If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, call 1-800-273-TALK (8255).  The House just passed a bill to create a 9-1-1 type service nationwide for suicide prevention. This change could be especially important for our region, which has some of the highest suicide rates in the country.

A new study out of Colorado State University shows that disease-bearing ticks are more widespread than previously thought, but the Mountain West is still relatively safe. The study analyzed more than 16,000 ticks, most of them mailed in by “citizen scientists” from across 49 states and Puerto Rico.

Four U.S. Senators are objecting to a program that teaches TV weathercasters about the science of climate change. As the Mountain West region deals with record high temperatures, that’s left meteorologists here figuring out how to report on the science of the weather.

Hundreds of veterans are calling on Congress to scrap a seemingly unrelated attachment to this year’s defense spending bill. Around 500 signatures on a letter from the Vet Voice Foundation are calling for a clean National Defense Authorization Act.

Record-breaking temperatures are scorching the United States with parts of our region seeing all-time highs. A number of heat-related deaths are already being reported in the U.S. According to the science-based federal agency NOAA, human-caused global warming means our heatwaves are getting hotter, longer, and more frequent.

Fires are burning in Colorado, Utah and there’s fire danger in other parts of the Mountain West. Now three U.S. Congressmen from Colorado have introduced legislation that would make it a felony to fly a drone over a wildfire. Drones can make fighting fires more difficult and put lives at risk.

You may not have heard of PILT payments, but they’re pretty important for local economies in areas like the Mountain West.  The federal government gives these ‘payments in lieu of taxes’ to counties with federal lands that can’t earn regular tax revenue.   The federal government is doling out nearly $553 million.

Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument is nothing fancy when you first drive in. No towering cliffs or dramatic canyons. It’s a calm, sunny valley – 6,000 acres all totaled — of meadow and ponderosa pine forest.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may seem like an unlikely champion for an illegal substance, but the Kentucky Republican just added the legalization of marijuana’s non-psychoactive cousin, hemp, to the Senate farm bill.

This month, Colorado became the first state in the nation to allow school nurses to administer medical marijuana to students. But not all nurses may be on board. Tammy Wollbrinck is President of the Colorado Association of School Nurses. She said the primary reason children may be prescribed medical marijuana is for seizures.

It’s officially Hemp History Week. The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution that recognizes the “full growth potential of the industrial hemp industry.” But at the state level, real progress for the hemp industry is still all over the map.

Protests and blockades of clinics that perform abortions are up dramatically around the nation, including Colorado, the first state in the union to pass a law legalizing abortion more than fifty years ago.   Nearly six years after Colorado legalized abortion, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v.

Colorado will be the first state in the country to test out so-called “smart pavement” on a stretch of highway this year.  The goal of these high tech roads is to make drivers safer.

An article published in the journal, Nature, this month explains how a 130 million year old fossilized skull is shaking up scientists’ understanding of how and when the earth’s continents broke apart. The skull was from a small fur-covered, egg-laying mammal that co-existed with the dinosaurs called the Cifelliodon wakarmoosuch.

Fire experts say this season could be big for wildfires in our region.

The Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report on Tuesday confirming that Russians hacked U.S. elections in 2016. It outlined what states could do better. It turns out our region is actually not doing too bad a job.