In The NOCO

In 2018 the City of Boulder and Boulder County filed an unusual lawsuit: they sued Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy for contributing to climate change.   Climate change, the lawsuit argued , has caused a plethora of problems like flooding, road damage, and an increase in wildfires. The city and county have spent millions of dollars reacting to these problems.   And they wanted help paying for it.   S...

Nuclear Waste is piling up at power plants around the country, and we have no idea where to put it. Many states are aggressively fighting plans for new storage facilities.  But northwest Colorado is quietly opening the door.  KUNC’s investigative reporter Scott Franz recently traveled around rural Colorado talking with people about what nuclear waste storage could do for the local economy – and al...

Over the past few months, crews have worked on an unusual firefighting operation near Boulder. They extinguished a blaze that has burned underground for more than a century.   The work happened at Marshall Mesa near an open area that's popular for hiking. A fire in a a coal seam there had smoldered beneath the surface for years. It was a remnant of a time when coal mining thrived in the area. And...

After the recent death of President Jimmy Carter, many of the tributes mentioned his environmental legacy and push for energy-efficient development. And one unusual part of his plan was focused here in Colorado.   Carter’s administration had backed the design of some experimental homes along the Front Range. They were warmed by the sun and fueled by renewable sources – an exciting idea in the late...

A note: Today’s episode deals with issues around suicide and firearm violence.  Over the past decade, Colorado has seen more than 7,000 deaths by suicide that involved a firearm. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, guns are involved in more than half of Colorado’s deaths by suicide.  A bill making its way through the state legislature could help reduce those numbers.   The...

Ask a teacher about the hardest part of their job, and you might expect them to cite long hours or low pay .   But there’s another, less visible challenge that educators face: exposure to student trauma. Students may confide in a teacher about not having enough to eat at home, or an abusive family member.  And exposure to those problems takes a serious toll on teachers.   According to a new study...

In 2025, many of us are on social media – and lots of us are hunting for a new job.   If that sounds like your situation, a University of Colorado researcher says be thoughtful about what you post online. Because what you do on Facebook or Threads or BlueSky can change your odds of landing that new gig.  Jason Thatcher has been studying how hiring managers use social media to make decisions about...

Researcher Caitlin Clark has a job a lot of people would envy. Clark is a food scientist who oversees a new laboratory devoted to the study of chocolate – how it’s made, what makes it taste so good, and how to make new and better varieties of it.  She and her team, based at the Colorado State University Food Innovation Center in Denver, work to dream up new confections that hopefully will end up o...

In February of 1942, not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military removed thousands of Americans of Japanese descent from their homes. Most of them were full citizens who had been born and raised in the United States.    Families had just a few days to get their affairs in order before reporting to relocation centers, mostly in Western states. Roosevelt’s order affected about 120,...

In the late 1960s, a new movement of Black music grew out of the end of the civil rights era. Black artists declared their “Black power” and rocked the airwaves with the sound of funk.     Funk music was more than just a genre with excellent grooves. It had deeper social and political meaning. Funk began as a reaction to tumultuous times and would ultimately lay the foundation for the hip0hop and...

If you grew up in the 80s, you might remember a famous anti-drug public service announcement from TV. There was a frying pan, a sizzling egg and an ominous warning:  “This is your brain on drugs.”  Josh Gowin, a researcher with the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, remembers that ad quite well. Anti-drug PSA's like that one inspired him to study the effects of marijuana use on the br...

A vaccine against weight gain could be on the horizon, according to new research from the University of Colorado Boulder.  The research shows that a particular strain of bacteria known as M. vaccae could help prevent obesity by reducing inflammation.   Chris Lowry is a professor of integrative physiology at CU and led the research. His study found that he could prevent mice from becoming overweigh...

Travelers making their way through Denver International Airport can experience a colorful, distinctive new art exhibit .   The project, called “It’s Not What You Take, It’s What You Bring Back,” was created from 183 pieces of used luggage, suspended over a walkway in Concourse B. They’re painted in the vibrant colors of the Colorado sky – turquoise, baby blue, ruby red – and they form a shape rese...

For many people, being stopped by police can produce a wave of anxiety. But that sense of stress and uncertainty is even worse for people with conditions like autism spectrum disorder, hearing loss, Tourette’s syndrome, or dementia.   Boulder’s Police Department recently rolled out a new initiative called the Blue Envelope Program to help people with disabilities communicate when they encounter an...

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: Rocky Flats was the site of a plant that made plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons until it was shuttered in the early 19...

You likely haven’t heard the word ‘bipartisanship’ used much lately when it comes to news out of Washington. Republicans control the presidency and both chambers of Congress – and they’re making big policy moves.  But Democratic Congressman Jason Crow still sees value in members of the two parties working together. Crow represents Colorado’s 6th District in the U.S. House of Representatives, which...

Manipulating the clouds to make it rain or snow sounds like the stuff of science fiction. But the technology behind cloud seeding is nothing new: It dates back to the 1940s.  That science got a new look recently when lawmakers ordered the Government Accountability Office to re-examine the possibilities of cloud seeding as water becomes a more precious resource in the U.S. The newly published repor...

JBS is one of the largest meat producers in the world. The company – which is headquartered in Greeley – reportedly earned $76 billion last year.    And the company relies on immigrant labor to keep their meatpacking plants, like the one in Greeley, operating.    A new story from the Food and Environment Reporting Network and the investigative journalism show Reveal offers a look at the community...

The recent news stories about wildfires in California seem all too familiar to Coloradans. We see homes destroyed by wildfires here every year.   But we’ve also been hearing reports of a second, slower-moving disaster in news reports out of California: insurance companies pulling out of high-risk areas , leaving thousands of homeowners with no ability to get coverage.   That kind of crisis is some...

Clinicians who treat patients with eating disorders have endured a perfect storm of challenges in recent years.    Specialists say the pandemic, and the years that followed, saw more people developing eating disorders and often taking longer to seek help. On top of that, treatment for these conditions is expensive. At the same time, lawmakers have heard terrible stories of patients being mistreate...

Parents worry about getting parenting right : limiting screen time, teaching responsibility, helping with homework.  It’s a lot of pressure.  Author Deborah Winking is an elementary school educator in Fort Collins. And she found her fears about raising a well-rounded child magnified after one of her children, Jack, was diagnosed with Sotos syndrome ,  a rare neurological disorder. Doctors weren’t...

A new vending machine opened for business recently in Boulder.   Instead of snacks or soda, customers who visit the machine can grab safe containers for needles ... fentanyl testing strips... or condoms. And all the items are free.  Health officials call it a "harm reduction vending machine." It’s funded by restitution money from lawsuits against manufacturers of prescription opioids. Supporters h...

Members of Congress are required to show up in person to vote on any measures. That creates challenges for representatives who are in the final weeks of pregnancy, or who just gave birth.   U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen , a Democrat from Lakewood, understands these rules from experience. And she says they’re unfair. She’s due to give birth to her second child in a few days – which means she’s under...

As President Donald Trump begins his second term, one of his promises to supporters has been to carry out what he calls the largest deportation in U.S. history. This has a number of Colorado communities on edge, especially in places where immigrants without legal status make up a large part of the population.   It has also prompted education leaders across Colorado to prepare for how their student...

Old firehoses. Used forklifts. Two-thousand sheets of acrylic plastic.  These are the kinds of things you can find at repurposedMATERIALS in Lafayette. The company acquires discarded industrial materials and products and resells them instead of sending them to a landfill.   Damon Carson founded the business in 2011 after running two trash companies. The repurposedMATERIALS location in Lafeyette is...