Enjoy Discover Science at Home, a virtual event series
The College of Science was offering a virtual Discover Science Lecture Series experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The virtual Discover Science at Home lectures feature leading scientists in the College. Learn about exciting new research and groundbreaking science from the comfort of your own home.
Past Discover Science at Home lectures and lecture recordings
Dr. Michael Webster
Calibrating Vision
Like a camera, our visual system must constantly adjust its sensitivity to match the properties of the current visual environment. However unlike a camera, in vision, these adjustments occur for almost everything we see – from basic features like brightness and color to complex attributes like the expression on a face. As a result, how you are currently perceiving your world is profoundly affected by the world you are in. I will illustrate the consequences of these adaptations for understanding how visual percepts change when your world changes, and why they tend to stay the same despite when you change (e.g. because of aging or disease).
Michael Webster is a Foundation Professor of Psychology and Director of UNR’s Center for Integrative Neuroscience (NIH COBRE award). He also co-directs both the undergraduate and graduate degree programs in Neuroscience.
Dr. Wendy Calvin
Roving Mars: From Sojourner to Perseverance
On February 18, 2021 NASA landed the fifth rover on the surface of Mars to explore an ancient lake deposit in Jezero crater. Since the first rover, Sojourner, landed in 1997 our knowledge of our sister planet has expanded tremendously through a suite of orbiter, lander and rover missions. Perseverance sets the stage for the next ambitious breakthrough, the return of a well-characterized set of geologic samples from Mars. Perseverance is equipped with sophisticated instrumentation to understand the environmental conditions linked to the habitability of early Mars and will collect rock cores intended to be returned to Earth. The talk will discuss the evolution of orbital information for selecting landing sites, the improvement and increased sophistication in engineering our roving vehicles and the scientific discoveries and accomplishments of our six-wheeled Martian explorers.
Dr. Calvin is a planetary scientist specializing in optical and infrared spectroscopy of minerals and ices. She has been working with data from Mars since she did her doctorate in 1991 and has been a member of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) team since 2002.
Learn more about Dr. Calvin's research as a member of the MER team
Dr. Bridget Ayling
Renewable energy underground – searching for hot water and hot rocks in the western USA
Geothermal energy is the heat of the earth, and this vast resource has been harnessed for electricity generation, heating and bathing for >100 years. The Great Basin region of the western USA is a world-class geothermal province, with substantial untapped resource potential. To facilitate greater use of this renewable energy source, we are working to understand (1) where do these resources exist and why? (2) how do fluids circulate in geothermal systems? and 3) how can we improve our chances of discovering viable geothermal systems for power generation? In this talk, I’ll review our current understanding and the latest research that aims to answer these pressing questions.
Dr. Beth Leger
Tales from the crypt: What can we learn from natural history museums?
Many people appreciate the aesthetic appeal of natural history museums, and these collections are a treasured part of school field trips, family vacations, and rainy weekend days, for people lucky enough to have access to a public museum of natural history. Beyond the sometimes old-fashioned displays (dioramas, skins, and skeletons), there is a whole world of irreplaceable collections hidden away in scientifically controlled environments, representing a record of the history of life on earth that exists nowhere else. In addition to educating the public, these collections are important for lines of research that include questions about responses to climate change, managing invasive species, and the identification of new diseases, among many others.
We have one such collection here at the University of Nevada, Reno Museum of Natural History, which houses plants and animals from our region and beyond, documenting the life of our state with specimens dating back to the 1850s. I will describe our museum, its waxing and waning in favor over time, current efforts to protect, preserve, and share these precious items, as well as present examples of how scientists are using collections to answer some of the biggest questions of our time. Museum research has led to some unexpected discoveries, providing answers to questions such as: How does human harvest affect wild organisms? Are all species responding similarly to climate change? And why is a museum curator’s work never done?
Dr. Neil Lareau
Radar and Lidar Observations of Wildfire Plume Dynamics
Large, high-intensity wildfires can generate their own extreme weather, including fire-generated thunderstorms (i.e., pyrocumulonimbus) and rare fire-tornados. My research aims to understand these phenomena using state-of-the-science radars and lidars, which can probe the internal dynamics of wildfire convective plumes. This talk will use these data to examine:
- Tornadic vortices generated during the Carr and Loyalton Fires
- Smaller, but still intense, vortices generated in both prescribed and wildland fire.
- The extreme updrafts occurring inside pyrocumulonimbus clouds.
Collectively these analyses help paint a clearer picture of how and when wildfires produce extreme weather, paving the way for nowcasting and warning for high-impact extreme fire behavior.