Science & Technology

Smart toilet design in Cambodia held promise, but key piece was missing

Megan Maneval — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 19:30:00 +0000

Smart toilet design in Cambodia held promise, but key piece was missing Megan Maneval Mon, 11/24/2025 - 12:30

College of Engineering and Applied Science

Assistant Teaching Professor James Harper recently led a behavioral study analyzing toilet use in Cambodia. The goal was to introduce a smart design that could keep rural households safe and protect the environment. But a crucial piece was missing.

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Research center embarks on next 5 years of pioneering quantum tech

Daniel William Strain — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 17:54:23 +0000

Research center embarks on next 5 years of pioneering quantum tech Daniel William… Mon, 11/17/2025 - 10:54

This story was adapted from a version published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Read the original here.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has renewed funding for the Quantum Systems Accelerator (QSA), a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories. �� Boulder is one of 15 partner institutions on the research center.

QSA builds and demonstrates quantum technologies and computing prototypes to transform quantum information science into breakthroughs for society. These advances will enable scientists to use quantum computers to design new materials, discover new chemicals and reactions, and accelerate breakthroughs in energy, physics, biology, and chemistry.

The total planned funding for QSA is $125 million over five years, with $25 million in year one and out-year funding contingent on congressional appropriations.

“This renewed funding is a vital investment in advancing quantum technology for our nation,” said Massimo Ruzzene, senior vice chancellor for research and innovation and dean of the institutes at �� Boulder. “Together with other key initiatives like the National Quantum Nanofab facility and the Quantum Systems through Entangled Science and Engineering (Q-SEnSE) Quantum Leap Challenge Institute, the QSA strengthens �� Boulder’s rapidly expanding capacity to translate quantum advances into real-world solutions benefitting society.”

QSA is one of five National Quantum Information Science (QIS) Research Centers established by DOE in 2020 to expand the frontier of what’s possible in quantum computing, communication, sensing, and materials in ways that will advance basic science for energy, security, communication, and logistics. Together, the centers have strengthened the national quantum information science ecosystem, achieving scientific and technological breakthroughs as well as training the next-generation quantum workforce. DOE has renewed funding for all five centers.

The center combines world-leading expertise and capabilities across national labs, academia, and industry. QSA will also partner with industry, such as Nobel Prize winner John Martinis’ Qolab, to advance quantum technology for DOE and commercial applications. These public-private partnerships will ensure that QSA’s science and technology advances are industry-relevant at every stage.

�� Boulder participates in QSA through the Q-SEnSE research institute. Q-SEnSE, which is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, launched in 2020 and focuses on, among other goals, exploring how advanced quantum sensing can discover new fundamental physics.

“With the renewal of DOE funding for the Quantum Systems Accelerator, we at �� Boulder are in a great position to deepen our contributions to national quantum innovation by connecting QSA efforts with the NSF-funded Q-SEnSE Institute and our ��bit Quantum Initiative,” said Inese Berzina-Pitcher, executive director of Q-SEnSE. “I am excited for what the next five years will bring as we work with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and our QSA partners to advance quantum science and technology.”

Among QSA’s many achievements in its first five years, the center made world-leading advancements on three promising qubit technologies: trapped ions, neutral atoms, and superconducting circuits. These achievements are laying the foundation for building practical quantum systems that can tackle real-world scientific and energy challenges and have strengthened QSA’s role in keeping the U.S. at the forefront of transformative quantum technologies.

“QSA plays a vital role in advancing QIS across the U.S. by bridging the gap between national labs, academia, and industry. By fostering collaboration, QSA ensures that breakthroughs can move from experimental stages to practical applications, benefiting the nation,” said QSA Director and Berkeley Lab scientist Bert de Jong.

Since launching in 2020, QSA has enabled major advances in quantum information science, including record-setting sensors, smarter algorithms, and more. QSA achieved a major milestone by being the first to develop and operate atom-based quantum simulators with over 200 qubits, while also advancing superconducting processors and trapped-ion technologies. QSA researchers also built quantum devices so precise they can detect tiny changes in Earth’s gravity, and created quantum error-correcting techniques that bring scientists closer to fault-tolerant quantum computers.

QSA’s initiatives have led to over a dozen patents, numerous scientific publications, and the creation of startups that are bringing quantum technology to the market. Multiple quantum companies have benefited from QSA’s extensive research network and ongoing collaborations, utilizing the expertise, feedback, and techniques shared by QSA partners to enhance their processes. Additionally, five QSA principal investigators have co-founded quantum companies, applying research results to promising industry use cases.

Beyond the story

Our quantum impact by the numbers:

60-plus years as the regional epicenter for quantum research
4 Nobel prizes in physics awarded to university researchers
No. 11 quantum physics program in the nation and co-leader on the new Quantum Incubator facility

Follow �� Boulder on LinkedIn

�� Boulder is one of 15 partner institutions on a research center that is spurring new quantum technologies, including sensors that can detect phenomena beyond the reach of traditional tools.

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NIST and �� Boulder researcher Laura Sinclair works on the summit of Mount Blue Sky in Colorado as part of a project using quantum technologies to measure how gravity can affect the passage of time. (Credit: Glenn Asakawa/�� Boulder)

The reaches of �� Boulder research

Megan Maneval — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 21:53:50 +0000

The reaches of �� Boulder research Megan Maneval Thu, 11/13/2025 - 14:53

Coloradan

�� researchers across space science, bioengineering and nanomaterials are turning "what if" questions into transformative discoveries.

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�� Boulder delivers impactful research and creative work, despite federal funding uncertainty

Megan Maneval — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 17:04:13 +0000

�� Boulder delivers impactful research and creative work, despite federal funding uncertainty Megan Maneval Fri, 10/31/2025 - 11:04

�� Boulder researchers continued to deliver meaningful, positive outcomes in the university's public research mission through strong results in fiscal year 2024–25. Highlights of their work include big innovations in quantum technology, improving our understanding of space weather, and enhancing environmental resiliency.

The pace of growth in research funding at �� Boulder tapered in the new year due to cuts and funding pauses by federal agencies, including the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NASA. At $766.7 million, the newly released sponsored research funding numbers for �� Boulder reflect a 3.3% increase over the prior year.

�� Boulder drives $5B boost to Colorado's economy

“The research, scholarship and creative work produced by �� Boulder faculty, researchers and students directly impacts people’s lives,” said Massimo Ruzzene, senior vice chancellor for research and innovation and dean of the institutes. “We are committed to advocating for the support needed to drive advances that strengthen our national security, enhance peoples’ health, ensure our nation’s continued leadership in scholarship and innovation, and spark economic development in Colorado and beyond.”

The bulk of the research funding, or 69%, comes from federal agencies, including NASA, the NSF, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NIH, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. The state of Colorado contributed $15 million of the total. Nonprofits and international organizations supported �� Boulder research and creative work to the tune of $102 million; industry accounted for $31 million; and other universities provided $47 million of the funding.

Here are a few research program highlights from �� Boulder.

Innovating at a quantum scale

The NSF invested $20 million in �� Boulder to launch a facility known as the National Quantum Nanofab. In this facility, Colorado researchers and quantum specialists from industry and research institutions around the country will design and build devices that tap into the world of the tiny packets of energy that make up light.

Principal Investigator Scott Diddams, professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, alongside a team of physicists and engineers, leads the work in this makerspace.

Improving understanding of space weather

A team at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) has received $2 million to develop a concept study for a NASA mission that will investigate how Earth’s lower atmosphere influences the upper atmosphere. The results will improve and expand our understanding of the space weather system surrounding our planet.

The group, which is led by LASP researcher Aimee Merkel, is one of three selected by NASA to develop detailed proposals for the agency’s DYNAMIC (Dynamical Neutral Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling) mission.

Helping communities adapt to climate change

�� Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) has received a new five-year, $1.4 million cooperative agreement to continue hosting the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NC CASC) from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Since its founding in 2018, the center provides actionable science to help communities, ecosystems and economies in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska adapt to climate change.

Led by William Travis, associate professor of geography, the center advances the development and delivery of actionable science to help fish, wildlife, water, land and people in the North Central region adapt to a changing environment.

Learn more about NC CASC here.

Pairing humans and AI to help students learn

�� Boulder joined six other teams that make up the Learning Engineering Virtual Institute (LEVI). The institute's goal is to double the rate of middle school math learning within five years, focusing on students from low-income backgrounds.

Professors Sidney D'Mello and Tamara Sumner of the Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science join professors Peter Foltz, Jennifer Jacobs and Jeffrey Bush of the Institute of Cognitive Science in leading the project team. �� Boulder's project is the Hybrid Human-AI Tutoring (HAT) platform.

Learn more about LEVI and HAT.

Creating a Band-Aid for the heart

In the quest to develop lifelike materials to replace and repair human body parts, scientists face a formidable challenge: Real tissues are often both strong and stretchable and vary in shape and size. A �� Boulder-led team, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, has taken a critical step toward cracking that code:

They’ve developed a new way to 3D print material that is at once elastic enough to withstand a heart’s persistent beating, tough enough to endure the crushing load placed on joints, and easily shapable to fit a patient’s unique defects.

A significant amount of sponsored research funding is directed to programs and researchers with unique expertise, such as biotechnology and aerospace, which stimulates industry.

Sponsored research funding from federal, state, international and foundation entities targets specific projects to advance research in laboratories and in the field. Research funding also helps pay for research-related capital improvements, scientific equipment, travel and salaries for research and support staff and student assistantships. �� cannot divert this funding to non-research-related expenses.

�� Boulder researchers continued to deliver meaningful, positive outcomes in the university's public research mission through strong results in fiscal year 2024–25.

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Researchers aim to identify pika calls through 'acoustic fingerprinting'

Megan Maneval — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 19:31:43 +0000

Researchers aim to identify pika calls through 'acoustic fingerprinting' Megan Maneval Thu, 10/30/2025 - 13:31

INSTAAR

Chris Ray has studied pika populations in the West for nearly four decades. Today, she is collaborating with doctoral student Rachel Mae Billings on a project that could revolutionize the field.

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New 'molecular dam' stops energy leaks in nanocrystals

Megan Maneval — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 16:25:13 +0000

New 'molecular dam' stops energy leaks in nanocrystals Megan Maneval Tue, 10/28/2025 - 10:25

A molecular engineering breakthrough could make key light-driven reactions over 40 times more efficient.

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Migration no guarantee of bird biodiversity

Megan Maneval — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 16:15:12 +0000

Migration no guarantee of bird biodiversity Megan Maneval Tue, 10/28/2025 - 10:15

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

�� Boulder researchers are challenging long-held assumptions about the relationship between bird migration and the process by which new species arise.

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How animals get their spots, and why they are beautifully imperfect

Yvaine Ye — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 18:29:11 +0000

How animals get their spots, and why they are beautifully imperfect Yvaine Ye Thu, 10/23/2025 - 12:29

Yvaine Ye

From tiger stripes to leopard spots, the animal world is full of distinctive and intricate patterns.

In a new study, �� Boulder scientists refined their previous theory of how animal patterns form and successfully recreated imperfections in natural designs, like irregular spots on a leopard. The new mechanism, described October 27 in Matter, could lead to materials that can respond to their environment, such as fabrics that change color on demand for camouflage.

Top: A male ornate boxfish (Aracana ornata). Bottom left: A close-up picture of the fish’s natural hexagonal pattern. Bottom center: Fish pattern simulation based on Turing’s reaction-diffusion theory. Bottom right: Diffusiophoresis-enhanced reaction-diffusion simulation. (Credit: The Birch Aquarium/Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Benjamin Alessio/�� Boulder)

“Imperfections are everywhere in nature,” said Ankur Gupta, the study’s lead researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. “We proposed a simple idea that can explain how cells assemble to create these variations.”

For decades, scientists have been trying to crack the code of how different animal patterns emerge from a mass of developing cells. In 1952, mathematician Alan Turing hypothesized that as tissue develops, it produces chemical agents that diffuse in the system in a process similar to pouring milk into coffee. Some of these chemicals activate pigment-producing cells, forming spots. Other chemicals inhibit these cells, creating the blank spaces in between.

But just as milk clouds the coffee, computer simulations based on Turing’s theory produced spots that were blurrier than those found in nature.

Updated simulations generated imperfect and textured hexagon and stripe patterns. (Credit: Siamak Mirfendereski and Ankur Gupta/�� Boulder)

In 2023, Gupta and his collaborators improved upon Turing’s theory by adding another mechanism called diffusiopherosis, a process where diffusing particles pull other particles along with them. It’s the same principle that helps laundry get clean: As soap diffuses out of the laundry into water, it drags dirt out from the fabric.

When Gupta simulated the purple-and-black hexagon pattern seen on ornate boxfish, a flashy species found in the seas off Australia, he found that diffusiopherosis could generate patterns with sharper outlines than Turing’s original model.

But the team’s results were a little too perfect. All the hexagons were the same size and shape, and the spaces between them were identical.

In nature, no animal has flawless patterns. A zebra’s black stripes vary in thickness, and the hexagons on the boxfish are never perfectly uniform.

So Gupta and his team set off to improve the diffusiopherosis model.
They found that by giving individual cells defined sizes and modeling how each one moved through tissue, their simulations began producing imperfect patterns and textures.

Imagine ping-pong balls of different sizes traveling through a tube. Larger balls would create thicker outlines than smaller ones. When bigger cells cluster, they form patterns that are broader. Sometimes the balls bump into one another and jam the tube, breaking up a continuous line. When cells experience that, they create breaks in the stripes.

“We are able to capture these imperfections and textures simply by giving these cells a size,” Gupta said. Their simulations showed breaks and grainy textures that look far more like what’s found in nature.

In the future, Gupta plans to incorporate more complex interactions among cells and with the background chemical agents to improve their simulations.

Humans have always drawn inspiration from nature. Bats’ ability to navigate using echoes led to sonar technology, which locates objects through sound. Gupta said understanding how pattern-making cells assemble could help engineers design synthetic materials that can change colors based on the environment, much like a chameleon’s skin. It could also help design effective approaches to deliver medicine to a specific part of the body.

“We are drawing inspiration from the imperfect beauty of natural systems and hope to harness these imperfections for new kinds of functionality in the future,” Gupta said.

Engineers have developed a way to simulate natural animal patterns, including their imperfections. The findings could lead to new materials that turn to camouflage on demand.

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A yellow boxfish swimming next to corals. (Credit: Jeffry S.S./Pexels)

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A yellow boxfish swimming next to corals. (Credit: Jeffry S.S./Pexels)

Roam if you want to. Unless you're a wild animal

Megan Maneval — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 13:58:30 +0000

Roam if you want to. Unless you're a wild animal Megan Maneval Thu, 10/23/2025 - 07:58

College of Communication, Media, Design and Information

A new book from journalism Professor Hillary Rosner looks at human-made barriers—visible and not—that have disrupted animal migrations and threaten our ecology.

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AWS down: How a single network outage rippled through businesses, institutions and the economy

Amber Elise Carlson — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 21:33:19 +0000

AWS down: How a single network outage rippled through businesses, institutions and the economy Amber Elise Carlson Wed, 10/22/2025 - 15:33

Amber Carlson

Server racks are pictured in a data center. (Credit: Adobe Stock)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) made worldwide headlines on Monday when the service went offline for hours, disrupting popular apps, services and tools from Zoom and Venmo to Snapchat and Reddit.

According to Reuters, it was the biggest internet disruption since the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike went down last year. It was also not the first time the AWS data center in northern Virginia has been implicated in a major outage.

What causes this type of network outage? What impacts can it have on businesses, institutions and the economy? And is there anything we can do to make such outages less likely in the future?

To answer these questions, we spoke with Levi Perigo, professor of computer science and co-director of �� Boulder’s Professional Master's Program in Network Engineering.

What happened and who did it impact?

The AWS outage was widespread and caused major disruptions for many businesses, resulting in what some experts estimate to be hundreds of billions of dollars in economic impact. The issue stemmed from a failure in the Domain Name System (DNS), which acts as the Internet’s “phone book.” DNS translates the easy-to-remember web addresses we use—like amazon.com—into the numeric IP addresses computers use to communicate.

When part of AWS’s internal DNS infrastructure went down, many of the services and websites hosted by AWS lost the ability to “find” each other. To users, it appeared that websites and applications were broken or offline. Even though DNS is a relatively simple technology, it’s a fundamental part of how the Internet works, so when it fails, the effects can be enormous.

What causes this type of outage to happen?

Levi Perigo

Outages like this can happen for several reasons, but most often it comes down to human or configuration errors that are amplified by the massive scale of operations at companies like AWS. To manage millions of systems efficiently, large cloud providers rely on network automation—essentially using software to configure and control their infrastructure.

In this case, it’s likely that a small misconfiguration or script error was deployed across thousands of systems, resulting in a large-scale failure. These incidents highlight the importance of careful testing, validation, and documentation, especially when automation is involved.

Could it happen again? How vulnerable are we?

Unfortunately, outages like this are always possible. The more we rely on centralized cloud platforms such as AWS, the more we share in their risk. The scale of this week’s disruption shows just how much of the internet depends on a few key providers. While AWS has strong and reliable overall, no system—no matter how advanced—is immune to failure.

What can we do to prevent this or reduce the risk of it happening again?

There are ways to reduce risk, though it’s difficult to eliminate it completely. One key strategy is called multi-cloud architecture—using multiple cloud providers (such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure) to host services rather than relying on just one. This approach helps ensure that if one provider experiences an outage, the others can keep systems running.

Ultimately, incidents like this remind us that the internet is now critical infrastructure, and its reliability depends not only on technology, but also on careful design, operational discipline, and shared responsibility across providers and customers alike.

A �� Boulder network expert discusses Monday’s Amazon Web Services network outage and its wide-ranging impacts.

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