Seré Williams

The future doesn’t have to feel bleak, and the next generation may be the best suited to remind us. Around the world, kids are seeing the future as an opportunity to apply their creativity. One of those kids is Gitanjali Rao who lives in Lone Tree, Colorado and won TIME magazine’s first-ever Kid of the Year award.

Safer-at-home means more neighborhood walks — and that means more urban wildlife watching. Over the summer, a new virus affecting rabbits appeared — rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus 2 (RHDV2) — but, as you may notice on your stroll, the cottontails in Northern Colorado are hopping in abundance this winter.

A purported panacea awaiting regulation, hemp products line retail shelves beckoning the adventurous consumer. Humans cultivated the cannabis plant for over 5,000 years before we made it illegal and more potent. With nationwide legalization, physicians, pharmacists and researchers are starting to embrace cannabinoids in the modern age.

Colorado’s top three commodity crops are wheat, beans and corn. But there’s a new kid on the block: hemp — and its confusing sex life and relationship to marijuana is complicating matters.

The Colorado hemp harvest began last week. After 80 years of prohibition, building an industry from the ground up is anything but the American Dream for hemp farmers, and last year it came to a disastrous crash. It turns out supply and demand rely on a supply chain – which doesn’t exist yet for hemp. And demand? No one knew the demand of a product that had been illegal for decades.

Many backyard gardeners along the Front Range are facing disappointment this year, as they search in vain for the products of their labor among the leaves and vines. Many fruit-bearing plants, like tomatoes and cucumbers, seem to be growing well, and they might even be producing plenty of flowers this year. But that hasn’t translated into a robust harvest.

Scientists are trying to answer a lot of questions to help in the fight against the new coronavirus. How does the immune system defend against COVID-19? And why does the virus impact people differently? One lab in Denver is helping find those answers by gathering coronavirus patient samples for researchers to use.

Despite some confusion early in the pandemic about the benefits of wearing a mask, scientific experts have since cleared the matter up: masks help reduce the spread of COVID-19.What underlies our decision to wear a mask?