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Jayhawks Make It An Ugly Afternoon For Buffs
Dec 8th
By B.G. Brooks, Contributing Editor
LAWRENCE, Kan. – After seven previous games, Kansas’ inclusion in the Top Ten might have been debatable in a few college basketball circles. After game eight, let the debate cease – at least from the Colorado Buffaloes’ perspective.
Rock Chalk Jayhawk – and with great feeling.
No. 9 KU rocked, rolled and romped over CU on Saturday in historic Allen Fieldhouse, burying the Buffs 90-54 in a beatdown for the visitors that was reminiscent of other times in other conferences.
CU dropped to 7-2, with a Wednesday trip to Fresno State next up. KU improved to 7-1, winning its 26th consecutive home game.
It was hardly the kind of return CU coach Tad Boyle, a 1985 KU grad, had in mind when the Buffs – now members of the Pac-12 Conference after leaving the Big 12 two years ago – rekindled a two-year series with KU.
The Jayhawks visit the Coors Events Center next season, and the Buffs undoubtedly left raucous Allen Fieldhouse late Saturday afternoon already dreaming of payback.
Boyle remained winless (0-4) against his alma mater and CU lost in Lawrence for the 29th consecutive time. The series stands at lopsided 123-39 in KU’s favor, including a nasty 62-7 edge in the Jayhawks’ 16,300-seat home. The Buffs last won here (75-74) on Feb. 10, 1983, when Boyle was a KU sophomore.
Freshman Josh Scott led CU with 19 points, 11 in the first half, while Askia Booker added 15. Booker had been held to six points in each of the last two games.
KU had four players in double figures, topped by Ben McLemore’s 24. He had 17 in the first half as the Jayhawks surged to a 21-point lead at intermission. KU outscored CU 46-26 in the paint and converted 18 CU turnovers into 26 points. The Jayhawks also got 16 second-chance points to the Buffs’ six and outscored CU’s bench 21-8.
Halftime brought the kind of score the Buffs had experienced in their last game, but this time they were on the other side of it – the bad side. KU led by 21 (43-22), pretty much the opposite of how CU had started on Wednesday night in rolling to a 20-point halftime lead against Colorado State.
KU’s 43 points were the most allowed in a first half by CU this season, while the Buffs’ 22 points were their lowest first-half total of the season.
How best to describe the Buffs’ start? Try slow and sloppy. Before the game was 4 minutes old, they had committed four of their 12 first-half turnovers and trailed 14-3. The Jayhawks converted those dozen turnovers into 22 of their first-half points while committing only two errors themselves.
The Allen Fieldhouse faithful was in full voice and just getting revved up.
At the 16:16 mark, CU guard Spencer Dinwiddie went down with an apparent ankle injury, went to the locker room and didn’t get back on the court until 10:08 remained before intermission. He scored immediately, hitting a jumper from the left wing, but those were his only two points of the half. He entered the game averaging 25.2 points over his last three games and finished Saturday with four.
His shot made the score 29-13 and ignited a 7-0 run that brought the Buffs to within 29-18. The Jayhawks might have sensed a slight stirring – and it didn’t please them. A 9-0 run followed, sending KU up by 20 (38-18) with 4 minutes left in the half.
Scott scored four of his team-high 11 first-half points in the final 31/2 minutes, but down by 21, the Buffs had an uphill climb facing them in the final 20 minutes.
And rather than gaining a foothold to open the second half, CU’s slippage continued. KU opened with a 6-0 run, went up by 27 (49-22) and elicited a timeout by Boyle with 18:07 to play.
It didn’t help.
After the Buffs turned it over on that possession, the Jayhawks got another McLemore basket and led by 29 (51-22) before Booker finally got CU’s first second-half points on a layup. But by then, the afternoon’s tone had been established – and it wasn’t a pretty one for the visitors.
The Buffs trailed by 42 before it was all over.
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CU Boulder research team finds massive crevasses and bendable ice affect stability of Antarctic ice shelf
Dec 7th
Gaping crevasses that penetrate upward from the bottom of the largest remaining ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula make it more susceptible to collapse, according to University of Colorado Boulder researchers who spent the last four Southern Hemisphere summers studying the massive floating sheet of ice that covers an area twice the size of Massachusetts.
But the scientists also found that ribbons running through the Larsen C Ice Shelf – made up of a mixture of ice types that, together, are more prone to bending than breaking – make the shelf more resilient than it otherwise would be.
The research team from CU-Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences presented the findings Dec. 6 at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in San Francisco.
The Larsen C Ice Shelf is all that’s left of a series of ice shelves that once clung to the eastern edge of the Antarctic Peninsula and stretched into the Weddell Sea. When the other shelves disintegrated abruptly – including Larsen A in January 1995 and Larsen B in February 2002 – scientists were surprised by the speed of the breakup.
Researchers now believe that the catastrophic collapses of Larsen A and B were caused, at least in part, by rising temperatures in the region, where warming is increasing at six times the global average. The Antarctic Peninsula warmed 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the last century.
The warmer climate increased meltwater production, allowing more liquid to pool on top of the ice shelves. The water then drained into surface crevasses, wedging them open and cracking the shelf into individual icebergs, which resulted in rapid disintegration.
But while the meltwater may have been responsible for dealing the final blow to the shelves, researchers did not have the opportunity to study how the structure of the Larsen A and B shelves may have made them more vulnerable to drastic breakups – or protected the shelves from an even earlier demise.
CU-Boulder researchers did not want to miss the same opportunity on the Larsen C shelf, which covers more than 22,000 square miles of sea.
“It’s the perfect natural laboratory,” said Daniel McGrath, a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and part of the CIRES research team. “We wanted to study this shelf while it’s still stable in order to get a better understanding of the processes that affect ice shelf stability.”
McGrath worked with CIRES colleagues over the last four years to study the Larsen C shelf in order to better understand how the warming climate may have interacted with the shelf’s existing structure to increase its vulnerability to a catastrophic collapse.
McGrath presented two of the group’s key findings at the AGU meeting. The first was the role that long-existing crevasses that start at the base of the shelf and propagate upward – known as basal crevasses – play in making the shelf more vulnerable to disintegration. The second relates to the way a type of ice found in areas called suture zones may be protecting the shelf against a breakup.
The scientists used ground penetrating radar to map out the basal crevasses, which turn out to be massive. The yawning cracks can run for several miles in length and can penetrate upwards for more than 750 feet. While the basal crevasses have been a part of Larsen C for hundreds of years, the interaction between these features and a warming climate will likely make the shelf more susceptible to future disintegration. “They likely play a really important role in ice-shelf disintegration, both past and future,” McGrath said.
The research team also studied the impact of suture zones in the ice shelf. Larsen C is fed by 12 distinct glaciers, which dump a steady flow of thick ice into the shelf. But the promontories of land between the glacial outlets, where ice does not flow into the shelf, allow for the creation of ribbon-like suture zones, which knit the glacial inflows together and which turn out to be important to the ice shelf’s resilience. “The ice in these zones really holds the neighboring inflows together,” McGrath said.
The suture zones get their malleable characteristic from a combination of ice types. A key component of the suture zone mixture is formed when the bottoms of the 12 glacial inflows begin to melt. The resulting freshwater is more buoyant than the surrounding seawater, so it rises upward to the relatively thinner ice zones between the glacial inflows, where it refreezes on the underside of the shelf and contributes to the chaotic ice structure that makes suture zones more flexible than the surrounding ice.
It turns out that the resilient characteristics of the suture zones keep cracks, including the basal crevasses, from spreading across the ice shelf, even where the suture zone ice makes up a comparatively small amount of the total thickness of the shelf. The CIRES team found that at the shelf front, where the ice meets the open sea, suture zone ice constitutes only 20 percent of the total thickness of the shelf but was still able to limit the spread of rifts through the ice. “It’s a pretty small part of the total ice thickness, and yet, it still has this really important role of holding the ice shelf together,” McGrath said.
Other CU researchers involved in the Larsen C project were Konrad Steffen, former director of CIRES; Ted Scambos, of CIRES and CU-Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center; Harihar Rajaram, of the Department of Civil Engineering; and Waleed Abdalati, of CIRES.
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CU study: New public gut bacteria study expected to reach around world
Nov 25th
Ever wondered who is living in your gut, and what they’re doing? The trillions of microbial partners in and on our bodies outnumber our own cells by as many as 10 to 1 and do all sorts of important jobs, from helping digest the food we eat this Thanksgiving to building up our immune systems.
In association with the Human Food Project, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder along with researchers at other institutions around the world are launching a new open-access project known as “American Gut” in which participants can get involved in finding out what microbes are in their own guts and what they are doing in there.
The project builds on previous efforts, including the five-year, $173-million NIH-funded Human Microbiome Project, to characterize the microbes living in and on our bodies, said Associate Professor Rob Knight of CU-Boulder’s BioFrontiers Institute. But unlike other projects that have focused on carefully chosen test subjects with a few hundred people, this project allows the public to get involved and is encouraging tens of thousands of people to do so, Knight said.
“Galileo saw outer space through his telescope, and we want to see the inner space of your gut through modern genetics,” said Rob Dunn, a scientist at North Carolina State University and a collaborator on the project. The new project will be “crowd-funded” by individuals interested in learning more about their own gut bacteria and by others who simply want to contribute to the project, said Dunn.
“By combining the crowd-funding model with the open-access data analysis model that we pioneered with the Earth Microbiome Project, we can finally give anyone with an interest in his or her microbiome an opportunity to participate, whether by contributing samples or by looking at the data,” said Knight, also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist.
Public interest is immense, says the research team. 18,000 people have already signed up to receive more information by email about the project when it launches. “The American Gut project builds on the Human Microbiome Project by allowing anyone to participate, and will let the public join in the excitement of this new field,” said Lita Proctor, program director for the Human Microbiome Project. “We can expect this to lay the groundwork for all sorts of fascinating studies in the future, that others will in turn build on.”
The American Gut project is an opportunity for the “citizen scientists” working with team of leading researchers and labs throughout the United States to help shape a new way of understanding how diet and lifestyle may contribute to human health through each person’s suite of trillions of tiny microbes, say the researchers. A key aspect of the project is to understand how diet and lifestyle, whether by choice — like athletes or vegetarians — or by necessity, including those suffering from particular autoimmune diseases or who have food allergies, affect peoples’ microbial makeup, said Knight.
“This will be the first project of its kind that might be able to address this question at such a large scale,” said Jeff Leach, founder of the Human Food Project and co-founder of American Gut. The gut microbiome has been linked to many diseases, including obesity, cancer, and inflammatory bowel disease — all of which are much more common in Western populations, he said.
“We should start thinking about diets not only from the perspective of what we should eat, but what we should be feeding our entire gut microbial systems,” said Leach. A key aspect of the project is to integrate studies of Americans of all shapes and sizes with studies of people living more traditional lifestyles in Africa, South America and elsewhere, he said.
The steep decline in the cost of DNA sequencing and recent advances in computational techniques allow for the analysis of microbial genomes orders of magnitude cheaper than was possible only a few years ago, said Knight. Sequencing is now getting cheap enough — participants who donate $99 or more can expect to get tens of thousands of sequences from microbes in their gut — that participants can include their families and even their pets, Knight said.
Doctoral student Daniel McDonald is one of several CU-Boulder students who will be involved in the effort. “I am excited to have the opportunity to develop new computational tools in order to further explore this frontier,” said McDonald, who is in the Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology program at the BioFrontiers Institute.
“I am pleased to participate in this pioneering effort that marries the vast interest of the public in science with questions that are worth answering about human health and nutrition,” said Martin Blaser, chair of the Department of Medicine and professor of microbiology at New York University. “Through this consortium, the technical and intellectual resources are there to lead to important new knowledge.”
The project will seek to build on a growing canine and feline database as well. “The majority of data we currently have on the dog and cat microbiomes has come from a handful of small studies in research or clinically ill animals,” said Associate Professor Kelly Swanson of the Department of Animal Sciences and Division of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “This study will apply the technology to free-living pets, where diet, genetics, and living environment are quite different from household to household.
“This research may identify important trends not possible with lab-based studies, and help guide us on how to feed our pets in the future,” said Swanson.
The backdrop to the project is the radical decline in the cost of DNA sequencing, which allows analysis of microbial genomes orders of magnitude cheaper than was possible only a few years ago, and recent advances in computational techniques. Participants in the project include many of the key players in the Human Microbiome Project and research facilities around the world.
To learn more about participating in or contributing to the project visit https://www.indiegogo.com/americangut. For a list of additional collaborators on the project visithttp://humanfoodproject.com/the-people/collaborators/.
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