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Buffs Hammer Hawks, Eye Pac-12 Opener
Dec 30th
By B.G. Brooks, Contributing Editor
BOULDER – When the Colorado Buffaloes step onto the basketball court next week in the Arizona desert, the degree of difficulty will soar. But based on their final two non-conference games, the Buffs believe they are very close to being Pac-12 ready.
CU hammered Hartford 80-52 on Saturday afternoon at the Coors Events Center, opening 10-2 for the first time since the 2005-06 season. Eight days earlier, the Buffs polished off Northern Arizona 98-51 – but don’t expect a repeat of those kinds of scores anytime soon.
On Thursday, CU opens its Pac-12 schedule at No. 3 Arizona. Figure on the Wildcats playing with an extra-large chip on their shoulders; the Buffs defeated them 53-51 in last season’s Pac-12 championship game in Los Angeles. And following the trip to Tucson, CU visits Arizona State on Sunday, Jan. 6.
Starting in Tucson, reminded Buffs coach Tad Boyle, “the price of poker goes up, the intensity goes up, the level of competition goes up . . . but I think we’re ready for conference play.”
Rather than concentrating on Saturday’s final snapshot of non-league work, Boyle preferred to reflect on the big picture – the Buffs’ 10-2 non-conference record.
“Right now, what’s on my mind is perspective,” he said. “We’re 10-2 and for the most part I’m happy. There are still areas for us to get better and taking care of the ball is one of them (CU had a season-worst 21 turnovers). But when you look at our schedule and the strength of our schedule, 10-2 feels good. We’re not satisfied, but we’ve taken care of most of the opportunities in front of us.”
He said the Buffs “should dominate Northern Arizona and Hartford, but now the test comes. Can we dominate Arizona? They’ve got men, they’ve got animals. I’m not sure we can dominate, but we can stay with them . . . our guys love challenges; they’re competitive and believe in themselves.”
CU quickly disposed of Hartford (7-6). In fact, the Buffs hardly were challenged, romping to a 45-21 halftime lead and holding at least a 25-point lead for most of the second half. Their largest second-half lead was 37 with just under 12 minutes to play.
Freshman post Josh Scott led CU with 21 points and 10 rebounds, while sophomore guard Askia Booker added 19 points. Junior wing Andre Roberson had 14 points and 14 rebounds for his 31st career double-double – the sixth this season. Sophomore point guard Spencer Dinwiddie added 11 points, his second straight game in double figures after getting five total in the previous two contests.
Josh Scott led the Buffs in scoring
The Buffs hadn’t played since Dec. 21, but the long Christmas break left no ugly marks on any part of their game. After bolting to an 11-0 lead, they increased their advantage to 31-9 with 6 minutes remaining before intermission, then led by 24 points at the break.
Said Dinwiddie: “I think that every time you have an extended period of time off (and) have a lot of practices between games you’re more focused.”
Hartford was a long way from home and way out of its league, which happens to be the American East. The Hawks lost 71-63 in early December at Arizona State, and they will reflect on that loss as their closest call with a Pac-12 team. Their first 20 minutes in Boulder were seriously forgettable; they shot only 25 percent (7-for-27) from the field and didn’t reach double digits (12) until the 5:51 mark of the half.
Meanwhile, CU was in another holiday sharing mood, particularly in the game’s first 6 minutes. After recording a season-high 24 assists against Northern Arizona, the Buffs dished out 10 assists in Saturday’s first half. That helped them hit 60 percent (18-for-30) from the field and also was instrumental in outscoring the Hawks 28-0 in the paint in the first 20 minutes.
The first-half board battle wasn’t close to even being a skirmish: CU outrebounded the visitors 28-6 and finished with a 52-21 board advantage. The Buffs prevailed in the paint 44-11.
Said Scott: “We’re always trying to get a hefty rebound margin . . . we just went out and did it.”
By intermission, three CU players already were in double figures – Booker and Scott with a dozen points each and Roberson with 11.
Large halftime leads sometimes can result in an early second-half malaise, but it didn’t work that way for the Buffs. Not quite 4 minutes into the second half, they had increased their lead to 33 (56-23) and showed no signs of slowing to rest. Still, with 7:35 remaining, playing mostly against Buffs reserves, the Hawks cut their deficit to 25 (68-43), prompting Boyle to return his five starters to the court.
He said his bench “is not where it needs to be mentally. With 11 minutes to go, I wanted to let our bench take us home.”Instead, Boyle’s reserves gave up some layups, committed a handful of their 21 turnovers and were generally not as crisp as Boyle envisioned. When conference play opens, Boyle conceded “our bench has to get better – and I think it will. There are guys there we’re going to have to count on.”Of the turnover total, Dinwiddie said, “We definitely heard about that (from Boyle). We went to keep our turnovers in an eight to ten range and today, we didn’t do that. Our turnovers continue to be a work in progress. Part of it is a product of how we play, because we try to play fast. So we’re going to be higher than most teams. But we always want our (assist-to-turnover) ratio to be positive, of course.”
By the 5:07 mark of the last half, the Buffs had righted themselves and surged to a 32-point advantage (75-43) on a pair of Sabatino Chen free throws. A three-point play by Jeremy Adams brought a 78-43 lead, and at that point, Boyle inserted sophomore center Ben Mills for the second time in two games.
Just under 3 minutes later, sophomore guard Beau Gamble left the bench, marking the second time in two games Boyle has used all of his players.
Boyle said his starters “are playing together, playing at a high level, sharing the ball, moving the ball . . . I told our team that there’s not one guy who can beat the Pac-12 on his own; we’ve got to do it together as a collective group. I like where we are.”
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50,000 Endangered Species Condoms to Be Handed Out at Year-end Events
Dec 23rd
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TUCSON, Ariz.— The Center for Biological Diversity is distributing 50,000 free Endangered Species Condoms for holiday and New Year’s Eve celebrations around the country. More than 600 volunteer distributors will hand out the condoms at events in all 50 states. The condoms are part of the Center’s 7 Billion and Counting campaign focusing on the effects of rapid human population growth on rare plants and animals. “There are more than 3 billion people on the planet under the age of 25. The choices this generation makes will determine whether our planet and its wildlife and natural resource base are burdened with 8 billion or 15 billion people. The difference between these paths can be measured by how many other species are left to roam alongside us,” said Jerry Karnas, population campaign director with the Center. “Our Endangered Species Condoms are a great way to get a conversation started about how the growing human population is affecting the wild world around us, especially animals already teetering on the edge of extinction.”
As part of its full-time population campaign launched in 2009, the Center has given out 450,000 free Endangered Species Condoms, featuring polar bears, panthers and other species threatened by population growth, loss of habitat and consumption of natural resources. This year, the Center is providing condoms to college health centers, nightclub owners, environmental activists, women’s reproductive-health groups and other activists around the United States. The world’s human population has doubled since 1970, reaching 7 billion in October 2011. According to the latest research, it could exceed 9 billion by 2050. In recent weeks, several federal reports have noted the impact that population is having on the natural world. A recent decision to propose Endangered Species Act protection for 66 coral species said that “the common root or driver of most, possibly all” of the threats that corals face — like climate change and changing ocean conditions — is the world’s growing human population. Another report, by the Department of the Interior, raised serious questions about the ability of the Colorado River to meet demands of a growing population in the western United States. “The evidence is mounting, and the solutions are at hand if only we’re just willing to start talking about them,” Karnas said. “Universal access to birth control, a rapid transition to clean energy, robust land-acquisition programs and much smarter growth policies can combine to forge a future for wildlife and a high quality of life for people. There’s no better time to start than in the new year of 2013.” The Center is the only environmental group with a full-time campaign highlighting the connection between unsustainable human population growth and the ongoing extinction crisis for plants and animals around the world. In 2011 the Center released a report on the top 10 U.S. species threatened by population growth. The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 450,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places. [includeme src=”http://c1n.tv/boulder/media/bouldersponsors.html” frameborder=”0″ width=”670″ height=”300″]
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CU team receives $9.2 million DOE grant to engineer E. coli into biofuels
Dec 4th
A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder has been awarded $9.2 million over five years from the U.S. Department of Energy to research modifying E. coli to produce biofuels such as gasoline.
“This is a fantastic opportunity to take what we have worked on for the past decade to the next level,” said team leader Ryan Gill, a fellow of CU-Boulder’s Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, or RASEI. “In this project, we will develop technologies that are orders of magnitude beyond where we are currently.”
The team is working with a non-pathogenic strain of E. coli. Among the microbe’s more than 4,000 genes, the team is searching for a small set and how it can be manipulated in a combination of on and off states to change the bacteria’s behavior.
“E. coli is not going to want to make your biofuel at all,” said Gill, who’s also a CU-Boulder associate professor of chemical and biological engineering. “It doesn’t do that naturally. It’s programmed with thousands of genes controlling how it replicates. We’re figuring out what control structure we need to rewire in the bug to make it do what we want, not what it wants.”
Included in the team are Rob Knight, CU-Boulder associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry; Pin-Ching Maness, principal scientist at DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL; and Adam Arkin, physical biosciences director at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The researchers hope to engineer the production of ethylene and isobutanol in the modified E. coli. The two compounds are widely used commodities that can be converted into gasoline among other chemicals.
The greatest challenge is harnessing an efficient and inexpensive process that competes with abundant and low-cost fossil fuels like oil, according to Gill.
“Microorganisms and their genomes are incredibly complex machines,” said Gill. “The first step alone — of pinpointing the part of the E. coli genome that can help us make biofuels or other chemicals on a cost-competitive basis — is a daunting challenge. Then we have to determine if the results we want will take one year or decades, $5 million or $500 million.”
The team will be able to simultaneously identify numerous E. coli genes and the results of turning these genes on or off using advanced technologies. Many of the technologies have been developed by the researchers’ own labs.
The grant is the first of its kind from the DOE’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research and was awarded to only seven other research groups including teams led by MIT, Purdue University and the J. Craig Venter Institute.
In 2011, CU’s Technology Transfer Office named Gill an inventor of the year. In 2005, Gill won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award as well as a National Institutes of Health K25 Career Development Award for genomics research and teaching.
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