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It's no secret. If you want to see stars, Kansas is definitely the place. A more exact location would be the Lake Afton Public Observatory, which has the distinction of being only one of approximately a dozen observatories in the entire country designed specifically so that the average person can look into outer space. Nestled near one of the Wichita area's most popular lakes, the observatory is the public's opportunity to see far more than they usually do with the naked eye —...

Peer Moore-Jansen, Wichita State's only physical anthropologist, can coax narratives from even the most reluctant of bones. From a second-floor lab room in Neff Hall, he reaches for the whitish gray skull of an orangutan, explaining as he runs his finger across a small indentation on the inside of the skull, "She had epileptic-like seizures when she was alive." He hands the cranium across the lab table, pointing to the tiny pockmark that pressure from a deadly brain tumor had le...

Another color I can instantly associate with the islands … is a gardenia white; a color like the underside of the giant tentacle I saw briefly wrapped around the rail on a stormy afternoon on the boat deck. — From the artist's notes The Cruise exhibition catalog, 1994 James G. Davis made this entry in a journal he kept during a three-week cruise he and his wife, Mary Anne '64, took to the South Pacific in the early 1990s. This fleeting vision from the periphery of rea...