Up Next May 9: Christina Andruk
Plants On Fire!
Fire is a natural part of Texas plant and animal communities. Too little fire has altered our savannas and woodlands and put them at risk for catastrophic wildfires. This talk will explore how prescribed fire can be used to restore endangered species, manage invasive species, and reduce extreme wildfire risk.
All lectures in this series are free, open to the public, and held at 7:30pm outdoors at Brackenridge Field Laboratory, 2907 Lake Austin Blvd, Austin, Texas 78703 (map). In the case of inclement weather, lectures will be held indoors. Arrive early for complimentary refreshments and fun activities for kids of all ages!
Ben Liebeskind
Electrical Life
It has been known for centuries that animal tissues can generate electricity. This fact has fed some of the more outlandish pseudo-scientific theories, such as animal magnetism. But every organism on the planet, right down to bacteria, uses electricity in one way or another. Join UT graduate student Ben Liebeskind as he explores some of the lesser known uses of electricity in strange and wonderful organisms, and talks about how evolution has favored the rise of complex electrical signaling in animal brains.
Dr. Mark Moffett
Life Among the Ants
Dr. Mark W. Moffett, research associate at the National Museum of Natural History, author of the book Adventures Among Ants, and protégé of E.O. Wilson, talks about the ways that modern humans are much more like ants than we are like chimpanzees. With our societies of millions, only certain social insects and humans need to deal with issues of roadways and traffic rules, public health and environmental safety, assembly lines and teamwork, market economics and voting, slavery and mass warfare. The talk will be illustrated with a few of the hundreds of images from Mark’s National Geographic Magazine stories, many of subject never seen before. The lecture will transport the audience around the world, to experience the fierce driver ants of the Congo, deadly bulldog ants of Australia, marauder ants of Asia, leafcutter ants of South America, and slavery ants of the USA.
Science Under the Stars is a free, monthly public outreach lecture series founded and organized by graduate students in the Section of Integrative Biology at University of Texas at Austin. Our goals are to host fun, informal science outreach events for Austin citizens of all ages, and give scientists a venue to share their work with the general public.
Victoria Huang
Sex in the Animal Kingdom
This Valentine’s Day, learn about how other animals find their mates.
You may know about the birds and the bees, but do you know about the
snails and the sea horses? Courtship and mating behaviors are as
diverse as the species in our world. Learn about how the environment
influences an animal’s reproduction, and how it finds The One (or One
Hundred).
Victoria is a graduate student in the Section of Integrative Biology
at the University of Texas at Austin.
Michael Gully-Santiago
The Science and Discovery of Stars, Sub-Stars, and Planets!
Do you ever think about how big space is? Join us as Michael Gully-Santiago explains how he is discovering new stars and sub-stars with some of the largest telescopes in the world. Michael will show how we can use these and other discoveries to learn about how stars and planets form from giant clouds of space dust and gas. Science Under the Stars is a free public outreach lecture series in Austin, Texas.
There are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, and “billions and billions” of galaxies in our Universe. In the Milky Way Galaxy we call home, scientists are still making discoveries in our astronomical backyard- the vicinity of space within merely a few hundred light-years to the Sun. Weather permitting, we will use portable telescopes to look at the planet Jupiter, and its largest moons; a star formation region M42, about a thousand light-years away; and the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light-years distant.
Michael Gully-Santiago is a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. Click here to visit Michael’s website.
