Michelle P. Fulcher

Former Peace Corps volunteer Andy Kelec lived in Truskavets, Ukraine in 2017 and 2018. He knew it as a pleasant, touristy town where he helped the locals learn English. Hoping to maintain those ties, Kelec relaunched his English club and reconnected with his students by Zoom a few months ago. Their weekly sessions continue, but now the talk is of war.

You’d think in this era of modern science, there’d be nothing new under the sun. Well, get ready for a newly discovered species of plant. And it’s called the funky thistle. It lives in some of the alpine meadows here in Colorado. Jennifer Ackerfield is head curator of natural history collections and associate director of biodiversity research at the Denver Botanic Gardens.

Singer-songwriter Neyla Pekarek found inspiration in the story of Kate Slaughterback, the famous Colorado woman who slayed a rhumba of rattlesnakes in the 1920s, and turned their skins into a flapper dress. She turned that story into a musical, “Rattlesnake Kate,” with the Denver Center for Performing Arts Theater Company.

This week’s climate report from a United Nations panel finds the effects of a warming planet are happening even faster than expected. One place where those effects are being studied is on a massive glacier in Antarctica. Among the researchers is Boulder scientist Ted Scambos, who’s watched how the Thwaites Glacier has changed over three decades.

We hear a lot about the political divide in Washington, D.C., but that’s not the whole story. Today, an interview with Republican Ken Buck and Democrat Joe Neguse, who both represent Colorado. They talk about their collaboration around policies like keeping Big Tech in check and ensuring that a Japanese internment camp in Colorado joins the national park system.

This year is shaping up to be a critical year in space development. NASA is headed back to the moon and private companies are getting into the action like never before. We speak with astronomer Doug Duncan, who is back for our regular conversation on space science, about the Colorado-built Orion spacecraft and why it’s returning to the moon. We also talk about a milestone for the mission to Mars.

Author Jenny Shank’s childhood in Denver was all about differences. The different neighborhoods she was bused to for school, the classmates and friends who grew up much differently than she did. That experience is at the heart of her award-winning short story collection, “Mixed Company.”

Lack of access to clean drinking water isn’t just a sanitation issue — it’s a health issue. Eleanor Allen is the CEO of a Colorado non-profit organization, Water for People, which is working toward the UN goal of ensuring global access to water by 2030.

Longtime Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter represents Denver’s northern suburbs and he announced this week he won’t seek re-election, something different from what he told us the last time he was on Colorado Matters in November. Host Ryan Warner asks him both about his departure and policy.

Months after they fled their country, thousands of Afghan refugees remain in temporary housing on U.S. military bases across the country. Local district attorney John Kellner, a Marine Corps reservist, recently returned from Fort Pickett, Virginia, where he helped refugees waiting to move to more permanent homes around the country.

Of course, there’s joy in giving this holiday season, but when you look under the tree do you feel a little guilty, too? All that shiny ribbon, the bright lights, the wrapping paper, even the tree itself? And what about fashion?