Biologist Julie Oliver explains the inner workings of our heart and circulatory system in “Matters of the Heart: Cell and Cardiovascular Disease.” With audience participation, Oliver will unravel how blood cells called platelets function at the site of an injury to form a plug. There’s good and bad news about our body’s ability to stop bleeding. While this rapid response is critical to wound healing, its regulation can be disrupted, causing a cascade of events that can lead to heart attacks and strokes. As she leads a tour into our veins, discover the what’s inside that activates the platelets – and what inhibits them. She also investigates how drugs like aspirin inhibit platelet’s clotting function. A demonstration reveals why platelets in mammals (that’s us!) respond particularly well to a daily, low-dose aspirin treatment for cardiovascular disease.
Scientists Who Turned the World Upside Down
In “Scientists Who Turned the World Upside Down,” mathematician Bart Adrian takes audience members on a trip through the history of game-changing discoveries by Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Richardson and Lorenz – but not always the breakthroughs you’ve heard about. Feel first-hand what radical idea Galileo discovered without a telescope. Take a spin, courtesy of Sir Isaac Newton and see what angular momentum is all about. Find out who Edward Lorenz and Lewis Richardson were, and then explore the scientific concept of stability in a demonstration with a tennis ball and a large salad bowl. Finally, Bart leads an investigation of the “missing mass” that Albert Einstein referred to in his famous description of the relationship between energy and mass, E = mc2.
Hidden Colors Revealed
With color, what you see isn’t always what you get. Discover the reasons in “Hidden Colors Revealed” when UWM chemist Alan Schwabacher shows various ways that color can be present, but not visible — or uncovered. He’ll make a white cloth made of fiberglass invisible before your very eyes by submerging the cloth in a liquid of the same index of refraction. He’ll demonstrate how substances can change from one color to another by removal of “obscuring” colors. On the flip side, Schwabacher will show some ways that colors caused by chemical reactions can form, and how other colors can hide by being mixed with still other colors. Finally, although colors like ultraviolet and infrared are invisible, we’ll learn how they impact the visible world: ultraviolet and sunburn; infrared and the effectiveness of insulation.