Nov. 18, 2016: Experience live-travel inside a human brain; journey through history with Charles Darwin

As Alaska's largest planetarium, the UAA Planetarium & Visualization Theater is an immersive place to explore the world around us-from the smallest microbes to the most distant galaxies. See below to learn what's playing next at the UAA Planetarium. For more information, including how to become a planetarium member, please visit uaa.alaska.edu/planetarium.

Neurotours, presented by UAA Biology Professor Caroline Wilson, Ph.D. Friday, Nov. 18, 6:30 p.m. ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building, Room 220 Tickets / Preview

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!

Natural Selection, presented by Microbiologist Catherine Pongratz Friday, Nov. 18, 8 p.m. ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building, Room 220 Tickets / Preview

In Victorian times many physical phenomena had already been discovered and described by natural laws, but life's most eloquent mechanism was still unknown. Join the young Charles Darwin on an adventurous voyage of exploration circumnavigating the world with the H.M.S. Beagle. Hear Darwin himself reveal the simple and beautiful mechanism that explains the evolution of all life on Earth: natural selection.

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Save the date for these upcoming shows at the UAA Planetarium & Visualization Theater:

• Friday, Dec. 9, 6:30 p.m. - Coloring the Universe
• Friday, Dec. 9, 8 p.m. - Undiscovered Worlds
• Friday, Dec. 16, 6:30 p.m. - Earthquake
• Friday, Dec. 16, 8 p.m. - Tilted Solstice

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