In The NOCO

If you visit the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge northwest of Denver, you see different types of wildlife, miles of hiking and biking trails and acres of rolling prairie.   But you don’t see any trace of the astonishing history of what happened there during the Cold War: The Rocky Flats plant made plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons until it was shuttered in the early 1990s.   The building...

Evacuating thousands of people during a natural disaster is a lot more complicated than simply telling everyone to move to safety.    A wildfire or tornado in Colorado, or the hurricanes that recently struck the southeast U.S., often hit vulnerable populations especially hard. Elderly folks, people with disabilities, or people who can’t afford to quickly pick up and leave have a more difficult tim...

Paying for a hospital visit often ends in a guessing game. For example, if you hurt your ankle and need an X-ray, you could pay a few hundred dollars – or nothing at all – depending on  which hospital you go to and the deal they’ve negotiated with your insurance company.   That fluctuation in pricing from hospital to hospital is true for many procedures in Colorado.  But some new websites might he...

A handful of Colorado schools monitor their students with cameras that use facial recognition software. It’s a security measure: An administrator with access to the technology can upload a student’s photo and then the system can use cameras around the school to pinpoint a student’s location.   More school districts across the state are exploring whether to adopt this technology, according to a rec...

Crews recently began work to extinguish a blaze that has burned underground for more than a century.    It's happening on Marshall Mesa , south of Boulder in an area popular for hiking. A fire in a coal seam there has been smoldering beneath the surface for years. It's a remnant of a time when coal mining thrived in the area.  Because heat from underground blazes can sometimes set fire to grass an...

Endless work emails. Slack messages from coworkers. Virtual meetings on Zoom.   If these things boost your anxiety, you're experiencing something called technostress. Technostress can also include anxiety about keeping up with new technologies – or being replaced by them.     It makes employees miserable. And easing technostress at work is an ongoing struggle for employers, especially since techno...

Heart disease causes one out of every five deaths in the United States. Now, a University of Colorado researcher says she’s found promising clues that could help treat it, but the source of her discoveries might make your skin crawl.      Dr. Leslie Leinwand is a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at CU Boulder. Her insights come from research conducted on a rather unwieldy...

Colorado and its pets are suffering from a shortage of veterinarians.   It's leading to long wait times at some clinics. And the Colorado Sun reports that many animal hospitals are so swamped they’re forced to turn away dogs and cats who need care.  On Election Day, Colorado voters will be asked to weigh in on a possible solution. Proposition 129   would create a new class of veterinary workers ca...

 Wildfires in Colorado rip through communities. They torch homes and disrupt lives.  But wildfires also cause some surprising – maybe even uplifting – things to happen. They make people more resilient. They strengthen the bonds between neighbors. And those stronger connections help people prepare for future emergencies.   That’s according to Lori Peek – a researcher who studies how communities com...

Since early 2023 hundreds of Denver residents experiencing homelessness received a monthly income whether they had a job or were unemployed.  Eight hundred participants received the payment as part of a program called the Denver Basic Income Project .   It was a pilot program designed to study whether rates of homelessness decrease when people are given a base-line income. Participants received ei...

Victorian Death Experiences is a Halloween attraction with a historic twist.   The program takes place in the historic home which houses the Center for Colorado Women’s History in Denver. Visitors see rooms decorated for mourning. They hear stories of death in the Old West. And they see fascinating artifacts, like hair jewelry made partly from the hair of a deceased loved one.   “We’re really not...

Weld County’s Clerk and Recorder Carly Koppes has a noticeable online presence. She posts lots of informational videos around election time telling voters how to cast a ballot or get ready for Election Day.  But here’s something that keeps Koppes -- and a lot of other election officials -- up at night. Artificial intelligence is developing so quickly that a bad actor could take one of Koppes’ vide...

  Today we've got something special for In The NoCo listeners. It's the first episode of "Ending the Hate State," the new season of KUNC's podcast The Colorado Dream . If you heard our Friday episode of In The NoCo, you already heard Colorado Dream host Stephanie Daniel talk about the new season. This first episode explores a time in the 1990s when Colorado voters refused to protect people from be...

Nearly three decades ago Colorado was known as The Hate State.  In 1992 Colorado voters passed Amendment 2, which banned anti-discrimination laws meant to protect gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. But the Amendment never went into effect because there was immediate backlash. It was challenged again and again for being unconstitutional, bringing it all the way to the supreme court.   Season 4 of KUNC’...

A new tax on sales of guns and ammunition could be used to fund services that help crime victims.   That’s the idea behind a proposal Colorado voters will consider on the November ballot. Proposition KK would add a 6.5 percent excise tax on guns, some parts and accessories, and ammunition. Buyers in Colorado already pay state and local sales taxes on the purchase of firearms and ammunition, and a...

More law enforcement officers in Colorado are using artificial intelligence to create their police reports.   Boulder Police launched a pilot program earlier this year allowing artificial intelligence to help officers generate reports related to minor crimes. A few months later, they expanded the policy to let AI help write police reports for all types of cases. That’s according to a story from Bo...

Patients in Colorado feel the brunt of a growing healthcare crisis every day. There’s a shortage of primary care doctors and other health care workers in most Colorado counties – and that has an especially big impact on low-income and rural communities.   That physician shortage is projected to get even worse, with roughly a third of doctors in the state aged 60 or older, and nearing retirement –...

Visit any farmers’ market in Colorado and you’ll see long lines of people waiting to buy produce that’s grown in the state.   And when fall arrives... it’s all about Pueblo chiles. The aroma of those dark green peppers roasting as they spin in large metal tumblers fills the crisp autumn air. People often buy extra bags of them – some to use now, some to freeze for use during the chilly winter mont...

School districts across Colorado have been suspending kids for problematic behavior at significantly higher rates than before the pandemic.    A recent analysis of data in The Denver Post found that school administrators across Colorado have been issuing out-of-school suspensions 25% more compared to the 2018-2019 school year.  Those figures are even higher in Denver public schools, which have see...

In 2002, Colorado saw a turning point for water use. It was the year Front Range cities got serious about how they use water and how to waste less of it.    Luke Runyon is a reporter who specializes in covering water issues for the University of Colorado Boulder’s Water Desk .  (You might remember him as the host of KUNC’s Colorado River podcast Thirst Gap .)  In a new story , Runyon looked at how...

More students in Colorado are headed to college. And enrollment numbers at Colorado colleges are climbing faster than predicted.  At the University of Colorado, for example, enrollment grew by 3.5 percent this school year – that's substantially more than the 0.5 percent increase the school’s officials had expected.   So, what’s behind the increase? And how is it changing who’s attending college in...

If you want to feel empowered to reduce your carbon footprint and fight climate change, the meals you plan, and the ingredients you buy, may be a great place to make some changes.    That’s a central point in a new book by Mark Easter . He’s a retired ecologist in Fort Collins who studies the carbon footprint of the food we eat.  In his book, titled The Blue Plate: A Food Lovers Guide to Climate C...

Shared experiences that echo across different cultures... and the unique perspectives that people from different places bring to our community.   An art show on display in Fort Collins explores those ideas through poems, letters and portraits of immigrants living in Northern Colorado.      Curator Brigid McAuliffe collected images and writings from people representing thirty-eight countries for tw...

A measure on Colorado’s ballot this November asks voters to choose whether wildcat hunting in the state should be banned.    Supporters of the initiative point to what they say are cruel hunting practices, like using large teams of dogs to chase mountain lions up trees to then be shot and killed. Supporters also say the initiative would eliminate unethical “trophy hunting” – meaning hunting for sp...

A Boulder County jury reached a verdict Monday afternoon: They found the man who killed ten people in a mass shooting at a Boulder King Soopers guilty on all counts. That includes 10 counts of first-degree murder and 45 additional charges.    At sentencing later that day, the judge overseeing the trial issued 10 consecutive life sentences, among other penalties.  The verdict comes three and a half...