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The University of Colorado at Boulder will confer 1,076 degrees during the summer commencement ceremony Saturday, Aug. 11, at 8:30 a.m. The summer ceremony, which is much smaller than the spring and winter ceremonies, is the only one held outside on the lawn of the historic Norlin Quadrangle in the heart of the Boulder campus. The ceremony will include the reading of all the graduates' names and will last about two hours. If it rains the ceremony will be held in an abbreviated form.

In a unique funding arrangement, CU-Boulder's Porter Biosciences Building soon will be equipped with an energy-efficient heat recovery system funded in part by a private donation from Boulder residents Chuck and Patricia Palmer. The $300,000 system will be installed into the heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems of the laboratory building. Porter Biosciences is typically one of the largest energy users on campus because it continually exhausts 100 percent of its conditioned air from the building. Typical buildings exhaust only about 15-25 percent.

A total of 118 blankets and towels were collected during the University of Colorado at Boulder's community blanket and towel drive for the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless and the Boulder and Longmont Humane Societies. CU's Office of Community Affairs partnered with the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity to distribute blankets to the homeless shelter. Â鶹ÒùÔº joined with university coordinators to recycle the items as they moved out of the residence halls last spring, which led to a successful outcome of the drive, said Gail Siegel, community affairs director.

NEWS TIP SHEET CU-Boulder Experts Available to Comment on July 25 CSAP Results Two testing experts from the CU-Boulder School of Education will be available to comment on the release of Colorado Student Assessment Program reading, writing, math and science test results for grades four to 10 on Wednesday, July 25. Lorrie Shepard, dean of the School of Education and professor of education, can be reached Wednesday afternoon at (303) 492-8108. Shepard is frequently cited as a national authority on standardized testing and assessment and kindergarten readiness.

The Perseid meteor shower, one of the best celestial treats of the year, will be visible in night skies throughout Colorado in early August. The natural fireworks will be most active Aug. 8-15, peaking Aug. 12 during the early morning hours between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. when more than 50 meteors per hour could be visible, according to experts at the Fiske Planetarium at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Approximately 350 incoming first year students at the University of Colorado at Boulder will participate in the second annual Camp Colorado on Aug. 20-22 to learn more about CU-Boulder traditions. According to camp organizer Matthew Hiser, CU alumni association director of student relations, students will travel to the Snow Mountain Ranch YMCA Camp outside of Winter Park for activities designed to introduce them to CU-Boulder traditions, the Rocky Mountains and fellow classmates.

Former CU-Boulder professor of electrical engineering and Nobel laureate Herbert Kroemer will return to the Boulder campus next month to receive an honorary degree at August commencement and present a public lecture on his groundbreaking research in semiconductors, which helped to launch the modern Information Age. The lecture, titled "Heterostructures for Everything?" will be presented Friday, Aug. 10, from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., in the Math 100 Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Patricia Graff, a former project manager at Leopard Communications in Boulder, has been named assistant director of the Robert H. and Beverly A. Deming Center for Entrepreneurship, a joint program of the colleges of business and engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her appointment was effective July 16.

Recent discoveries about the universe and its evolution will be the topic of "The Big Bang," a live show at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Fiske Planetarium on Friday, Aug. 3, at 8 p.m. CU-Boulder Professor Andrew Hamilton will take the planetarium audience on a trip back in time to learn about the "big bang" and how the Milky Way and its stars were formed. The term big bang refers to the theory that the universe began at a single point in space and has been expanding ever since.

A group of Colorado physicists who made worldwide news in 1995 by creating a new form of matter called Bose-Einstein condensate have developed a new "flavor" of the matter that has been delivering surprise after surprise in the laboratory.