Moon mission: will a private firm finally land a craft on the lunar surface?

“We’re going to get there, with smaller and newer companies building US spacecraft,” says Christopher Dreyer, a mechanical engineer at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden who develops lunar-exploration technologies. But “they’re going to make ....
February 13, 2024

Wrong Ideas about Teacher Pay, Happiness May Keep Students from the Profession

Those are some of the positive narratives that policymakers need to amplify and repeat if they want to convince more young people to go into teaching, according to Get the Facts Out, a partnership between the Colorado School of Mines and six national ....
February 13, 2024

2 Colorado entities net $2.4M in federal funds for hydrogen study

Out of 16 projects funded as part of this program, two hail from Colorado. Colorado School of Mines in Golden is set to receive $1.5 million and Denver-based clean energy startup Koloma will get $900,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy.
February 12, 2024

Mines celebrates 150th anniversary, opens Labriola Innovation District

Despite being one of the oldest universities in the state, Colorado School of Mines has a fresh look.
February 12, 2024

World continues to learn from Colorado's oil-and-gas methane controls

Morgan Bazilian, Simon Lomax and Brad Handler of the Payne Institute for Public Policy co-wrote this opinion piece on how Colorado has become a global leader in controlling methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.
February 8, 2024

Why lithium prices have been on a roller coaster ride

A bunch of companies suddenly became hungry for it starting around 2021. They were investing in electric vehicles and energy storage systems for utilities. But when they went looking for lithium suppliers, they found the market to be a bit limited ....
February 6, 2024
Nathan Lenssen headshot
Nathan Lenssen
Teaching Assistant Professor
303-384-2520
Applied Mathematics and Statistics

Climate change, climate variability and predictability, climate impacts on natural and human systems, El Niño-Southern Oscillation, climate data uncertainty

Ignoring Indigenous rights is making the green transition more expensive

Rick Tallman, a program manager at Colorado School of Mines’ Center for Native American Mining and Energy Sovereignty who has spent more than two decades working on financing and consulting for clean energy projects, calls the Osage Nation ruling a ....
February 2, 2024

Biden’s EV agenda hits mining world’s boom-and-bust cycle

Ian Lange, director of the mineral and energy economics program at the Colorado School of Mines, said the lithium price decline shows the difficulty of making policy when the mining sector’s boom-and-bust reality is constantly shaking things up
January 31, 2024

Will La Niña return this fall? The tea leaves are unusually strong

A paper now in review led by Nathan Lenssen, a teaching assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines now visiting NCAR, takes that research a step further. It uses a set of analog “hindcasts” (forecasts of replicated past events) across ....
January 31, 2024