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Faculty, staff and students at the University of Colorado at Boulder have been selected to design and build a major instrument that will launch on a NASA spacecraft bound for Mercury in the year 2004. Known as the Mercury Space Environment Geochemistry and Ranging mission, or MESSENGER, the spacecraft will carry seven miniaturized instruments, said Daniel Baker, director of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. As part of NASAÂ’s new Discovery Program missions, MESSENGER will be the first spacecraft to visit Mercury in more than 30 years.

As people grow older, many worry that if they exercise they may do more harm than good and perhaps even injure themselves. But that fear is simply not true even in the case of the very old, says Robert Mazzeo, a professor in the department of kinesiology and applied physiology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "Remaining sedentary is more dangerous than any physical activity," says Mazzeo, who also is chairman of the American College of Sports Medicine committee, which recently reported on the issue.

Editors: On Aug. 26, from 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m., Levitt will be at the Troubadour Bookstore, on Pearl Street, Boulder, reading excerpts from his book on Joe Frisco, signing copies and talking about vaudeville. Joe Frisco, a vaudeville comic and jazz dancer, was probably as famous in the 1920s and ‘30s as television comedian Jerry Seinfeld is in the ‘90s. But soon after he died in 1958, Frisco slipped into obscurity.

Migrant and seasonal workers who earned general education diplomas through the University of Colorado at BoulderÂ’s High School Equivalency Program at La Junta will graduate July 17. About 500 people are expected to attend the 10 a.m. ceremony in the Humanities Center at Otero Junior College and a reception afterwards in the college gym.

University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Thomas Johnson was one of 14 researchers nationwide selected as an Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar in 1998. The honor includes $200,000 annually for up to four years, which Johnson has begun receiving this year. A fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics, Johnson plans to use the money for a new research program to study aging genes in mice.

More than 30 Denver minority middle school students and their parents will take part in a number of engineering tasks during the Success Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder July 8 and July 9.

Every summer as students leave the CU-Boulder campus for home, hundreds of high school and college students from CU's summer diversity programs take their places in the residence halls and classrooms. This year marks the first time student in all of the summer diversity programs will have the chance to meet one another at the Diversity and Excellence Summer Gathering on July 8 from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. The gathering, which is being held south of the Business College at Observatory Field along Regent Drive, is sponsored by the Office of Diversity and Equity.

Widespread public reaction to the Columbine tragedy has raised questions about the nature of humanity as well as the state of society, according to Donald Weatherley, associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The death of 15 people at Columbine High School in Littleton April 20 was particularly traumatic to people for several reasons, Weatherley said.

The University of Colorado at Boulder is giving a new twist to the old joke about how many people it takes to change a lightbulb – at the CU campus the serious question is how many lightbulbs are there to change? The answer to that is about to rise significantly with news that the Vice Chancellor for Administration, Paul Tabolt, has approved the budget allocation of $100,000 for new lighting.

Twelve South African Mandela Scholars have arrived at the Economics Institute to undergo 3 months of graduate preparatory training before pursuing master's and doctoral programs in American universities this fall. The highly prestigious Mandela Economics Scholarship Program was established by the U.S.–South African Binational Commission under the leadership of South African President Thabo Mbeki and Vice President Albert Gore.