When Amber Turner was about 13, her parents bought her a telescope for Christmas. She’d check out the stars and wonder what was up there.

Technology companies want the wastewater. The cities produce a steady supply of it.

Inside a lab on the fourth floor of the Science and Engineering Building at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Ka-Voka Jackson pulled from a brown sack a dried seed head of the invasive plant called ravennagrass. She slowly maneuvered the brittle branch out, and from its wispy ventricles tiny seeds poofed into the air, across the counter and onto the floor. A couple of them latched onto her long black hair. “Each of the seed stock plumes can produce thousands per plant,” she said, as she shimmied it back into the bag. “It’s a prolific seed bearer. They are very light, and they can travel by wind, float on the water. And it seems to spread very efficiently in this area.”

UNLV is getting a new laser-scanning microscope, which officials say might help recruit researchers and will be available to other Nevada students.

Amber Turner tried to balance working and going to school full time, but when she passed out in her economics class from exhaustion, she knew it wasn’t possible. “I realized I was lost when I was working at McDonald’s trying to pay my tuition,” Turner said. “I thought: I don’t like what I’m studying enough to be this exhausted. If I’m going to work that much, I want to love what I’m doing.”

This isn’t your average microscope.
Carrying a price tag of nearly $1 million, a high-speed, laser-scanning microscope — the first of its kind in the state — will be coming to UNLV next spring.

If you’re anything like us, you probably have solar eclipse fever: You've had August 21 marked on your calendar for days with dozens of sun and moon emojis; you’ve got your special viewing glasses, and you’re planning on taking your lunch break precisely at the eclipse’s peak moment (for all of you New Yorkers out there, that’s 2:44 p.m.). If you’re really committed to 2017’s total solar eclipse, you might even have travel plans to the path of totality to see the phenomenon in its truest form.

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.”

Master’s student Ka-Voka Jackson has combined her passion for biology and the environment with her Native American roots to help solve environmental issues from a unique perspective.

Amber Turner, a twenty-two-year-old undergraduate student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is probably busier than you. Turner, a first-generation minority student, is a senior studying Geology who put her collegiate studies on hold to partake in an eight-month internship working for NASA from January 2017 until August 2017.

Over the course of two decades, several thousand planets have been discovered and recorded. Most of these exoplanets look nothing like the planets in our Solar System. Dr. Steffen, a member of the science team for NASA’s Kepler mission, joins us to talk about these discoveries and what we’ve learned from them.

The effects of global climate change are being felt in the West’s continuing drought, according to a panel discussion at UNLV last week. Wildfires have increased over the last several years, something one of Colby Pelligrino’s mentors told her years ago would show that climate change is legitimate.