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<p>The confidence of Colorado business leaders has continued its strong upward trend, surging into the third quarter of 2013, according to the most recent Leeds Business Confidence Index, or LBCI, released today by the Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØ’s Leeds School of Business.</p>

<p>Waleed Abdalati has been named the new director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, a joint institute of the Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØ and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.</p>
<p>Abdalati is a CIRES Fellow, a CU-Boulder professor of geography and director of the CIRES Earth Science and Observation Center. He will take office on July 1.</p>

<p>Let’s all fist bump: Spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way appear to be much larger and more massive than previously believed, according to a new Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØ study by researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope.</p>

<p>The Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØ has become a full institutional member of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-IV, an ambitious effort by some of the world’s top astronomers to map the celestial sky in three dimensions to learn more about the structure and evolution of the universe.</p>

<p>The Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØ has been chosen by the Association of American Universities to be one of eight campuses participating in a new initiative to improve undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering and math.</p>
<p>Over the next three years, each of the eight project sites will receive $500,000 to undertake an innovative STEM education project.</p>

<p>CIRES news release         </p>
<p>The Colorado River provides water for more than 30 million people in the U.S. West, so water managers have been eager to understand how climate change will affect the river’s flow. But scientific studies have produced an unsettling range of estimates, from a modest decrease of 6 percent by 2050 to a steep drop of 45 percent by then.</p>

<p>Two Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØ faculty members have received prestigious CAREER Awards from the National Science Foundation.</p>
<p>NSF Faculty Early Career Development, or CAREER, Awards recognize talented young faculty members with grants to support outstanding research projects and to encourage the integration of teaching and research.</p>

<p>A Colorado student space research consortium led by the Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØ teamed up with a Virginia space consortium led by the University of Virginia this week to help aspiring rocket scientists from around the country learn how to design, build and fly payloads.</p>

<p>The <a href="http://hr.colorado.edu/training/Pages/EmployeeLMC.aspx">Department of Human Resources</a> and the <a href="http://emp.colorado.edu/">Lockheed Martin Engineering Management Program</a> are excited to announce the launch of an exclusive <em>Leadership and Management Graduate Certificate Program</em>. Designed with CU-Boulder employees in mind, the program will help our current and future leaders develop and refine their leadership skills and learn new ways to measure and enhance organizational effectiveness with practical application. Course content is applicable to all professions and does not require a technical or engineering background.</p>
<p>Our employees will be able to use the tuition reimbursement benefit to cover tuition, and employees selected to participate in this exclusive program will be allowed to attend classes during work time and the employee’s department will pay for the costs of any fees and books. </p>

<p>Many photographs of the Southeast’s Smoky Mountains show layers of tall hills, shading to purples and grays in the distance. Tiny particles in the atmosphere help create the effect, which makes for stunning pictures. But human-caused enhancements of those fine particles also contribute to poor air quality in the Southeastern U.S., and may help explain why the region has not warmed like the rest of the nation.</p>