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This exhibit series is funded by a grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.
Previous Portal Exhibits
Chemists: Catalysts for Change – March 19, 2016 – September 5, 2016.
The raw materials that make up medicine, microchips, eyeglasses and even dog toys come from one source: oil. Find out more about these chemicals and chemistry in general at Chemists: Catalysts for Change, the new exhibit in the Portal to Current Research space.
Get to know some of the chemists from the University of Washington’s Center for Enabling New Technologies through Catalysis (CENTC). Learn about their efforts to make chemical reactions happen faster and their search for new sources of raw materials for everyday items. Roll up your sleeves, put on your gloves and build a compound. Explore some of the chemicals we use every day—did you know table salt is a chemical?—and see the catalysts inside your car.
This exhibit is made possible by grant number CHE-1205189 from the National Science Foundation.
Memory: Past Meets Present – September 19-March 6, 2016
How do your muscles learn to ride a bike, shoot a basketball or play the piano? In Memory: Past Meets Present, dive into procedural (a.k.a. muscle) memory and explore how practicing a specific action many times teaches your body to do physical tasks.
Train your own memory with a “save-the-prince” interactive game, and see if you can use your procedural memory to play a simple song on a keyboard. Meet UW graduate students working on a project called “vHAB” that could help patients relearn muscle memories after disease or injuries; then play a vHAB video game that uses sensitive motion-tracking technology to read your muscle movements and give you feedback on improvement.
Researchers estimate we each have about 86 billion neurons in our brains connected by 100,000 miles of axons—that’s equivalent to four trips around the Earth! While still don’t know exactly how our neurons talk to each other, scientists have made huge leaps in understanding how we acquire, consolidate and retrieve our memories.
This exhibit is made possible by a grant from The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.
Investigating Arctic Ice Melt February-September, 2015
Narwhals, polar suits and buoys, oh my! Come explore our new exhibit, Investigating Arctic Ice Melt, and see how sea ice moves, how oceans are like layer cakes and where narwhals go for the winter. Featuring research from five University of Washington scientists out of the Polar Science Center, Investigating Arctic Ice Melt uses pieces of complementary Arctic research to answer the question – what is going on with Arctic ice melt? Explore how wind affects sea ice and how light reflects off it – and how this impacts our climate. Are you as tall as a narwhal’s tooth? Come find out, at Investigating Arctic Ice Melt
Meet the Scientists
Kristin Laidre – Kristin studies the movements of narwhals and polar bears in the Arctic, two species that call the ice their home. How is the changing ice landscape affecting these creatures? Kristin is working to find out.
Bonnie Light – Bonnie studies the physics and optics of sea ice – how the bright summer sun affects ice formation and movement, which in turn affects the atmosphere. Being able to answer these questions will give us more accurate predictions of future climate.
Ignatius Rigor – Ignatius studies Arctic sea ice, one of the primary indicators of global climate change. The ice waxes and wanes, driven by variations in sunlight and temperature. Changes in wind also play an important role by redistributing the ice across the Arctic Ocean, creating areas of open water, and by compressing this ice into ridges. Making sense of the complex interplay between the air, ocean and sea ice is a challenging puzzle that motivates his research.
Axel Schweiger – Axel studies the interaction of sea ice with clouds and radiation using satellite data, models and in-situ observations. Axel hopes his work will help lessen the negative impacts of our actions on the environment by developing better models that illustrate the risks of not address