NHMLA Talks | Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
Summary: Expand your world with talks about science, history, and culture held across the Natural History Family of Museums: the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the La Brea Tar Pits Museum, and the William S. Hart Park and Museum.
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Podcasts:
About 15 million years ago, Los Angeles was at the bottom of the ocean. Climate change means land that’s been high and dry for millennia is getting inundated by water again. What do terms like “500-year flood” mean when we have one every ten years? And what can engineering do to make Southern California’s new floodplains survivable?
About 15 million years ago, Los Angeles was at the bottom of the ocean. Climate change means land that’s been high and dry for millennia is getting inundated by water again. What do terms like “500-year flood” mean when we have one every ten years? And what can engineering do to make Southern California’s new floodplains survivable?
The amount of water on Earth hasn’t changed appreciably since Caesar and Cleopatra took a little cruise on the Nile. But the hydrologic cycle has changed where that water goes – and we are heading up a very dry creek. California has always teetered on the edge of drought, but hereafter, how we eat, drink, and even survive depends more than ever on the ingenuity of science and human willingness to suck it up by not sucking down so much water.
In the past, fires often renewed and even enriched California, like a mythical phoenix. But California feels only menaced and exhausted by them now. How have humans changed fire patterns? How will fire change our everyday lives, and what does standing up to fire’s “new abnormal” mean? Can science tell us where and how we fight, and when we just get out of fire’s way?
Join us for a discussion around the special exhibition “That was then. This is now. History of PostNatural Selection”. Reflect on the profound questions raised by the interplay between culture, nature, biotechnology, art, and science in a dynamic discussion with Richard Pell, Director of the Center for PostNatural History in Pittsburgh; Matt Dean, Associate Professor of Molecular and Computational Biology at USC; and Amy Gusick, Associate Curator for Archaeology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.Presented by USC Visions and Voices: The Arts and Humanities Initiative. Organized by Karen Liebowitz (USC Roski School of Art and Design) with contributions from Matt Dean (Biological Sciences at USC Dornsife), in partnership with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the Center for PostNatural History. Co-sponsored by the USC Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study and USC's The Bridge Art + Science Alliance (BASA).
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All plants and animals, including humans, move during their lifetimes, but some take truly harrowing or magnificent journeys to new lands and habitats. This fall the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum will join UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability to produce a three-night conversation between the people of Los Angeles and the leading experts on migration. For many species, migration is a question of when, not if. Sometimes it is the result of fresh opportunities in unfamiliar terrain. Other times it is driven by external forces, natural and unnatural. Tonight’s conversation will get to the root causes of migration – From floods and fires to developing societies.
NHM celebrated the launch of This Is (Not) L.A.: An Insider’s Guide to the Real Los Angeles: Debunking the Clichés, Crushing the Haters, and Generally Making You Wish You Lived Here (or Happier That You Already Do) by Jen Bilik. This evening Jen Bilik hosted a rollicking discussion of why we love L.A. with a panel of Los Angeles luminaries, touching on the research and stories behind the book, followed by a Q&A.
L.A.’s first car hit the street 120 years ago, and through the smog and spaghetti-bowl freeways, L.A. is renowned for its car culture (and traffic). But we're starting to shift gears around here. We flirt with electric cars, pile into ride shares, trick out our bicycles, and hop aboard the Expo Line. In a city built for internal combustion, are we changing the rules of the road?
It's the City of Angels, but what kind of city is it? It's a place that, in just a handful of generations, grew from adobes and dirt roads to an architectural crazy-quilt built not on a human scale but on the scale of the Model T and the Humvee. In its third century, L.A. tries to reverse-engineer itself to become livable, walkable, and accessible. Can it be done? What would that L.A. be like, to work in and live in?
Author Kirk Wallace Johnson in conversation with NHMLA President Dr. Lori Bettison-Varga about The Feather Thief – A rollicking true-crime adventure about a young American that stole hundreds of rare bird specimens from the British Natural History Museum in Tring. His book is a thought-provoking exploration on the debt we owe institutions that house precious collections and the human drive to possess natural beauty.
Two celebrated artists and a historian discuss the challenges women have faced in breaking into a traditionally male profession, and the ways women’s ink has revolutionized tattoo art.
