Science & Technology   

Learn sky basics along with the winter constellations and planets. Special topics include Jupiter and its auroras, the secrets of starlight, and where planets and stars come from. We'll also preview the upcoming lunar eclipse in March and spend an optional night stargazing with a telescope on Skyline Parkway. One of the four classes will be held at the Marshall W. Alworth Planetarium at UMD.

The year 2026 marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of the first electronic message from a computer to another computer over a network. Ray Tomlinson, a contractor working for the United States Department of Defense, created software for communicating over ARPANET, the government’s network that allowed computers to access centralized computing resources. Today, email is pervasive, and it’s not going away. Almost eight billion mailboxes are in use today, with many of us using more than one email account. This class covers the history of email along with a detailed description of how it works.

From nuclear power to washing machines without mangles, from vaccines to soft toilet paper, the twentieth century was a time of amazing inventions and discoveries. Learn about various inventions and their inventors, discoveries and their finders, and consider how all of them have affected our lives.

Calling all weather enthusiasts! This class will be an opportunity to take a deep-dive into the science and safety of weather phenomena, instructed by meteorologists from the National Weather Service (NWS) office in Duluth. Topics will include NWS Duluth forecasts, severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, flooding, winter storms, blizzards, extreme cold, lake-effect snow, fire weather, airport weather forecasting, and conditions on Lake Superior. No previous weather experience or expertise is required. Come join us for an interesting and informative look at weather in the Northland.

Science can help us decipher the history of virtually everything around us. Radioactive dating tells us much about the history of human civilization, art, agriculture, diet, and migration patterns. Tree rings, ice cores, and ocean sediments indicate past climate patterns and the development of our planet’s atmosphere. We will discuss the origin and early history of life, the demise of the dinosaurs, the life cycle of stars, and the birth of our solar system. We will view selections from The Great Courses, supplemented by slides and classroom discussion.