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<p>The federal laboratories in Colorado together with their affiliates contributed $1.5 billion to the state economy in fiscal year 2010, and accounted for more than 16,000 direct and indirect jobs, a new survey shows.</p>

<p>NASA's MESSENGER mission, launched in 2004, is slated to slide into Mercury's orbit March 17 after a harrowing 4.7 billion mile journey that involved 15 loops around the sun and will bring relief and renewed excitement to the University of Colorado Boulder team that designed and a built an $8.7 million instrument onboard.</p>

<p>A $28 million University of Colorado Boulder instrument developed to study changes in the sun's brightness and its impact on Earth's climate is one of two primary payloads on NASA's Glory mission set to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Feb. 23.</p>

<p>A powerful solar flare has ushered in the largest space weather storm in at least four years and has already disrupted some ground communications on Earth, said University of Colorado Boulder Professor Daniel Baker, an internationally known space weather expert.</p>

<p>Following a more than three-month delay due to technical problems, NASA's space shuttle Discovery will make its final flight Feb. 24 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying two University of Colorado Boulder-built biomedical payload devices.</p>

<p>In a paradox typical of the quantum world, JILA scientists have eliminated collisions between atoms in an atomic clock by packing the atoms closer together. The surprising discovery, described in the Feb. 3 issue of Science Express, can boost the performance of experimental atomic clocks made of thousands or tens of thousands of neutral atoms trapped by intersecting laser beams</p>

<p>Two University of Colorado at Boulder faculty members have been elected 2010 fellows of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science.</p>

<p>NASA's space shuttle Discovery will make its swan song flight Nov. 1 carrying two University of Colorado at Boulder-built biomedical payload devices, including one to help scientists better understand changes in the virulence of nasty bacteria in the low gravity of space as a way to help researchers prevent or control infectious diseases.</p>

<p>Two University of Colorado faculty members have received prestigious National Science Foundation Early Career Development, or CAREER awards.</p>

<p>If you think global warming is bad, 11 billion years ago the entire universe underwent what might be called universal warming. The consequence of that early heating was that fierce blasts of radiation from voracious black holes stunted the growth of some small galaxies for a stretch of 500 million years.</p>