UNLV Associate Professor of Political Science, Rebecca Gill, Ph.D. joins us on ARC Las Vegas and weighs in on the current political climate amid the Charlie Kirk assassination in Utah.

At one time, Frank Sinatra and his fellow Rat Pack members were practically synonymous with Las Vegas. Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Junior, and their crew all drew fans to Vegas in droves, and Sin City returned the favor by boosting the whole pack’s level of celebrity.

President Trump announced plans over the weekend to sign an executive order that would change several election processes across the country, including requiring voter identification. While there is no timeline on when the order will come, it's an issue that has people divided.

All around us is a rich world for us to experience. Inside our minds, we have our own understanding of the world, ourselves, and everything in it. How does the brain do any of this? There’s all this information that we have access to in our minds, but how does the brain represent information? What does information in the brain even mean? These are some of the greatest questions that humans have ever pondered, but neuroscience has made great strides in answering them.

When Karen Harry first saw the artifacts, she snorted and shook her head. She simply did not believe that they were ancient cooking pots—everything about them looked wrong. Harry, a ceramics archaeologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, works mostly in the desert Southwest of the United States, where Native Americans traditionally made some of the most elegant pottery in the world. But one day in 2003, a colleague at UNLV, Liam Frink, returned from a trip to western Alaska, where he had been excavating sites associated with the Thule people, the ancestors of the modern-day Inuit. Frink showed her the remains of some supposed cooking pots he had collected there. The pieces looked more like chunks of scorched dirt than typical potsherds—blackened and crumbling, like nothing Harry had ever seen.

In mid-August, the science journal Nature published UNLV research about a newly discovered species of human ancestors. A group of scientists traveled to Ethiopia, where they found 13 teeth fossils. Some of them belonged to the genus Homo — yes, the same genus modern humans belong to. But they also found a set of teeth that belonged to a new species of the genus Australopithecus, indicating that both species were present in Africa at the same time a little over 2 million years ago. 

The appearance of the genus Homo is close to the Plio-Pleistocene boundary, reflected by fossils reported recently by Brian Villmoare and his colleagues and well dated at about 2.8 million years ago. The origin of Homo may relate to changes in temperature and associated changes in habitat, as recognised five decades ago by South African palaeontologists Elisabeth Vrba and Bob Brain, although they emphasised a date of 2.5 million years ago.

A charter provision allows the city’s demographer to use internal figures that factor in the area’s rapid growth — resulting in seven changes in 15 years.

Buffalo Bill's opened in May 1994 and opened a second tower in 1995. It was a hot spot early on and even served as a movie backdrop just three years after it opened.

Two decades ago, it would’ve been foolhardy to suggest the testosterone-infused confines of athletics, especially football, were a place where being transparent served a benefit. But now, every NFL team has a sports psychologist. They help with anything including athlete focus, ability to channel aggression into motivation and, on the unfathomable occasion a player or team loses, the ability to turn failure into a cathartic current.

Researchers have discovered a new species of human ancestor that existed alongside Homo sapiens.

There is no trace of that enclave today, but a recently installed historic marker now commemorates the site of Reno’s lost Chinatown. For generations, it was a place of hard work, hope, celebrations—and despair.