Posts tagged outdoor
CU: State-of-the-art rec center is online
Jan 10th
The University of Colorado Boulder’s expansion of the Student Recreation Center, a project initiated by students, opens on Friday, Jan. 10, at 9 a.m. The southwest addition, the second and largest phase of the project, is located just north of the Ramaley Biology Building and east of Sewall Hall and will provide an additional 83,000 square feet of indoor recreational space.
The portions opening this month include a three-level weight and cardio area; three new wood floor all-purpose indoor courts for basketball, volleyball and badminton; a climbing wall and bouldering area; three fitness studios; wellness suites; new locker rooms and a spacious entrance and lobby.
“Recreation facilities have always been extremely popular among CU-Boulder students and over the years we found that our current facilities were not keeping up with the demand,” said Chris Schaefbauer , CU Student Government tri-executive. “In surveys of our peers we found CU students participate in recreational activities at a rate higher than the national average, but that our indoor recreation and fitness space per student was lower than the national average.”
The new ice rink opened in November and the Rental and Resource Center, which will rent camping and outdoor equipment, opens in mid-February. The final phase of the project, which consists of an indoor turf field, tennis courts, outdoor pool and the renovation of the existing basketball courts, is on track for completion in April.
The $63.5 million project was funded through the sale of bonds to be repaid through student fees collected over a 25-year period. In April 2011, the CU-Boulder student body voted to support the expansion and renovation of the Recreation Center. Nearly 37 percent of eligible student voters participated in the election, the largest ever student turnout, and over 70 percent voted “yes” to increase student fees in support of the expansion and renovation.
“With this state-of-the-art addition and the significant improvements to the Recreation Center, the students and the campus community will indeed have a remarkable facility at their disposal,” said Gary Chadwick, interim director of recreation facilities. “This is certainly an exciting time for the Recreation Services staff, who are anxious to begin offering the students the numerous opportunities that this center provides.”
Students will have 30,000 square feet of state-of-the-art cardiovascular and strength training equipment, a lower-level strength area, several additional cardiovascular and stretching spaces, and a “cardio equipment green zone” that captures user energy produced during exercises to feed back into the power grid and offset some power consumption within the facility.
A 4,000-square-foot-climbing wall built by Eldorado Designs contains areas for bouldering, lead climbing and top-rope climbing. The lead and top-rope areas reach up to 38 feet. The beginner to advanced bouldering terrain reaches a maximum height of 14 feet. The northeast corner consists of shot rock and is designed as an educational area for anchor building, lead climbing and multi-pitch climbing along with gear anchor building.
Three additional multipurpose fitness studios and a mind-body studio will provide members many opportunities to participate in fitness, mind-body, martial arts, Pilates reformer and dance classes.
The Wellness Suite will provide fitness assessments, nutrition clinics, personal training consultations, and the muscular skeletal clinic. The Wellness Suite also will serve to support student success in living a healthy, balanced lifestyle.
The campus community is invited to attend “Reconnect with the Rec” Jan. 21-24. CU-Boulder faculty and staff members are invited to use the facility for free during this time. The event will provide the opportunity to experience and learn more about the southwest addition. Festivities at this free event will include personal trainers and equipment vendors on site, group exercise demonstrations, facility tours, climbing wall competitions, giveaways, snacks and more. For a full schedule of events go to www.colorado.edu/recreation.
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CU study; Death of microbes could determine time of death
Sep 27th
The clock is essentially the lock-step succession of bacterial changes that occur postmortem as bodies move through the decay process. And while the researchers used mice for the new study, previous studies on the human microbiome – the estimated 100 trillion or so microbes that live on and in each of us – indicate there is good reason to believe similar microbial clocks are ticking away on human corpses, said Jessica Metcalf, a CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher and first author on the study.
“While establishing time of death is a crucial piece of information for investigators in cases that involve bodies, existing techniques are not always reliable,” said Metcalf of CU-Boulder’s BioFrontiers Institute. “Our results provide a detailed understanding of the bacterial changes that occur as mouse corpses decompose, and we believe this method has the potential to be a complementary forensic tool for estimating time of death.”
Currently, investigators use tools ranging from the timing of last text messages and corpse temperatures to insect infestations on bodies and “grave soil” analyses, with varying results, she said. And the more days that elapse following a person’s demise, the more difficult it becomes to determine the time of death with any significant accuracy.
Using high-technology gene sequencing techniques on both bacteria and microbial eukaryotic organisms like fungi, nematodes and amoeba postmortem, the researchers were able to pinpoint time of mouse death after a 48-day period to within roughly four days. The results were even more accurate following an analysis at 34 days, correctly estimating the time of death within about three days, said Metcalf.
A paper on the subject was published Sept. 23 in the new online science and biomedical journal, eLIFE, a joint initiative of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust Fund. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Justice.
The researchers tracked microbial changes on the heads, torsos, body cavities and associated grave soil of 40 mice at eight different time points over the 48-day study. The stages after death include the “fresh” stage before decomposition, followed by “active decay” that includes bloating and subsequent body cavity rupture, followed by “advanced decay,” said Chaminade University forensic scientist David Carter, a co-author on the study.
“At each time point that we sampled, we saw similar microbiome patterns on the individual mice and similar biochemical changes in the grave soil,” said Laura Parfrey, a former CU-Boulder postdoctoral fellow and now a faculty member at the University of British Columbia who is a microbial and eukaryotic expert. “And although there were dramatic changes in the abundance and distribution of bacteria over the course of the study, we saw a surprising amount of consistency between individual mice microbes between the time points — something we were hoping for.”
As part of the project, the researchers also charted “blooms” of a common soil-dwelling nematode well known for consuming bacterial biomass that occurred at roughly the same time on individual mice during the decay period. “The nematodes seem to be responding to increases in bacterial biomass during the early decomposition process, an interesting finding from a community ecology standpoint,” said Metcalf.
“This work shows that your microbiome is not just important while you’re alive,” said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Rob Knight, the corresponding study author who runs the lab where the experiments took place. “It might also be important after you’re dead.”
The research team is working closely with assistant professors Sibyl Bucheli and Aaron Linne of Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, home of the Southeast Texas Applied Forensic Science Facility, an outdoor human decomposition facility known popularly as a “body farm.” The researchers are testing bacterial signatures of human cadavers over time to learn more about the process of human decomposition and how it is influenced by weather, seasons, animal scavenging and insect infestations.
The new study is one of more than a dozen papers authored or co-authored by CU-Boulder researchers published in the past several years on human microbiomes. One of the studies, led by Professor Noah Fierer, a co-author on the new study, brought to light another potential forensic tool — microbial signatures left on computer keys and computer mice, an idea enthralling enough it was featured on a “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” television episode.
“This study establishes that a body’s collection of microbial genomes provides a store of information about its history,” said Knight, also an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist. “Future studies will let us understand how much of this information, both about events before death — like diet, lifestyle and travel — and after death can be recovered.”
In addition to Metcalf, Fierer, Knight, Carter and Parfrey, other study authors included Antonio Gonzalez, Gail Ackerman, Greg Humphrey, Mathew Gebert, Will Van Treuren, Donna Berg Lyons and Kyle Keepers from CU-Boulder, former BioFrontiers doctoral student Dan Knights from the University of Minnesota, and Yan Go and James Bullard from Pacific Biosciences in Menlo Park, Calif. Keepers participated in the study as an undergraduate while Gonzalez, now a postdoctoral researcher, was a graduate student during the study.
“There is no single forensic tool that is useful in all scenarios, as all have some degree of uncertainty,” said Metcalf. “But given our results and our experience with microbiomes, there is reason to believe we can get past some of this uncertainty and look toward this technique as a complementary method to better estimate time of death in humans.”
Gene sequencing equipment for the study included machines from Illumina of San Diego and Pacific Biosciences of Menlo Park, Calif. The Illumina data were generated at CU-Boulder in the BioFrontiers Next Generation Sequencing Facility.
To access a copy of the paper visit http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.01104. For more information on the BioFrontiers Institute visit http://biofrontiers.colorado.edu.
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