humans.

By the time nuclear weapons became a reality, Drosophila was already the lens through which geneticists saw the world.

“It was Drosophila all the way down,” she says. “All of these scientists, whatever they wound up doing, including human genetics, wound up traveling through the Drosophila laboratories.”

Indeed, researchers trained in Columbia’s fly rooms fanned out across the world. Many sat on committees that wrote the first human radiation safety standards after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

Goldstein and Stawkowski’s paper traces how the assumptions handed down through decades of fruit fly research traveled with those scientists.

Thanks to this shared foundation, geneticists have held on to a core assumption through the years. Conventional fruit fly research suggests that populations of organisms exposed to radiation eventually recover and return to equilibrium. It also claims genetic damage is not heritable over generations.

“When we’re saying that Drosophila resilience may have been a little bit exaggerated, we’re not just talking about what we know about Drosophila, but about the scientists who passed through those laboratories and absorbed what it was they were learning about Drosophila,” Goldstein says.

She and Stawkowski call this the “Drosophila bias.”

“That idea of resilience and of recovery and that damage should not be considered genetic really has maybe been a calming mechanism for all of us,” Goldstein says. “That’s what we want to hear.”

Research conducted on pale grass blue butterflies collected near the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan showed genetic abnormalities in the first generation that were significantly higher than the control group. Subsequent generations not only bore those same abnormalities but experienced them at increasingly higher rates. (Photo: Milind Bhakare/Wikimedia Commons)

The butterfly effect

Goldstein and Stawkowski’s research challenges the assumption that fruit fly research on radiation safety and the risks it poses accurately carries over to humans.

In 2012, Japanese researchers published findings on butterflies collected near Fukushima’s damaged nuclear power plant. The first generation showed genetic abnormalities significantly higher than the control group. Subsequent generations not only bore those same abnormalities but experienced them at increasingly higher rates.

The mutations defy the logic held as gospel by Drosophila-trained scientists.

“The butterfly findings that are so recent really gave us pause to kind of look back and think about ‘when did this idea that there could be no genetic damage among insects evolve?’” Goldstein says.

The answer, her paper argues, goes back to the humble fruit fly.

“Maybe we’re kind of drowsy from the Drosophila bias,” Goldstein says.

Still, she’s careful not to overstate the claim, citing her background as an anthropologist and historian of science, not a radiobiologist.

“We can’t really say definitively that we know there is genetic damage because we’re not those kinds of scientists. But what we can say is that maybe the certainty we’ve been using as our groundwork and our foundation is possibly less certain than we think,” she adds.

Yet, following the Fukushima butterfly study, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation dismissed the findings as “not consistent with conventional understanding” of radiation biology.

A nice story to tell

The Drosophila bias masks a more complex dilemma. It may explain why we are willing to put our faith in dated science that, as new findings emerge, might not paint an accurate picture.

“Perhaps most of us believe in our hearts in a human exceptionalism, that, in fact, we’re even more resilient than the most resilient organism,” Goldstein says. “Yeah, it’s a nice story to tell.”

Goldstein argues the bias allows us to believe that humans are uniquely resilient, insulated from radiation’s worst effects by our very biology.

But is the story Drosophila tells true?

“We are basically trying to read into what’s considered settled science and maybe do a little bit of unsettling.”

Goldstein urges scientists to take another honest look at the data being published in recent years.

The stakes of finding the right conclusion are high. Nuclear energy is back on the global agenda, and much of the case for it rests in part on the consensus that low-dose radiation causes no heritable genetic damage. Goldstein doesn’t claim that consensus is wrong, but she thinks it does deserve more intense scrutiny.

“The pro-nuclear establishment really relies on the finding that there’s no genetic damage. I’m interested in seeing if that’s really true. We may have, through the Drosophila bias and through the exaggeration of our interest in resilience, exaggerated our calmness about this.”

Taking another look

Goldstein and Stawkowski mean for their paper to be provocative. As for any argument that goes against long-held precedent, there will surely be detractors. Yet, as Goldstein says, feedback is welcome.

“If people out there want to respond or say something about it, they should,” she says.

The butterflies near Fukushima tell a story spanning generations, offering a living record of what radiation did and continues to do. Goldstein says similar studies of other organisms are being carried out in Brazil, Ukraine and several other parts of the world.

Whether the scientific community is prepared to interpret the results on their own terms, rather than through the assumptions of a lab from the 1940s, may be one of the most consequential questions in radiation biology today.

Goldstein’s hope is that more researchers will challenge the allure of accepting supreme human resilience to radiation and examine the evidence against it at face value.

“We have to remember that not just one organism can tell us the full story.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Donna Goldstein seeks to understand radiation risk through a butterfly’s wings and, yes, the humble fruit fly.

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Top photo: Erik Karits/Pexels

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholars elected members of the National Academy of Sciences

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:47:49 +0000

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholars elected members of the National Academy of Sciences Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/01/2026 - 14:47

Lee Niswander and Bethany Ehlmann recognized ‘for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research’

Two �鶹��Ѱ�� scientists have been elected members of the National Academy of Sciences, joining a cohort of more than 140 scholars around the world who are recognized for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Lee Niswander, a distinguished professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, and Bethany Ehlmann, a professor of geological sciences and director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, join an academy whose members include Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Richard Feynman and Jennifer Doudna, among other scientists.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and—with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine—provides science, engineering and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

Lee Niswander is a distinguished professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology.

Pursuing clinical therapies

Niswander is head of the Niswander Lab, where she and her group investigate mouse models of embryonic development to provide insights into fundamental developmental processes, major human birth defects and potential clinical therapies. Her studies have revealed the molecular mechanisms that control formation of the central and peripheral nervous system, as well as lung, limb and neuromuscular development.

Niswander’s current focus is on early brain formation and birth defects that arise when normal brain formation goes awry, like failure of neural tube closure or maintenance of neural progenitor cells, resulting in spina bifida or microcephaly.

The Niswander Lab uses the mouse embryo and human-induced pluripotent stem cells as models of human development. The lab’s studies encompass genetics, epigenetics, environmental factors and live imaging to couple molecular insights to cell behaviors. Through collaborative efforts, Niswander Lab researchers are also exploring the genetic causes of neural tube defects in humans.

Niswander recently received the Hazel Barnes Prize, which celebrates the enriching interrelationship between teaching and research. It is the largest and most prestigious award funded by the university. This summer she will be honored with an Edwin G. Conklin Medal, which is awarded annually by the Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) to recognize a developmental biologist who has made and is continuing to make extraordinary research contributions to the field and is an excellent mentor, helping train the next generation of outstanding scientists.

Niswander received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, her master’s degree in biochemistry and genetics from University of Colorado Health Sciences Center (now �鶹��Ѱ��Anschutz) and her doctorate in genetics from Case Western University. She performed her postdoctoral training in developmental biology at the University of California San Francisco.

“I am deeply honored to become a member of the National Academy of Sciences,” Niswander says. “I am grateful to the numerous trainees and their research discoveries that provided the foundation of this honor. I am excited to join the Academy in their mission to advise on scientific matters important for human health.”

Bethany Ehlmann is a professor of geological sciences and director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

Studying space

Ehlmann is a planetary scientist who, in addition to her roles as director of LASP and professor of geological sciences, holds the faculty roles of Provost’s Chair in the Research and Innovation Office and affiliate professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. Her research focuses on water in the solar system, the evolution of habitable worlds and remote sensing techniques and instruments for planetary missions.

Ehlmann is a science team member of multiple missions, including the Jupiter-bound Europa Clipper; the Earth-orbiting EMIT imaging spectrometer; the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover; the Mars2020 Perseverance rover; the ExoMars rover; and orbiting and landed spectrometers for the Artemis lunar program. Previously, she was a science team member for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter CRISM instrument, the Dawn mission during its exploration of the asteroid Ceres, the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity and principal investigator of Lunar Trailblazer.

Active in science policy and outreach, Ehlmann is president of the board of directors of The Planetary Society. She served as a member of the National Academies Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey and the National Academies Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science. She is a fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and the Mineralogical Society of America, and has authored a children's book, “Dr. E's Super Stellar Solar System,” with National Geographic.

Ehlmann earned a bachelor’s degree from Washington University, where she double majored in earth and planetary sciences and environmental studies with a minor in math; two master’s degrees from the University of Oxford, in environmental change and management and geography; and master’s and doctoral degrees in geological sciences from Brown University.

“Election to the National Academy of Sciences is an honor,” Ehlmann said. “I’m grateful for this recognition and look forward to supporting the Academy’s mission to guide and advance scientific discovery, especially at a moment when humanity is extending our scientific exploration of the Moon, Mars and other planets.”

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Lee Niswander and Bethany Ehlmann recognized ‘for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.’

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Grad ponders the past and considers the future

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:54:29 +0000

Grad ponders the past and considers the future Rachel Sauer Thu, 04/30/2026 - 16:54

Rachel Sauer

Abigail Verneuille, who is earning a BA in anthropology along with a GIS certificate, is honored as the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate

In the summer of 2024, following her sophomore year as a �鶹��Ѱ�� anthropology major, Abigail Verneuille signed up for archaeological field school in the Velarde Valley of northern New Mexico.

The area is stunning with its boundless sky and mosaic of mesas, but summers there are intense—arid and scorchingly hot, plus dusty and buggy.

“We were sleeping on the floor for a month, and despite that and the heat, all the dirt, the bugs, everything, I just had the best time of my life,” she says. “I loved everything about it.”

Abigail Verneuille (third from left), the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate, with (left to right) Dean of Arts and Humanities John-Michael Rivera, Dean of Social Sciences Sarah Jackson, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Daryl Maeda, Dean of Natural Sciences Irene Blair and Interim Associate Dean for Student Success Jennifer Fitzgerald.

Before that summer, she had indistinct ideas about her path following college, but after it she knew that she wanted a career in archaeology and directed the rest of her undergraduate education toward that goal—earning a certificate in geographic information systems (GIS) and computational science and writing a thesis aiming to predict past streamflow heights of the Rio Grande River to identify years of agricultural instability.

In recognition of her innovative research, academic excellence and dedicated work, Verneuille has been named the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate.

“Verneuille’s perfect academic record tells only part of the story, as she has taken courses ranging from humanities to women and gender studies to biological anthropology to math to astronomy to geographic information systems to computational science, and she has received straight A’s in all of them!” wrote Scott Ortman, professor of anthropology, in recommending her. “She has also conducted archaeological field research in North Macedonia and participated in the anthropology department’s archaeology field school in northern New Mexico. Her honors thesis project emerged from that experience.

“What stands out about Abby’s thesis is not just its organization, clarity and technical sophistication, but the fact that the work is of such significance in its field.”

Hiking into the backcountry

Because the kind of archaeology she wants to do is outdoors and sometimes miles down a dirt road, it helps that Verneuille has always loved to be outside. Growing up in Tennessee, she spent a lot of time hiking and exploring—activities she continued when she moved to Boulder for college.

She majored in anthropology and minored in women and gender studies, which allowed her to study themes of religion and ritual that dovetailed with her archaeological research. She discovered her academic passion, though, near the tiny community of Estaca, New Mexico, where she and her research colleagues opened four two-meter-by-one-meter rectangles in which they found artifacts that helped describe the people who lived in that area before and after Spanish colonialism.

Another project on which she worked was documenting petroglyphs with the Mesa Prieta Petroglyph Project. “There would be days where we’d hike an hour and a half into the backcountry and spend eight hours recording petroglyphs, then hike an hour and a half back up this mesa, and that was just the most fun I’ve ever had in my life,” Verneuille says.

In talking with archaeologists from other universities, though, she realized at field school that she would need technical expertise to accompany her hands-in-the-dirt skills, so in Fall 2024 she began pursuing her GIS and computational science certificate. “For that, you’re required to take a semester of statistics in R Studio and then two semesters of coding in Python, and I’d never really thought of myself as a computer kind of person, but I got thrown straight into it,” she says.

“But once I got into the actual mapping classes, the spatial analytics, all the remote sensing, that’s when I thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing, I love this.’”

Abigail Verneuille working at an archaeological field site in northern New Mexico. (Photo: Abigail Verneuille)

Amazing work, amazing people

For her thesis, Verneuille sought to tackle a 100-year-old mystery in U.S. Southwest archaeology: When Pueblo ancestors migrated from the Four Corners region into the Rio Grande Valley in the 13th century, why did they initially settle away from the main courses of the Rio Grande and Rio Chama, where most of the water was, only to gravitate toward the rivers about 100 years later?

Verneuille combined river flow data from the Embudo gauge, the oldest river gauge in the United States, with weather-station data and tree-ring data reflecting precipitation and temperature from the headwaters of the Rio Grande to essentially “predict the past” and understand June flood risk from the present back to 1200 A.D.

Abigail Verneuille conducts land surveys in northern New Mexico for her archaeological research. (Photo: Abigail Verneuille)

Transitions visible in her model corresponded with the end of a phenomenon called the Medieval Climate Anomaly, an unusually warm and wet period worldwide.

“In a final stroke of brilliance, Verneuille not only showed that this reduction in June flood risk corresponds in time to the concentration of population along the main river channels, but she also considers how Pueblo ancestors would have interpreted this change in the environment by considering depictions of water serpent beings in rock art of the area,” Ortman wrote. “Her work shows that climate change can improve local environments for humans in counterintuitive ways, and that there is a connection between the practical and the spiritual with regard to human adaptation to the environment.”

She notes that while the physical work of archaeology was fascinating, she equally loved the community-building aspect of it, working with people who live in the area and whose ancestors were the Tewa-speaking people she was studying. In March, she and several colleagues gave a presentation to residents in the area on what their research had revealed about things like diet and socioeconomic differences of the people who lived in that area hundreds of years ago.

“They were gracious enough to welcome us into their home, so everyone sat around the dining room table and we had a little projector,” Verneuille says. “This is their livelihood, their community, so they had a lot of questions, and it was such a rewarding experience to see how the technical side of academic work has real-life impacts.”

It’s work that she hopes to continue doing after she graduates Saturday, and she has applied for a field technician position with cultural resource management firms. She also is aiming for graduate school in the next five years to continue her archaeology studies.

“It’s amazing work and the most amazing community of people,” she says, “and one that I’d love to continue being a part of.”

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Abigail Verneuille, who is earning a BA in anthropology along with a GIS certificate, is honored as the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate.

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As a new space race takes shape, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder class asks: Do we understand China?

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:16:14 +0000

As a new space race takes shape, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder class asks: Do we understand China? Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/29/2026 - 11:16

'China's Space Dream,' ASIA 4100, brings aerospace engineers, Chinese language students and international affairs majors into one room—and a visiting journalist from the South China Morning Post into the conversation

Days after Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific, returning four astronauts from the first crewed voyage beyond low Earth orbit in more than half a century, a science journalist who has spent years reporting on China's space program from inside its scientific institutions sat down with a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder classroom full of students who had been tracking the same story from the outside.

The conversation that followed put the American triumph in a wider frame. When the International Space Station was being designed in the 1990s, China had little to offer a partnership even if one had been on the table. Three decades later, the country operates its own permanently crewed space station, has returned the first-ever samples from the far side of the Moon, and is on track to bring back the first Martian soil before the United States does. The students, aerospace engineering majors sitting next to Chinese language and civilizations majors, history students alongside international affairs specialists, already knew these facts. What they wanted from Ling Xin was something harder to find out, what does this moment look like from the other side of the space race?

ASIA 4100, “China’s Space Dream: Long March to the Moon and Beyond,” is a course developed through the support of �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s interdisciplinary Space Minor and taught by Lauren Collins, a teaching assistant professor and director of the Asian Studies program in the Center for Asian Studies. Now in its second iteration, the class will be offered again in spring 2027.

Collins designed the course around an observation that kept surfacing in her own work. US-China space competition is one of the defining dynamics of a shifting world order, but the people who understand the engineering often lack the cultural and historical context, and the people who study China often aren’t following the technical developments.

Four astronauts aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft atop the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket launch on the agency’s Artemis II test flight, Wednesday, April 1, from Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Photo: NASA)

“The mix in the classroom is the whole point,” Collins said. “Aerospace and astronomy students know something about orbital mechanics and mission design. Chinese language and civilizations students know something about political culture and history. International affairs students understand geopolitics. But the interconnectedness across all of those domains is what surprises everyone, including me.”

The course weaves together Chinese culture, history, geopolitical contexts, and the race to the Moon as it unfolds in real time. Students study the origins of China’s space program, the role of the “space dream” in Chinese national identity, the Wolf Amendment that bars NASA from bilateral cooperation with China, the military dimensions of space technology, and the case for collaboration.

“Warfare and military applications are clearly an issue,” Collins said. “But the need to collaborate is so key, too. We’re talking about planetary challenges that affect all of us like climate monitoring, asteroid deflection, space debris, deep-space science. These issues don’t respect national borders.”

Learning from a visiting journalist

Ling Xin’s visit to the class came through the Conference on World Affairs classroom visit program, which pairs CWA speakers with �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder courses during conference week. The 78th annual CWA, running April 13–16, featured more than 60 speakers across 50 panels at the Limelight Hotel Boulder and across campus.

For Collins, the match was ideal. Ling Xin is one of a small number of journalists working in English who can draw on firsthand access to Chinese scientific institutions, fluency in Mandarin, and formal journalism training in the United States. A former writer for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, she holds a master’s degree in journalism from Ohio University and has published in Science, Scientific American, Nature, and MIT Technology Review. She has reported extensively on China’s Chang’e lunar missions, the Tiangong space station, and the movement of Chinese scientists between US and Chinese institutions, a phenomenon known as the “reverse brain drain”.

“Having a journalist like Ling Xin in the classroom is a different experience from reading an article,” Collins said. “She can tell students what Chinese space scientists actually say when a reporter asks them about the competition with NASA”.

The timing of the visit was perfect. Artemis II had splashed down on April 10 after a successful nine-day circumlunar flight, making astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen the first humans to fly past the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Koch became the first woman to travel beyond low Earth orbit. The mission was a triumph (and a relief) after many delays.

But even as the Artemis II crew was being celebrated, the competitive landscape was shifting beneath the surface. NASA announced in February that the first crewed lunar landing has been pushed from Artemis III to Artemis IV, now targeted for 2028. The Lunar Gateway station was cancelled. And Congress effectively killed NASA’s Mars Sample Return program in the FY2026 spending bill, leaving nearly 30 carefully collected sample tubes sitting in Mars’s Jezero Crater with no funded plan to bring them home.

"Let's Go to the Moon!" by Yuko Shimizu

Accelerating push to space

China, meanwhile, is accelerating. Its Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission is targeted for launch in 2028, with samples expected back on Earth around 2031. If NASA doesn’t revive its own program, China will likely become the first nation to return Martian soil, a milestone with enormous scientific and symbolic weight. These debates are a key substance of class discussion.

“When you put an aerospace engineering student and a Chinese civilizations student in the same conversation about whether or not space should be treated as a global commons, you get an analysis that neither of them could produce alone,” Collins said. “Knowledge is co-created.”

The Wolf Amendment, a congressional provision renewed annually since 2011 that bars NASA from bilateral activities with Chinese space agencies, is a recurring thread in the course. The policy, which effectively excluded China from the International Space Station partnership, is widely credited with accelerating China’s independent development of the Tiangong station, the Long March 5 rocket family, and the full suite of crewed spaceflight technology that now positions the country as NASA’s primary competitor.

In 2026 alone, China plans to launch two crewed missions to Tiangong, including its first year-long stay, and host a Pakistani astronaut, the station’s first international crew member. The Chang’e-7 lunar probe, targeting the Moon’s south pole to search for water ice, is scheduled to launch later this year. A crewed lunar landing is targeted before 2030.

Collins also brings science fiction into the classroom to explore the cultural dimensions of space ambition. The global success of Liu Cixin’s “Three-Body Problem” trilogy has made Chinese science fiction a shared cultural reference point that crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. “Science fiction adds a layer that unites all of us,” Collins said. “These are universal concerns about what technology is doing to human civilization, especially now in the age of AI.”

The course is one of several electives offered through �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Space Minor, a campus-wide program open to students regardless of major that provides an interdisciplinary foundation in all aspects of space. The minor, part of �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Grand Challenge initiative, requires five courses: the foundational “Pathway to Space” and four electives drawn from departments across the university, ranging from aerospace engineering to music to environmental design.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder has a singular claim on the subject. The university is the only academic institution in the world to have sent instruments to every planet in the solar system and Pluto, and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics has been a leader in space research since 1948.

“This university has extraordinary depth in the technical side of space,” Collins said. “What the Space Minor makes possible is courses like mine that bring the human dimensions like culture, history, geopolitics, and collaboration into the same conversation. That’s what students will need to navigate a world where the US and China are building competing lunar bases and competing for leadership in the space economy.”

ASIA 4100, “China’s Space Dream: Long March to the Moon and Beyond,” will next be offered in spring 2027. The course is open to all �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder students and counts toward the Space Minor.

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Top illustration: A Chinese flag added to famed photo of astronaut James Irwin on the moon. (Original photo: NASA)

Wildfire’s toll on animals went largely unreported, researchers show

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:10:13 +0000

Wildfire’s toll on animals went largely unreported, researchers show Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/27/2026 - 12:10

Clint Talbott

After the Marshall Fire, researchers at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and Western Washington University muse on why animals disappear from disaster stories and suggest a remedy

When the Marshall Fire swept through Boulder County on Dec. 30, 2021, it killed two people and destroyed 1,084 homes. Colorado’s governor called the relatively modest loss of human life a “New Year’s miracle.”

As �鶹��Ѱ�� sociologist Leslie Irvine later found, however, the wildfire also killed more than 1,000 companion animals who were trapped in homes that rapidly incinerated while their people were at work, traveling or stuck in evacuation traffic.

New research from Irvine and Cameron Whitley, a sociology professor at Western Washington University, quantifies the extent to which the loss of sentient animal life was overlooked by public officials and the news media.

In recently published research, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder sociologist Leslie Irvine and colleague Cameron Whitely quantify the extent to which the loss of sentient animal life was overlooked by public officials and the news media following the Marshall Fire.

For many residents, the toll was devastating but largely invisible.

Out of 981 news stories published in the two months after the fire, only 16% mentioned animals at all. Fewer than 5% focused on animals in their coverage. Government officials mentioned animal loss in less than 1% of public statements.

“What surprised me most wasn’t just what showed up in the media,” Whitley says of the research, which was recently published in the journal Anthrozoös. “It was what didn’t—especially considering how many people think of their animals as family.”

For Irvine, now retired from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder but still deeply engaged with the work, the Marshall Fire reopened questions she had hoped never to revisit.

Two decades earlier, after Hurricane Katrina, Irvine wrote Filling the Ark: Animal Welfare in Disasters, a groundbreaking book documenting how disaster-response systems failed people with pets—and how those failures increased human risk as well. After Katrina, Congress passed the PETS Act, requiring emergency plans to account for companion animals.

“I said I would never study disasters and animals again,” Irvine recalls. “It was too devastating.”

Then the Marshall Fire struck Boulder County “right in my backyard,” she says. Whitley, who grew up in nearby Lafayette and earned his BA from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, came to the project with both scholarly training and knowledge of personal loss.

“As people were grieving animals—pets, wildlife, livestock—they kept telling me the same thing,” Whitley says. “They weren’t seeing that grief reflected anywhere.”

Using systematic content analysis, Whitley and his co-authors coded every Marshall Fire news story published by local, state and national outlets in the fire’s immediate aftermath. They tracked when animals appeared, how they were framed, and—critically—when entire categories of loss vanished.

Domestic pets received the most attention, but usually as side notes to evacuation instructions or “feel‑good” reunion stories. Agricultural animals were typically counted collectively—horses evacuated, livestock lost—rarely described as individuals. Wildlife barely appeared at all.

“The default hierarchy is still very clear,” Irvine says. “Humans first. Then property. Animals come after—if at all.”

When the ‘hierarchy’ obscures the truth

“The only thing some families have left of their animals is a burned‑out food bowl. That alone should tell us something about what we’re failing to see,” says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Leslie Irvine. (Photo: Patti Benninghoff-Lawson)

That hierarchy persists despite decades of research showing that people routinely risk their lives for animals during disasters. Some refuse to evacuate without them. Others re‑enter burn zones to try to rescue them—sometimes requiring rescue themselves.

In fact, one of the two human fatalities in the Marshall fire was Edna Turnbull, who died while trying to rescue her dogs. “Turnbull’s refusal to leave without making sure her companion animals were safe is not unique,” Whitley and Irvine write.

From an economic or safety standpoint alone, Irvine argues, ignoring animals is irrational. She contends: “If government officials took animals seriously in disasters, they would reduce risks to first responders, reduce chaos and improve outcomes for everyone.”

One consequence of invisibility is what Whitley calls unrecognized grief. He cites research showing that losing a companion animal can provoke grief comparable to losing a human family member. But when that loss is absent from public discourse, grieving people also feel isolated, he observes, adding:

“In the LA County fires we’re studying now, people talk about losing their home as something they could move past. Losing their animal, or being forced to give that animal up months later because of housing instability, that’s what they say they’ll never recover from.”

That secondary grief rarely appears in disaster coverage. Nor do the long‑term consequences that follow fires even after humans rebuild.

Irvine points to toxic exposure as an underreported crisis. Dogs in burn zones may now need booties and paw decontamination. Outdoor cats may carry contaminants inside. Veterinarians report increases in respiratory illness and unexplained deaths among animal patients months or years later.

Merlin, a cat injured during the Marshall Fire, has since recovered. (Photo: Shelby Davis/Soul Dog Rescue)

“These aren’t dramatic images,” Irvine says. “They don’t fit into breaking news. But they shape everyday life for years.”

“We tend to act as though a disaster ends once people rebuild their homes. But for people with animals, the disaster often continues for the rest of those animals’ lives—through toxic exposure, long‑term illness and ongoing grief.”

Why journalism struggles with animals

The researchers note the challenges facing journalists. Disaster coverage focuses on what can be confirmed quickly, counted easily and tied to economic loss.

“Homes and infrastructure are quantifiable,” Whitley says. “Animals aren’t, unless they’re agricultural, and even then, they’re usually listed as numbers, not lives.”

The media also gravitate toward redemptive narratives—pets reunited with families, miraculous survivals—rather than mass loss without resolution.

“There’s a kind of collective discomfort with stories that don’t offer closure,” Irvine says.

Whitley notes that journalists are reporting statements of public officials, whose focus is on humans and property. “Less than 1% of official government statements mentioned animals at all. That’s not just a media problem; that’s a policy failure.”

But when animals disappear from disaster coverage, so do the people who love them.

The study offers a suggestion on disaster reporting: prioritize sentient life—human and nonhuman alike—before property loss.

“This isn’t about placing animals above people,” Whitley says. “It’s about telling the whole story.”

As climate‑driven disasters become more frequent, these questions will arise more frequently, the researchers note.

“The Marshall Fire taught us that firestorms are no longer remote or rare,” Irvine says. “And it showed us something else—that we are still failing to see whole parts of our communities when disaster strikes.”

Whitley adds: “When we talk about disasters, we celebrate the minimal loss of human life—while thousands of animals die without acknowledgement. For the people who lost them, that silence matters.”

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After the Marshall Fire, researchers at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and Western Washington University muse on why animals disappear from disaster stories and suggest a remedy.

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