Boulder, Colorado in the context of "Orbiting Solar Observatory"

The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado, United States. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado system. CU Boulder is a member of the Association of American Universities, is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity" and has been referred to as a Public Ivy.

The university consists of nine colleges and schools and offers over 150 academic programs, enrolling more than 35,000 students as of January 2022. In 2021, the university attracted the support of over $634 million for research and spent $536 million on research and development according to the National Science Foundation, ranking it 50th in the nation. It receives the most NASA astrophysics technology grants of all academic institutions and is the only university in the world that has sent instruments to all planets in the Solar System.

The Colorado Mineral Belt (CMB) is an area of ore deposits from the La Plata Mountains in Southwestern Colorado to near the middle of the state at Boulder, Colorado, and from which over 25 million troy ounces (778 t) of gold were extracted beginning in 1858. The belt is a "northeast-striking zone defined by: a Proterozoic shear zone system (McCoy, 2001); a suite of Laramide-aged plutons and related ore deposits (Tweto and Sims, 1963); a major gravity low (Isaacson and Smithson, 1976); low-crustal velocities; and high heat flow (Decker et al., 1988)." Mining districts include:[1]

• Central City-Idaho Springs district
• Leadville mining district, named for Leadville, Colorado
• Sneffels-Red Mountain-Telluride district

The belt lies within a zone that has been geologically active at intervals beginning from near the time of crustal accretion in central Colorado at least 1.6 billion years ago until the present. Parts of the CMB follow shear zones of Precambrian age and the Paleozoic and Mesozoic. Igneous rocks intruded about 60 to 70 million years ago during the Laramide orogeny are associated with the belt and once were thought to be responsible for most of the ore deposits. Now many of the important ore deposits are thought to be genetically related to younger magmatism, some at least as young as about 25 million years.

The National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) was one of the national environmental data centers operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The main NODC facility was located in Silver Spring, Maryland, and consisted of five divisions. The NODC also had field offices collocated with major government or academic oceanographic laboratories in Stennis Space Center, MS; Miami, FL; La Jolla, San Diego, California; Seattle, WA; Austin, Texas; Charleston, South Carolina; Norfolk, Virginia; and Honolulu, Hawaii. In 2015, NODC was merged with the National Climatic Data Center and the National Geophysical Data Center into the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

NOAA also operated two other data centers: National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), Asheville, North Carolina and National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC), Boulder, Colorado. In 2015, the three merged to form the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, is also operated for NGDC by the University of Colorado through the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES).

The Pike's Peak gold rush (later known as the Colorado gold rush) was the boom in gold prospecting and mining in the Pike's Peak Country of western Kansas Territory and southwestern Nebraska Territory of the United States that began in July 1858 and lasted until roughly the creation of the Colorado Territory on February 28, 1861. An estimated 100,000 gold seekers took part in one of the greatest gold rushes in North American history.

The participants in the gold rush were known as "Fifty-Niners" after 1859, the peak year of the rush and often used the motto Pike's Peak or Bust! In fact, the location of the Pike's Peak gold rush was centered 85 miles (137 km) north of Pikes Peak. The name Pike's Peak gold rush was used mainly because of how well known and important Pike's Peak was at the time. The rush created a few towns such as Denver and Boulder that would develop into cities.

Front Range Passenger Rail is a proposed intercity passenger train service along the Front Range and broader I-25 corridors in Colorado and Wyoming. Most proposals envision a route from Pueblo north to Colorado Springs, Denver, Boulder, and Fort Collins. Extensions north to Cheyenne and south to Trinidad, Albuquerque, and even El Paso have been discussed.

Front Range communities were historically connected by rail transit until the mid-20th century. A series of studies performed since the early 2000s have shown mounting interest in renewed service. In the 2020s, Colorado created a taxing district to fund a new passenger-rail effort, while Amtrak included the route in its expansion vision.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR /ˈɛnkɑːr/) is a US federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). NCAR has multiple facilities, including the I. M. Pei-designed Mesa Laboratory headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. Studies include meteorology, climate science, atmospheric chemistry, solar-terrestrial interactions, environmental and societal impacts.