NHMLA Talks | Natural History Museum of Los Angeles

Bradley Voytek, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science and the Neurosciences at the UC San Diego and an Alfred P. Sloan Neuroscience Research Fellow, and Timothy Verstynen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University, bite into the subject of "zombie brain research" and popular shows and films about the undead.

Dr. Michael Habib, Assistant Professor in the Keck School of Medicine of USC and a Research Associate in the Dinosaur Institute at NHM, and Dr. Nathan Smith, Associate Curator in the Dinosaur Institute, dig into a conversation about film and dinosaurs.

Dr. Clifford V. Johnson, professor of Physics at the University of Southern California and Professor Sean Carroll, professor of physics at California Institute of Technology will explore the influence of space and time travel in movies.

Dr. Chris Thacker, NHM’s Curator of Ichthyology (aka fish!) and Dr. Maddalena Bearzi, Ocean Conservation Society President, will dive into a conversation about what lies beneath.

Spiros Michalakis, a research scientist for the Institute of Quantum Information and Matter at CalTech, and Alex Wild, professional photographer and Curator of Entomology at the University of Texas at Austin, will dissect the body mechanics of hybrid superheroes such as Antman and Spiderman and the insects that inspired them.

Using daring displays of algorithmic trickery, lightning calculator and number wizard Arthur Benjamin, mesmerizes audiences with mathematical mystery and beauty. A mathematician who is known throughout the world as the “mathemagician,” Benjamin mixes mathematics and magic to make the subject fun and easy to understand.

eBird is a citizen science project that collects data about bird sightings from bird watchers around the world. The millions of observations recorded each month, logged into a central database at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, are enabling a global understanding of the distribution, abundance, and movements of thousands of species of birds. The information is used by scientists, land managers, and bird watchers to document changes in bird distributions, pinpoint bird populations in need of conservation, and locate cool places to find new birds. Bonney will trace the origin, evolution, and current use of eBird and show how it is being used not only at the global level, but locally in the greater Los Angeles area.

Sandra Tsing Loh is a professional science communicator and educator with many proud accomplishments, but all bets are off when sitting down with her 12 year old daughter Suzy. Lofty TED Talk theories and triumphal chants of "Hands-on STEM!" fly out the window when a parent tries to help her middle schooler with her actual science homework. Loh candidly addresses the cultural, societal and family influences on how science is taught, and to whom, arriving at surprising insights into how we might (re-)tell the stories of science to all audiences K-100, now and into the future.

The first Earth Day was a national holiday that brought out millions of people from a wide variety of politics and persuasion. Today the environmental movement has lost its mojo – but if we connect people with nature, and engage them in science, we can rejuvenate environmentalism, and maybe even save the world at the same time we save people from themselves.

With the help of citizen scientists all across Southern California, we have made many important discoveries, including that of nonnative frogs, geckos, and snakes that had not previously been reported in the region. In the last century, the human population in Southern California has grown dramatically, causing habitat loss and fragmentation. The resulting range shifts and declines of native species have been accompanied and exacerbated by introductions of nonnative species. Citizen science can help fill this gap in our biodiversity knowledge, because it crowdsources data collection by asking the public to photograph organisms they encounter and submit those photos to online databases.

Our world is rapidly changing. The government spends billions of dollars each year monitoring Earth from space, but who is tracking the critters and watching the plants right in front of us? This responsibility has shifted; now you may take control. The tools are simple: smart phones, digital recorders, shared networks, data loggers, and apps. Participating in Citizen Science projects and focusing on a few key principles can help effect change in a big way.

If you eat food, then you need to know about bees. As pollinators, bees help produce over 130 fruit and vegetable crops. As an economic force, honey bees alone contribute over $14 billion to the U.S. economy each year. Yet, bees are dying. Peculiarly, urban beehives seem to be thriving. The recent popularity of urban beekeeping is more than just a fad - data show that honey bees might actually do better in cities. Are beehives a necessary part of city living?

To be trapped in asphalt is a terrible way to die but a wonderful way to preserve fossils! The literally millions of fossils recovered from the sticky seeps of the world's richest Ice Age fossil site document what life was like in California when the first humans arrived here. A hundred years of excavation has revealed who was living here, what the local habitats were like, the changes that took place in response to global cooling and warming, and hints at why we no longer encounter sabertooths and mammoths.

We evolved to eat berries rather than bagels, to live in mud huts rather than condos, to sprint barefoot rather than play football - or did we? Are our bodies and brains truly at odds with modern life? Everyone is fond of paleofantasies, stories about how humans lived eons ago, and we use them to explain why many elements of our lives, from the food we eat to the way we raise our children, seem very distant from what nature intended. We sometimes assume that humans in a modern society aren't evolving any more, that we have somehow freed ourselves from evolution, or at the very least, that evolution always requires so long to act that we can't expect to have adapted to our current circumstances. But popular theories about how our ancestors lived - and why we should emulate them - are often based on speculation, not scientific evidence, and they reflect a basic misunderstanding about how evolution works.

Southern California has historically been home to one of the most diverse reptile and amphibian faunas in North America. Some of these species continue to persist in and around urban LA, others are declining, and several have gone locally extinct. In this discussion, we will talk briefly about three projects that members of the UCLA/La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science are conducting that explore what we have done to eliminate these amazing species, and what we are doing to try to bring them back.