A luxury tower on the Las Vegas Strip will turn into posh military barracks starting Saturday.

Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Jason Steffen, has been working with NASA as part of the research team for the Kepler Mission. This mission is in it’s final stages where release papers are ready to be submitted. The spacecraft is still functioning under there K2 Mission. NASA’s goal under the K2 Mission is to create a spacecraft and science program. Since the spacecraft is getting older, NASA has changed the direction of the spacecraft in they sky to make it easier to steer. The K2 gets reviewed every two years, where budget constraints are also analyzed at this time. Primarily, the K2 Mission is searching for different planets around different stars, determining whether or not these exoplanets could be habitable. So, is life on other planets really that common? One way to analyze this is by fractions of stars. For example, if 1 out of every billion stars has life around it, that’s still 300 in a galaxy. Regardless of this being in a rudimentary stage of research, Steffen says he would “not be surprised to find life out there.”

Kahyree Fisher paced near the basketball courts on the third floor of UNLV’s Student Recreation and Wellness Center, and gathered four other players to join his five-man team.

UNLV has appointed Dr. Shawn Gerstenberger as acting dean for its new School of Medicine while founding Dean Barbara Atkinson continues to recover from a July surgery. Gerstenberger will serve in the temporary assignment in addition to his current role as dean for the School of Community Health Sciences at UNLV, a position he has held since 2013.

Just weeks after its initial class, the UNLV School of Medicine appointed an acting dean on Wednesday as founding dean Dr. Barbara Atkinson recovers from surgery. Dr. Shawn Gerstenberger, current dean at the School of Community Health Sciences, will serve as the acting dean.

If fishing reports existed 250 million years ago they probably would have warned anglers to bring extra sturdy line to northern Nevada. That’s because newly described fossil evidence shows the warm waters of the time were home to a toothy apex predator that chomped its prey like a modern shark.

Gardner Co. along with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas are moving forward with the Harry Reid Research and Technology Park, a 122-acre master-planned research and technology community in Las Vegas. Gardner Co. has been retained by UNLV Research Foundation as master developer of the tech park.

On July 19, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson was at Nellis Air Force Base preparing to share information about a new program in the pipeline called AFwerX. The program will test collaborating with UNLV and the public to innovate ideas and for problem-solving.

June was another strong month for the U.S. commercial casino industry. The industry, which excludes tribal-run casinos, saw revenue from gambling increase year-over-year by more than two percent to more than $3.3 billion.