EnergySmart customers can access up to $1,000 in rebates for home energy efficiency upgrades
May 2nd
Boulder County, Colo. – Boulder County residents have a limited time to access new rebates for energy efficiency improvements in their homes.
Through its EnergySmart program, Boulder County is offering up to $1,000 per household in rebates until July 31 or until funds are exhausted. Rebates are for qualifying projects including insulation, furnace replacement, efficient windows, and Energy Star appliances such as refrigerators, dishwashers and more.
The more than $300,000 in rebates are available to EnergySmart participants only. EnergySmart provides a full suite of services to help Boulder County residents identify valuable energy-saving opportunities.
More information and registration is available at www.EnergySmartYES.com or by calling 303-544-1000. Rebate payment takes an average of 6-8 weeks and will be made to qualifying applicants upon completion of projects on a first-come, first-served basis.
The $1,000 in EnergySmart rebates are available in addition to existing utility rebates. EnergySmart also offers 2.5 percent interest “microloans” for up to $5,000 on qualifying energy efficiency projects. More than 1,200 Boulder County residents have enrolled in EnergySmart services since the program launched in early 2011.
“Rebates are generally confusing, but EnergySmart helps people find them and figure them out. We even fill out the paperwork,” said EnergySmart Advisor manager Andy Mazal. “These new $1,000 rebates are really going to get people excited. There has never been a better time or an easier way to make energy efficiency upgrades.”
EnergySmart services and large energy efficiency rebates are also available to all businesses in Boulder County.
EnergySmart is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the U.S. Department of Energy’s BetterBuildings grant program and is sponsored in partnership by Boulder County, the cities of Boulder and Longmont, Xcel Energy and the Platte River Power Authority. Residential services are administered by Populus, LLC.
CU APPLIED MATHEMATICS PROFESSOR HARVEY SEGUR TO RECEIVE 2011 HAZEL BARNES PRIZE
May 2nd
Segur will receive an engraved university medal and a $20,000 cash award, the largest single faculty award funded by CU-Boulder. He will be recognized at a reception in his honor next fall and at the winter commencement ceremony on Dec 16.
The prize recognizes Segur’s highly cited and influential research on nonlinear waves, along with his exceptional teaching record as a CU-Boulder faculty member since 1989.
“Professor Segur’s transformational teaching and curriculum enhancements in service to our students embodies our Flagship 2030 Strategic Plan to redefine education for the 21st century,” said Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. “It is because of faculty like Professor Segur that learning and teaching is one of our pillars of impact at CU-Boulder. But this honor also recognizes his influential scholarly work and service and that is why it is our highest faculty honor.”
Segur is helping to transform undergraduate education at CU-Boulder, focusing on improved student performance in lower-division calculus. The subject is a gatekeeper for majors and careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, fields, according to Segur.
To bolster student success in introductory calculus courses, Segur, instructor Mary Nelson and others in the applied mathematics department have implemented more reflective discourse in the classroom through oral assessments. They also expanded CU-Boulder’s Calculus I curriculum to include a two-semester alternative to the usual one-semester course, with the alternative designed to help students with weak mathematical backgrounds. Several universities across the United States are now adopting these reforms.
Segur received a 1994 Teaching Excellence Award from the Boulder Faculty Assembly and was awarded the Minority Engineering Program’s Faculty Award in 1995.
In 1998, Segur was named a President’s Teaching Scholar by former CU president John Buechner. He also served as chair of the applied mathematics department from 2000 to 2003.
Segur was selected to give CU-Boulder’s 97th Distinguished Research Lecture in 2005, the highest honor bestowed by the Graduate School on a faculty member, recognizing an entire body of research and creative work. His talk was on fluid dynamics, describing several types of ocean waves, including common, wind-driven waves and much rarer tsunami waves.
Segur has authored several books and numerous journal articles. He has been a principal lecturer at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. He also has been a guest lecturer in 15 countries including Germany, Russia, Japan, China and Denmark.
Segur has conducted research in various mathematical fields for the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NATO, the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Army Research Office. He also has worked extensively in private industry.
Segur received his master’s and doctoral degrees in aeronautical sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to CU-Boulder he was a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology, an associate professor at Clarkson College of Technology in Potsdam, N.J., and a professor at State University of New York, Buffalo.
The Hazel Barnes Prize was established in 1991 to recognize the enriching relationship between teaching and research. The prize was named in honor of CU-Boulder philosophy Professor Emerita Hazel Barnes, who taught at CU-Boulder from 1943 to 1986 and is noted for her interpretations of the works of French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. Barnes died in 2008 at the age of 92.
For more information on the Hazel Barnes Prize and a list of recipients visit http://www.colorado.edu/chancellor/awards/index.html.
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ANCIENT BIPEDAL HOMINID DUBBED ‘NUTCRACKER MAN’ PREFERRED GRASS TO NUTS, NEW STUDY FINDS
May 2nd
The hominid, known as Paranthropus boisei, ranged across the African landscape more than 1 million years ago and lived side-by-side with direct ancestors of humans, said University of Colorado Boulder anthropology Professor Matt Sponheimer, a study co-author. It was long assumed Paranthropus boisei favored nuts, seeds and hard fruit because of its huge jaws, powerful jaw muscles and the biggest and flattest molars of any known hominid in the anthropological record, he said.
In the last several years, research on the wear marks of teeth from Paranthropus boisei by other research teams has indicated it likely was eating items like soft fruit and grasses, said Sponheimer. That evidence, combined with the new study that measured the carbon isotopes embedded in fossil teeth to infer diet, indicates the rugged jaw and large, flat tooth structure may have been just the ticket for Paranthropus boisei to mow down and swallow huge amounts of grasses or sedges at a single sitting, he said.
“Frankly, we didn’t expect to find the primate equivalent of a cow dangling from a remote twig of our family tree,” said Sponheimer.
Published in the May 2 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study was led by University of Utah Professor Thure Cerling. Other authors included Emma Mbua, Frances Kirera, Fredrick Manthi and Meave Leakey from the National Museums of Kenya, Fredrick Grine from Stony Brook University in New York and Kevin Uno from the University of Utah.
“Fortunately for us, the work of several research groups over the last several years has begun to soften prevailing notions of early hominid diets,” said Sponheimer. “If we had presented our new results at a scientific meeting 20 years ago, we would have been laughed out of the room.”
For the new study, the researchers removed tiny amounts of enamel from 22 Paranthropus boisei teeth collected in central and northern Kenya, each of which contained carbon isotopes absorbed from the types of food eaten during the lifetime of each individual. In tropical environments, virtually all trees and bushes — including fruits and leaves — use the so-called C3 photosynthetic pathway to convert sunlight into energy, while savannah grasses and some sedges use the C4 photosynthetic pathway.
The isotope analysis indicated Paranthropus boisei individuals were much bigger fans of C4 grasses and sedges than C3 trees, shrubs and bushes. The results indicated the collective diet of the 22 individuals averaged about 77 percent grasses and sedges for a period lasting at least 500,000 years, said Sponheimer.
The research team also compared the carbon isotope ratios of Paranthropus teeth with the teeth of other grazing mammals living at the same time and in the same area, including ancestral zebras, hippos, warthogs and pigs. The results indicated those mammals were eating primarily C4 grasses, virtually identical to Paranthropus boisei. “They were eating at the same table,” said Cerling.
Paranthropus was part of a line of close human relatives known as australopithecines that includes the famous 3-million-year-old Ethiopian fossil Lucy, seen by some as the matriarch of modern humans. Roughly 2.5 million years ago, the australopithecines are thought to have split into the genus Homo — which produced modern Homo sapiens — and the genus Paranthropus, that dead-ended, said Sponheimer.
“One key result is that this hominid had a diet fundamentally different from that of all living apes, and, by extension, favored very different environments,” he said. “And having a good idea of where these ancient creatures lived and what they ate helps us understand why some early hominids left descendants and others did not.”
The first skull of a Paranthropus boisei individual was discovered by co-author Meave Leakey’s in-laws, Mary and Louis Leaky, in 1959 in Tanzania.
In 2006, a team led by Sponheimer found that a cousin of Paranthropus boisei known as Paranthropus robustus had a far more diverse diet than once believed, clouding the notion that it was driven to extinction by its picky eating habits. Published in Science magazine, the study showed that Paranthropus robustus had a diverse diet ranging from fruits and nuts to sedges, grasses, seeds and perhaps even animals.
So what led to the end of the line for Paranthropus? It could well have been direct competition with Homo — which was becoming skilled in extensive bone and stone technology — or it could have been a variety of other issues, including a slower reproductive rate for Paranthropus than for Homo, he said.
The new study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the CU-Boulder Dean’s Fund for Excellence.
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