First Fridays Science Discussion | Natural History Museum Of Los Angeles

In October 2010, a bulldozer operator working at the base of the Snowmass ski area in Colorado's Rocky Mountains uncovered the skeleton of a young female mammoth. Over the next 11 months, this find would yield a treasure trove of amazingly well-preserved ice age fossils - more than 5,000 bones of over 40 kinds of animals --and would change forever our understanding of alpine life in the ice age. Join Dr. Kirk Johnson as he tells the dynamic story of this discovery and dig: the excitement, emotion, and the colorful cast of characters who made the project a success.

Human creativity is profoundly influenced by those around us. But how does this influence happen? Lehrer will explore a few of the more surprising social effects, such as why the most innovative entrepreneurs have the oddest friends, why brainstorming doesn't work (but brutal honesty does) and why some cities produce so many patents per capita than others. (Hint: It's all about the walking speed of pedestrians.)

Join Amy Stewart for a darkly comical look at the sinister side of our relationship with the insect world. You'll meet creatures that infest, infect, and generally wreak havoc on human affairs.

Join Jared Diamond for a short introduction to language diversity and multilingualism around the world, and raise the question whether society would be better off if we could agree on just one language. Would we as individuals be better or worse off going to the effort of learning several languages?

Pluto, which used to be thought of as a lonely oddball planet at the edge of the solar system, is now known to be part of a new collection of tiny worlds circling far beyond the sun. Brown will talk about the discoveries of these worlds and how our new explosion of knowledge led, inevitably, to an undeniable conclusion: Pluto had to die.

Amy Parish is a biological anthropologist, primatologist, and Darwinian feminist. For the last twenty years she has been studying the world's captive population of bonobos, who are among the closest living relatives of humans. The social system of the Bonobo is unusual in many respects: females form real and meaningful bonds in the absence of kinship, females attack and dominate males, and all possible age and gender combinations participate in sexual interactions.

Synthesizing thirty years of research, Michael Shermer upends traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first, and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. Using sensory data that flow in through the senses, the brain naturally looks for and finds patterns - and then infuses those patterns with meaning, forming beliefs.

Ever since a single fossil feather, and its presumed owner Archaeopteryx, was discovered 150 years ago, the origins of birds have been one of paleontology's greatest debates. Recent discoveries of feathered dinosaurs in China have only stoked the controversy. Dr. Luis Chiappe, lead curator of the Dinosaur Hall which opens July 16, is a longtime advocate of the dinosaur-bird link. In this lecture, he'll examine the evidence in support of the idea that birds are the living descendants of meat eating dinosaurs, and therefore, that dinosaurs are not extinct.

Environmental change impacts the Earth's biota. Extracting the responses of populations, species and communities to perturbations of the past is one of the best ways of unraveling how they will respond to perturbations of the future. I excavate caves and use the fossils to reveal how animals have handled prehistoric warming and cooling events using isotopes, morphometrics and ancient DNA.

Taking a night off from his USC lab, Dr. Steven Finkel will talk about roles of microbes in three ways: how microbes set the stage for life on Earth; the current roles of microbes in our ecosystem; and their practical applications now and in the future.

Dr. Janet Kübler, from the Biomimicry Guild's Speakers Bureau, will show us how life is helping humans build a more beautiful, efficient and connected place in the biosphere. The presentation will cover what biomimicry is and isn't, giving examples of current, developing and dream technology based on living systems including learning about communications systems from bees and fungi, safe transport from locusts and about holding things together from mollusks in the sea.

Learn through this astonishing scientific adventure whether the long-sought secret of eternal youth has at last been found. From Berkeley to the Bronx, from Cambridge University to Dante's tomb in Ravenna, Jonathan Weiner meets the leading intellectuals in the field and delves into the mind-blowing science behind the latest research.

Why do we have our best ideas in the shower? Which drugs make us more creative? Why are certain cities so much innovative than others? Does brainstorming work? These are a few of the questions that will be addressed in Lehrer's talk, which features material from his forthcoming book, "Imagine."

More than a quarter century ago, it was suggested that galaxies such as our own Milky Way may harbor massive, though possibly dormant, central black holes. Definitive proof, for or against, the existence of a massive central black hole lies in the assessment of the distribution of matter in the center of the Galaxy. The motion of the stars in the vicinity of a black hole offers a way to determine this distribution. Based on 10 years of high resolution imaging, Dr. Ghez's team has moved the case for a supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center from a possibility to a certainty.

With photos, maps, and computer animations, Atwater will describe the peculiar patterns of Southern California's mountains, valleys, and coastlines. Then she'll show how these were formed-one earthquake at a time-by the grinding between the huge North American and Pacific plates.

David Anderson is using molecular genetic techniques to map and probe neural circuits that underlie innate behaviors in both mice and fruit flies. These behavioral responses, and associated internal states (such as arousal), form the evolutionary underpinnings of emotional behavior in higher organisms.

What would it take for the world to get away from fossil fuels and convert to renewable energy? The dirty secret is: It'll take more than a Prius in the garage and solar panels on the roof. If we want to use wind, solar thermal and electric, biomass, hydroelectric and geothermal energy, it will take planning and willingness on the part of governments and industry.

Their medium is silk; their mission is to spin. Spiders are the unparalleled architects and engineers of the natural world, and in this talk, Hayashi introduces the basic biology of spider silk, and shares recent research on its genetics and biomechanics.

Evolution happened, and the theory describing it is one of the most well-founded in all of science. Then why do half of all Americans reject it? In his book Why Darwin Matters, and in this same-titled talk, historian of science and bestselling author Dr. Michael Shermer - a former evangelical Christian - examines what evolution really is, how we know it happened, and how to test it. Shermer looks at science through a brief history of the evolution-creation trials and debates from the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 to the intelligent design controversies of the 1990s and 2000s, and demonstrates how and why creationism and intelligent design are not part of science

Paleoanthropologist Dr. Donald C. Johanson - founder of human-evolution think tank, the Institute of Human Origins - highlights some of his discoveries, including the most widely known fossil find of last century, the Lucy skeleton. Although the 20th century has been peppered with important fossil hominid finds from both eastern and southern Africa, it was Dr. Johanson's 1974 discovery of a 3.2-million-year-old hominid fossil in Ethiopia that added a crucial link. Lucy prompted ongoing debate and major revisions in our understanding of the human evolutionary past - because the skeleton possessed an intriguing mixture of ape-like features, but also characters we consider human.