Nell London

Prisoners are becoming professors at Adams State University in Alamosa. The school has long taught incarcerated students through correspondence courses. Now it’s added classes in prisons, and hired an inmate as an adjunct, one of the first in the nation.

Dancing galaxies and a dying double star are just some of the cosmic marvels spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope — whose optical system was built in Colorado by Ball Aerospace. NASA revealed its first images this week, providing a glimpse at the never-before-seen-universe. University of Denver astronomy professor Jennifer Hoffman helps us understand the unprecedented images.

For the first time, an all-Black team of climbers summited Mt. Everest this spring. Eddie Taylor from Lafayette is one of the climbers and Phillip Henderson of Cortez led the effort, called “Full Circle Everest.”

Sandy Phillips sees the pain caused by mass shootings through a very personal lens.  Her own daughter Jessi was murdered, along with 11 others, at an Aurora movie theater in 2012.  Phillips and her husband have been on the road ever since, crisscrossing the country.

A lunar eclipse will turn the full moon blood red, but it’s also the first in a series of interesting celestial phenomena that will happen in the next few months. Astronomer Doug Duncan of CU Boulder talks about the lunar eclipse, a parade of planets and three super moons people will enjoy watching later this summer.

It’s go-time for gardeners. Mother’s Day signaled the start of the spring season for much of Colorado.  And our listeners have saved up a winter’s-worth of questions for expert Fatuma Emmad. She’s founder of Frontline Farming, a community group that focuses on farming and education.

Shutdowns due to COVID-19 changed work and schools overnight, with Zoom meeting and Google classrooms becoming the norms. The technology that’s helped transform how we operate was created at CableLabs, a research facility in Louisville — it’s CEO, Phil McKinney, was recently named CEO of the Year by the Colorado Technology Association.

There’s a growing effort to honor Hispanic history through preservation. The national group, “Latinos in Heritage Conservation” holds its biannual conference in Denver this week. Desiree Aranda is the group’s cofounder. Annie Levinsky is with Historic Denver.

Long-COVID may have something to teach us. Those lingering symptoms of muscle pain, brain fog, and exhaustion are familiar to people who haven’t had COVID — but who suffer from chronic fatigue– people who’re often told “it’s all in their heads.” Like Dr. Michael Gallagher, of Denver. He was a triathlete — contracted a common virus — seemed to get better — but wound up bedridden. Gallagher’s new book “Run Down” is out today. We spoke in December.

For hundreds of millions of years, nature was silent. No birds chirping, no insects buzzing. But then, things changed. That’s the subject of the new book, “Sounds Wild and Broken,” that follows the evolution of animal sounds. Biologist David George Haskell wrote much of it while living in Boulder.

Kids are more susceptible than adults to light, and that can interfere with their sleep. How to help them cope? Lauren Hartstein is a postdoctoral fellow with the Sleep and Development Lab at CU Boulder.

The pandemic was especially hard on Black-owned businesses.  They suffered three times the declines seen by other ethnic and racial groups.  At the same time, a publication that supports Black businesses in Denver has been on hold since the first shutdown.  But now it’s back.  The 2022 edition of the Little Black Book launched last week.  Carla Ladd is the publisher.

The new GOES-T satellite is scheduled to launch into orbit on Tuesday, March 1, 2022. Colorado’s Lockheed Martin built the satellite, which will improve weather forecasting and climate science. Adrian Cuadra is program director for Weather and Earth Science at Lockheed Martin.