July 8, 2016: Biology night at the UAA Planetarium featuring 'NeuroTours' and 'Nanocam'
by Michelle Saport |
"NeuroTours" with UAA Biology Professor Jamie Elswick Friday, July 8, 6:30 p.m. UAA Planetarium and Visualization Theater (ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building, Room 220) Tickets on sale at UAATix.com.
In Neurotours, the latest neuroimaging technology becomes our observatory to discover the inner frontier of human consciousness. Through a live-presented planetarium show, real brain images come alive around us as we scale our inner universe.
We'll be taken through MRI and CT scans all the way to two-photon microscopy of individual neurons. During the tour we'll explore imagery on scales ranging from the size of the entire head down to the sub-cellular scale, millions of times smaller. It takes us flying through the skull to the outer layers of the cerebral cortex, exploring sub-components of the brain, wandering through neurons and much more.
Throughout the journey, you get an unprecedented view of our place in the universe, and in turn, where the universe is represented in our brain (it is!).
Complex 3-D biological structures are hard to learn by looking at flat pictures in textbooks, but Neurotours does what no one has done before-it brings cutting-edge neuroscience into the planetarium and creates an experience where we all become brain experts. For most people, the tour will be their first immersive live-travel inside a real human brain... a truly mind-blowing experience!
"Nanocam: A trip into biodiversity" with UAA Biology Professor Ian van Tets Friday, July 8, 8 p.m. UAA Planetarium and Visualization Theater (ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building, Room 220) Tickets on sale at UAATix.com.
The planetarium show that shrinks you down to the size of an insect and flies you through the eye of a needle... "Nanocam: A trip into biodiversity" is a microscopic joyride into the five kingdoms of life. Created with the latest 3-D animation technology and based on real electron microscope imagery, this show offers a unique, motivating, didactic and funny approach to biology that has never been seen like this before.
Join Hugo and Marcos as they rush to finish an assignment before heading off to the big game. But when they find the Nanocam microscope simulator online, their tedious task turns into a fascinating voyage of discovery into worlds they'd never dreamed of before.
"Nanocam: A trip into biodiversity" is one hour in length, featuring a 28-minute show and a presentation by Caroline Wilson on the biological uses of electron microscopes.
For more information, or to learn how to become a UAA Planetarium member, please visit uaa.alaska.edu/planetarium.
"July 8, 2016: Biology night at the UAA Planetarium featuring 'NeuroTours' and 'Nanocam'" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.