CU News
News from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
New financial educator to help CU-Boulder students navigate money matters
Aug 22nd
In an effort to help University of Colorado Boulder students make smart financial decisions about their budgets, credit, school loans and other money matters, a new campus financial educator will be available to students beginning Aug. 26, the first day of fall semester classes.
The CU Money Sense program was created by the Bursar’s Office in 2009 to provide student financial workshops and other educational opportunities including “Money Smart Week,” according to Susie Jacobs, the program’s director.
“This year our program added a new financial educator position to provide our students with one-on-one education sessions,” Jacobs said.
Niomi Williams, the new financial educator, will offer the free one-on-one sessions in order to give CU-Boulder students — and alumni — a financial leg up in what can be a challenging chapter in many young adults’ lives.
“When I was a recent college graduate, I found myself with student loan and credit card debt and not enough income,” Williams said. “I didn’t know how to manage my finances, I was a mess. My goal in this new position is to help students steer clear of money mistakes and lay the foundation for a stable financial future.”
While all individuals’ needs will be different, Williams said students can request a one-on-one session with her to cover basic financial questions such as how to organize and budget money, a challenging task for many people. Or they can just come in to talk about other financial issues or questions they may have.
“For many students, college is the first time they have to really manage their money, everything from paying rent to understanding how much their student loan payments will be when they graduate,” she said.
Williams said she won’t be offering investment or tax advice, but she hopes she can help students excel in money management.
“Once I learned how to organize and control my finances, all the pressure and financial stress I had been feeling went away,” she said.
Students who don’t want to sit down with Williams can visit the CU Money Sense website at http://bursar.colorado.edu/cumoneysense. Students also can check out the Facebook and Twitter pages, or follow the CU Money Sense blog, all of which can be accessed on the main website. CU Money Sense also puts on several workshops throughout the school year on financial topics of interest to students, free of charge.
Upcoming CU Money Sense workshops include:
- “Money Matters Information Sessions,” Aug. 21-23, 3-4 p.m. in University Memorial Center room 247.
- “Best Money Apps and Websites for Students,” Aug. 27-28, at 3 p.m. in University Memorial Center room 353.
- “Intro to Money, Banking and Budgeting in Boulder for International Students,” Sept. 18, at noon in University Memorial Center room 425.
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CU-Boulder research efforts dates oldest petroglyphs known in North America
Aug 13th
A new high-tech analysis led by a University of Colorado Boulder researcher shows the oldest known petroglyphs in North America, which are cut into several boulders in western Nevada, date to at least 10,500 years ago and perhaps even as far back as 14,800 years ago.
The petroglyphs located at the Winnemucca Lake petroglyph site 35 miles northeast of Reno consist of large, deeply carved grooves and dots forming complex designs on several large limestone boulders that have been known about for decades, said CU-Boulder researcher Larry Benson, who led the new effort. Although there are no people, animals or handprint symbols depicted, the petroglyph designs include a series of vertical, chain-like symbols and a number of smaller pits deeply incised with a type of hard rock scraper.
Benson and his colleagues used several methods to date the petroglyphs, including determining when the water level the Winnemucca Lake subbasin—which back then was a single body of water connecting the now-dry Winnemucca Lake and the existing Pyramid Lake—reached the specific elevation of 3,960 feet.
The elevation was key to the study because it marked the maximum height the ancient lake system could have reached before it began spilling excess water over Emerson Pass to the north. When the lake level was at this height, the petroglyph-peppered boulders were submerged and therefore not accessible for carving, said Benson, an adjunct curator of anthropology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.
A paper on the subject was published this month in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Co-authors on the study included Eugene Hattori of the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, Nev., John Southon of the University of California, Irvine and Benjamin Aleck of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe Museum and Visitor’s Center in Nixon, Nev. The National Research Program of the U.S. Geological Survey funded the study.
According to Benson, a white layer of carbonate made of limestone precipitated from the ancient, overflowing Winnemucca Lake had coated some of the petroglyph carvings near the base of the boulders. Previous work by Benson showed the carbonate coating elsewhere in the basin at that elevation had a radiocarbon date of roughly 11,000 years ago.
Benson sampled the carbonate into which the petroglyphs were incised and the carbonate that coated the petroglyphs at the base of the limestone boulder. The radiocarbon dates on the samples indicated the carbonate layer underlying the petroglyphs dated to roughly 14,800 ago. Those dates, as well as additional geochemical data on a sediment core from the adjacent Pyramid Lake subbasin, indicated the limestone boulders containing the petroglyphs were exposed to air between 14,800 and 13,200 years ago and again between about 11,300 and 10,500 years ago.
“Prior to our study, archaeologists had suggested these petroglyphs were extremely old,” said Benson, also an emeritus USGS scientist. “Whether they turn out to be as old as 14,800 years ago or as recent as 10,500 years ago, they are still the oldest petroglyphs that have been dated in North America.”
While Native American artifacts found in the Lahontan Basin—which encompasses the Winnemucca Lake subbasin—date to the time period of 11,300 to 10,500 years ago, it does not rule out the possibility that the petroglyphs were carved as early as 14,800 years ago, Benson said.
The oldest dates calculated for the Winnemucca Lake petroglyph site correspond with the time frame linked to several pieces of fossilized human excrement found in a cave in Oregon, said Benson, who also is affiliated with CU’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. The caves, known as the Paisley Caves in south central Oregon, held not only fossilized human coprolites that dated to roughly 14,400 years ago, but also bones of horses and camels that went extinct in North America prior to 13,000 years ago.
The younger time interval calculated for the Winnemucca petroglyphs corresponds to dates obtained from a second significant archaeological finding in the region—Spirit Cave Man, who was discovered more than 70 years ago some 60 miles east of Reno and whose hair, bones and clothing were dated to about 10,600 years ago. The remains of the man, who was found partially mummified in a shallow grave in Spirit Cave, Nev., were discovered with a fur robe, a woven marsh plant shroud and moccasins.
Petroglyphs near Long Lake in central Oregon—which were previously thought to be the oldest examples of rock art in North America—share similar features with some of the rock art the Winnemucca site, said Benson. At least one of the petroglyph panels from Long Lake was buried by ash from an eruption of the nearby Mount Mazama volcano roughly 6,700 years ago, proof that it was carved sometime before the eruption.
“We have no idea what they mean,” Benson said of the Winnemucca Lake petroglyphs. “But I think they are absolutely beautiful symbols. Some look like multiple connected sets of diamonds, and some look like trees, or veins in a leaf. There are few petroglyphs in the American Southwest that are as deeply carved as these, and few that have the same sense of size.”
Benson obtained permission to non-invasively examine the petroglyphs from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, which owns the land. Study co-author John Southton, a faculty member at University of California, Irvine, radiocarbon dated the material for the study.
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CU: Set your internal clock–go camping for, a WEEK?
Aug 5th
Artificial light screws with your circadian rhythms
Spending just one week exposed only to natural light while camping in the Rocky Mountains was enough to synch the circadian clocks of eight people participating in a University of Colorado Boulder study with the timing of sunrise and sunset.
The study, published online today in the journal Current Biology, found that the synchronization happened in that short period of time for all participants, regardless of whether they were early birds or night owls during their normal lives.
“What’s remarkable is how, when we’re exposed to natural sunlight, our clocks perfectly become in synch in less than a week to the solar day,” said CU-Boulder integrative physiology Professor Kenneth Wright, who led the study.
Electrical lighting, which became widely available in the 1930s, has affected our internal circadian clocks, which tell our bodies when to prepare for sleep and when to prepare for wakefulness. The ability to flip a switch and flood a room with light allows humans to be exposed to light much later into the night than would be possible naturally.
Even when people are exposed to electrical lights during daylight hours, the intensity of indoor lighting is much less than sunlight and the color of electrical light also differs from natural light, which changes shade throughout the day.
To quantify the effects of electrical lighting, a research team led by Wright, who also is the director of CU-Boulder’s Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory, monitored eight participants for one week as they went about their normal daily lives. The participants wore wrist monitors that recorded the intensity of light they were exposed to, the timing of that light, and their activity, which allowed the researchers to infer when they were sleeping.
At the end of the week, the researchers also recorded the timing of participants’ circadian clocks in the laboratory by measuring the presence of the hormone melatonin. The release of melatonin is one of the ways our bodies signal the onset of our biological nighttime. Melatonin levels decrease again at the start of our biological daytime.
The same metrics were recorded during and after a second week when the eight participants—six men and two women with a mean age of 30—went camping in Colorado’s Eagles Nest Wilderness. During the week, the campers were exposed only to sunlight and the glow of a campfire. Flashlights and personal electronic devices were not allowed.
On average, participants’ biological nighttimes started about two hours later when they were exposed to electrical lights than after a week of camping. During the week when participants went about their normal lives, they also woke up before their biological night had ended.
After the camping trip—when study subjects were exposed to four times the intensity of light compared with their normal lives—participants’ biological nighttimes began near sunset and ended at sunrise. They also woke up just after their biological night had ended. Becoming in synch with sunset and sunrise happened for all individuals even though the measurements from the previous week indicated that some people were prone to staying up late and others to getting up earlier.
“When people are living in the modern world—living in these constructed environments—we have the opportunity to have a lot of differences among individuals,” Wright said. “Some people are morning types and others like to stay up later. What we found is that natural light-dark cycles provide a strong signal that reduces the differences that we see among people—night owls and early birds—dramatically.”
Our genes determine our propensity to become night owls or early birds in the absence of a strong signal to nudge our internal circadian clocks to stay in synch with the solar day, Wright said.
The new study, which demonstrates just how strong of a signal exposure to natural light is, offers some possible solutions for people who are struggling with their sleep patterns. For example, people who naturally drift toward staying up late may also find that it’s more difficult to feel alert in the morning—when melatonin levels may indicate they’re still in their biological nighttimes—at work or in school.
To combat a person’s genetic drift toward later nights, exposure to more sunlight in the morning and midday could help nudge his or her internal clock earlier. Also, dimming electrical lights at night, forgoing late-night TV and cutting out screen time with laptops and other personal electronic devices also may help internal circadian clocks stay more closely attuned with the solar day, Wright said.
Other CU-Boulder co-authors of the study are doctoral students Andrew McHill and Evan Chinoy; former undergraduate students Brian Birks and Brandon Griffin, both of whom are now professional research assistants; and former postdoctoral researcher Thomas Rusterholz.
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