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At the ready to help the local community process more coronavirus tests, the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Colorado State University is bringing its expertise in animal disease surveillance into the human health world. The laboratory conducts over 600,000 tests annually, helping identify and diagnose a variety of animal diseases for veterinarians, livestock producers, pet owners, government agencies, and animal-health companies. From a technological perspective, adding SARS-CoV-2 testing to its repertoire of capabilities is actually pretty simple. SARS-CoV-2 is the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. “We respond to animal disease outbreaks often,” said Kristy Pabilonia, director of the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory. “What we do here on a daily basis uses the same processes and technology for animal testing as those used for human testing.” In their Biosafety Level 3 facility, a special laboratory for testing highly infectious bacteria and viruses, high-throughput testing equipment can test 96 samples at a time, multiple times a day. The diagnostic test, called a real-time polymerase chain reaction assay, detects a virus’s nucleic acid (SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus) in each sample to determine if the virus is present. READ MORE>>>

Colorado School of Mines students and faculty are putting their ingenuity and engineering skills to work as part of a statewide effort to provide personal protective equipment to Colorado health care providers on the front lines in the fight against COVID-19. Two Mines freshmen are among the makers firing up 3D printers across the state as part of Make4Covid, a coalition of Colorado  manufacturers and makers working to provide health care professionals with the equipment they need. Photo: Plastic extenders for surgical masks come off the printer.Photo courtesy of Samuel Wicklund “Helping out has always been a part of my background,” said Samuel Wicklund, who is majoring in electrical engineering. “Since I have a 3D printer, lots of extra material, and enjoy helping others, I decided that I would start printing these surgical mask extenders as a way to help those who were risking their own health and safety as well as being away from family so that they could help others.” The simple plastic extenders are designed to go around the back of the head – instead of attaching the elastic of a surgical mask around the ears, the wearer can attach them to the extender, for a secure yet more comfortable wear. READ MORE>>>

Five decades ago, an idea sprouted into an event that grew into a movement, which today, on its 50th anniversary, we recognize as Earth Day—a global day of awareness and a celebration of principle, responsibility, and sustainability. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), originally the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), has always enjoyed strong ties to Earth Day. NREL’s second laboratory director, Denis Hayes, played a key role in its creation, coordinating the first Earth Day in 1970, in collaboration with Earth Day founder and U.S. senator from Wisconsin Gaylord Nelson. Hayes founded the Earth Day Network. The research NREL conducts every day aligns seamlessly with the network’s mission to build the world’s largest environmental movement to drive transformative change for people and planet. Hayes recognized this, observing “… a huge part of the answer was with the issues SERI was addressing then and NREL is addressing now—the transition to a super-efficient world that was run largely by renewable energy sources.” READ MORE>>>

CU Boulder researcher Daniel Larremore and several colleagues from Colorado joined a nationwide study that seeks to use social media data to better understand how coronavirus cases might grow and travel in the coming weeks. The COVID-19 Mobility Data Network will draw on huge volumes of anonymized location information supplied by Facebook to follow how groups of people move from spot to spot over time. That will allow researchers like Larremore, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and in the BioFrontiers Institute, to build maps that show where people are still traveling in the age of social distancing. It’s totally anonymous and designed with privacy as a top priority, he said. “You can’t tell anything about individual mobility since Facebook gives us only anonymized and aggregated data,” said Larremore. “But we will be able to see, for example, how many people went from Jefferson County to Boulder County last week and compare it to how many people made the same trip several weeks ago.” He and his colleagues will soon provide these maps to local public health leaders on a daily basis so that they can craft more efficient policies around how to slow the spread of the virus. Read More.

Nearly 75 years ago, the Dust Bowl showed farmers the dangers of leaving soil bare. Today, most farmers here grow cycles of wheat and fallow, essentially resting their soil for an entire year after each harvest to give it time to collect enough rainwater to produce another crop. But fallow requires leaving the soil without a growing crop for up to 14 months at a time. If it is tilled, that bare soil is subject to both wind and water erosion, and loses 75% of its water storage to evaporation and weeds. A growing number of dryland farmers are searching for more resilient ways to farm. Some of their new approaches were inspired by the water-use strategies of the shortgrass prairie. They use crop rotations to enhance diversity, plant cover crops to keep the soil covered and increase soil organic matter, integrate livestock into their cropping systems, and apply no-till farming practices. DrylandAg.org is collaborating with Lexicon of Sustainability and Colorado State University’s Department of Soil and Crop Sciences to examine new farming practices in the Semi-Arid High Plains, one of America’s driest farming regions. Participants in the project include Gary Peterson, a retired CSU soil scientist; USDA Research Ecologist David Augustine; Lucretia Sherrod, Soil Scientist with USDA ARS; and Nolan Doesken, State Climatologist for Colorado. Dryland farmers in Northern Colorado and Nebraska include Cole Mertens, Steve Tucker, John Heerman and Curt Sayles. See more at https://www.drylandag.org/

Doctors and nurses—many of whom are also researchers—are working around the clock at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital (UCH) to treat patients who are hospitalized with COVID-19. Over the next several months, research teams and caregivers will treat patients using four different drugs in the course of multiple clinical trials using Sarilumab, Remdesivir and Hydroxychloroquine. Infectious disease expert Thomas Campbell, MD, says it is important to remind the public of the lack of proven treatment options. “This virus has come upon us very quickly, and when we treat patients we have a very limited box of tools—most of which we have no idea if they work,” says Campbell, professor of infectious diseases in the CU School of Medicine and medical director of the CCTSI’s Clinical and Translational Research Center at University of Colorado Hospital. “So it is important to do carefully designed and controlled clinical research to find out what does work and what is safe.” Sarilumab One of the studies Campbell is leading at UCH employs a therapeutic called Sarilumab (Regeneron Pharmaceuticals), which was previously approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat patients with rheumatoid arthritis. It has been “fast tracked” by the FDA to use in the fight against COVID-19. Sarilumab, an IL-6 receptor antagonist, works to calm what people have been calling the “cytokine storm” or a dangerous overreaction of the immune system. Some people who get very ill with COVID-19 have a very high inflammatory response even after the virus is no longer a threat, and the body continues to release cytokines, which may actually attack multiple organs including the lungs and liver. This suggests that the problems some patients experience in terms of respiratory failure may be driven by the body’s response against the virus. “And if that is true, then calming or attenuating the hyper-inflammatory response might prevent damage to the lung that drives respiratory failure,” Campbell says. Read more about Remdesivir, Hydroxychloroquine, Research Nursing & Convalescent Plasma work at CU Anschutz.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies), especially in areas of significant community-based transmission. See more on exactly how to wear a mask. CDC also advises the use of simple cloth face coverings to slow the spread of the virus and help people who may have the virus and do not know it from transmitting it to others.  Cloth face coverings fashioned from household items or made at home from common materials at low cost can be used as an additional, voluntary public health measure. Cloth face coverings should not be placed on young children under age 2, anyone who has trouble breathing, or is unconscious, incapacitated or otherwise unable to remove the mask without assistance. The cloth face coverings recommended are not surgical masks or N-95 respirators.  Those are critical supplies that must continue to be reserved for healthcare workers and other medical first responders, as recommended by current CDC guidance.

In October 2019, scientists trapped a ship filled with equipment in Arctic sea ice with the intention of drifting around the Arctic Ocean for a full year, gathering data on the polar regions and sea ice floes. However, a new study indicates there is a chance the expedition may melt out months before the year-end goal. The MOSAiC (Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate) research team went through extensive preparation and training for the expedition, including analyzing historic conditions. The new research shows, however, that Arctic conditions have been changing so rapidly that the past may no longer be a guide to today. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have used an ensemble of multiple climate model runs to simulate conditions along potential routes for the polar expedition, using today’s conditions in the “new Arctic.” The results suggest that thinner sea ice may carry the ship farther than would be expected compared to historical conditions and the sea ice around the ship may melt earlier than the 12-month goal. Of the 30 model runs analyzed in the new study, five (17%) showed melt-out in less than a year. The research, published in the journal The Cryosphere, was funded by the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR’s sponsor. The study's co-authors are from the University of Colorado Boulder and the school's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), as well as Dartmouth College and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The ensemble of 30 model runs used current climate conditions and reflected the breadth of ways sea ice could form, drift, and melt in a 2020 climate. The study did not incorporate 2019 ice conditions and is not a forecast of the track the ship will take over its year-long expedition. “The whole point of MOSAiC is to understand the new Arctic and how things have changed over the last 10 years,” said Alice DuVivier, an NCAR climate scientist and lead author of the new study. “This model gives us an understanding of the range of drifting possibilities the expedition could face in the new ice regime.” Scientists have been gathering data on Arctic sea ice extent, which can cover millions of square miles in winter, since 1979 when satellites began capturing annual changes in ice cover. “The changes in the Arctic system are so incredibly rapid that even our satellite observations from 15 years ago are unlike the Arctic today,” said Marika Holland, NCAR scientist and co-author of the study. “Now there is thinner ice, which moves more quickly, and there is less snow cover. It is a totally different ice regime.” READ MORE>>>

Battelle, the operating entity for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to support front-line healthcare workers as they face critical shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE). The Battelle CCDS Critical Care Decontamination SystemTM is now operating at Battelle’s West Jefferson, Ohio facility under the EUA and is capable of decontaminating up to 80,000 respirator masks per system each day using concentrated, vapor phase hydrogen peroxide (VPHP). The respirator masks are exposed to the validated concentration level for 2.5 hours to decontaminate biological contaminates, including SARS-CoV-2. Battelle CCDS can decontaminate the same respirator mask up to 20 times without degrading the mask’s performance.  Further systems are currently being manufactured and deployed around the US. A small group of staff that normally support the NEON project from Boulder, CO and other NEON locations around the country have volunteered to support the operation of Battelle CCDSTM where needed.  More information on Battelle CCDSTM can be found at this link, including data sheets, FDA documentation, instructions for healthcare facilities and more. Related Update April 8, 2020: California plans to sanitize 80,000 masks a day for health workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic using the CCDS system from defense company Battelle.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is joining the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium by providing one of the nation's leading supercomputers to help research the deadly pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus. The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium is a unique public-private consortium spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, IBM, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). It enables researchers to access the most powerful high-performance computing resources to accelerate understanding of the COVID-19 virus and develop methods for combating it. The NCAR-operated Cheyenne supercomputer, a 5.34-petaflop machine that ranks among the world's 50 fastest, will be available to scientists across the country who are working to glean insights into the novel coronavirus that has spread worldwide. Researchers are mounting a massive effort to learn more about the behavior of the virus, such as transmission patterns and whether it is affected by seasonal changes, even as they work toward the development of treatments and vaccines. READ MORE.

Every workday for Scientist Eric Moglia starts the same. He drives to the shipping and receiving department to retrieve packages from far-flung spots like Alaska, Mongolia and Algeria. Inside them is precious information about climate change. But those packages might stop coming. “Shipping is shut down,” said Moglia, reflecting on how different his job is today compared to just one month ago. Inside the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration complex in Boulder, Moglia’s life has changed because of the workplace restrictions put in place due to COVID-19. LISTEN TO the full interview on Colorado Public Radio. Moglia schleps the boxes back to his basement lab where he puts on gloves and begins his routine of disinfecting everything. Each box he retrieves is specially designed to contain air flasks and are reused multiple times. The flasks are about the size of a Nalgene bottle. They're used by NOAA to measure carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and other gases that feed directly into NOAA’s world-renowned inventory. NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network has become a bizarre window into the global pandemic. Moglia worries that some sites might not be able to provide him with the air samples he needs because of it. “Every day I come into work and I’m like, ‘Is there a new site that has new restrictions that we can’t either ship to, or are no longer able to take samples?’” Moglia said. “It’s kind of nerve-racking.”

University of Colorado President Mark Kennedy has selected Michelle Marks to be the next chancellor of the institution’s Denver campus. Marks will succeed Dorothy Horrell, who will retire in June after serving as chancellor for nearly five years. Marks has had diverse experience during her academic career at George Mason, from professor of management in the Business School to associate provost for graduate education to vice provost for academic affairs. Before George Mason, she was an assistant professor of psychology at Florida International University in Miami, Fla. At George Mason University, her successes included launching a nationally acclaimed program to help students from racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse families earn four-year degrees; stewarding six- and seven-figure gifts to advance scholarships and programs; reversing a graduate enrollment decline through an institution-wide initiative to launch quality online programs; and creating a more culturally diverse student body and generating significant new revenues by growing international enrollment and turning a university hotel into a global center. READ MORE.