The La Brea Tar Pits represent much more than world-renowned fossil sites - they're the mass graves of thousands of ice age creatures, each with a story to tell. Researchers at the nearby Page Museum clean the asphalt from the fossil remains, and using paleoforensics, recount the grim details of their deaths. In the process, clues emerge about what life was like in prehistoric Los Angeles.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Luke Groskin and Christian Baker
Animation by Joshua Krause
Narrated by Shane Morris
Additonal Footage and Stills provided by The Page Museum, Shutterstock
Pond5, Getty Images, Miles Roberts/John Ososky, Smithsonian Institution
Kathleen Cantner, AGI, created for EARTH Magazine

Want to see the biggest ant collection in the world? Welcome to ant central! In the latest installment of Science Friday's Desktop Diaries series, ecologist Edward O. Wilson takes us on a tour of his office, located in Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. Wilson, who has studied ants for 60 years and has won two Pulitzer prizes for his writing, shows off Harvard's ant collection (the largest in the world with about a million specimens), plays a backwoods fiddle and explains how he looks to Darwin (a bobble head doll, in this case) for encouragement.

You don't need a time machine to marvel at the hot broth of quarks and gluons that made up all matter a microsecond after the Big Bang. You just need a ticket on the Long Island Railroad. Using massive feats of engineering, Brookhaven National Laboratory has devised a recipe for cooking up tiny ephemeral batches of this quark-gluon soup, a fluid which physicists Paul Sorensen say is the most "perfect" fluid ever discovered.
Produced by Luke Groskin, Music by Audio Network, Additional Footage and Stills by Brookhaven National Laboratory NASA and Shutterstock

Go into Jason Hackenwerth's studio and watch him bend balloons into giant flowers.

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In the orderly arenas of the Westminster Dog Show, we're encouraged to judge dogs and their behavior using stereotypes based solely on dog breed. But data distilled from doggie behaviorist James Serpell's massive study of more than 80,000 individual dog profiles revealed that outside of the show ring, there's a lot of behavioral variation within any given breed, particularly when it comes to aggression.

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In a basement laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, two roboticists have harnessed the innate sensing, swimming, and swarming abilities of bacteria to power microscopic robots. Even though their work sounds like the prologue to a dark science fiction film, Ph.D. students Elizabeth Beattie and Denise Wong hope these initial experiments with nano bio-robots will provide a platform for future medical and micro-engineering endeavors.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Footage ands Stills Provided by
Elizabeth Beattie
Denise Wong
Edward Steager
Prelinger Archives
Quentin Lindsey, Daniel Mellinger, and Vijay Kumar,
University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab

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As the most common genetic disorder worldwide, colorblindness affects roughly 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women, the overwhelming majority of whom have trouble perceiving red and green. While this may be a minor inconvenience to some, being severely colorblind can taint seemingly ordinary experiences such as a enjoying a vivid sunset or picking out fresh produce. Colorblindness can even prevent some people from pursuing jobs where color vision is critical. With these grievances in mind, visionary researchers Maureen and Jay Neitz have spent over a decade researching and developing a cure. Using a virus-based gene therapy and a group of highly trained monkeys, the Neitzes may have finally created a cure for the colorblindness blues.

NOTE: This is a 360/VR video but you do not a VR viewer to experience the 360 viewpoint- just click around the video!
In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and 2 to explore and document our solar system and the interstellar space beyond. The craft will drift for billions of years in the emptiness, each carrying a Golden Record inscribed with our message to any intelligent spacefaring civilization that discovers it.
Produced by Luke Groskin
VR/360 Direction by Jason Drakeford
Narrated by Annie Nero
Music by
Audio Network
Dark Was the Night – Blind Willie Johnson
Tchenhoukoumen – Charles Duvelle
Original Golden Record Images and Diagrams
F.D. Drake, Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, NASA, United Nations, Hale Observatory,
Wayne Miller/ Magnum Photos, David Harvey / Woodfin Camp Inc.,
1955 Life Magazine © Time Inc. 1947
The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum
The World Book Encyclopedia © Harper & Row Publishers Inc.
Ruby Mera / UNICEF, David Carroll, Stephen Dalton
F. D. Drake, Herman Eckelmann/ NAIC, Jon Lomberg
Gaston Rebuffat, Ray Manley/ Shostal Associates,
Isaac Newton, Lennart Nilsson, David Wickstrom
National Geographic Society Images
H. Edward Kim, William Albert Allard, Gordon W. Grahan,
James P. Blair, Thomas Nebbia, David Doubilet, Donna Grosvenor,
Joseph Scherschel, Goerge F. Mobley, Jodi Cobb

There are lots of wild things in Brooklyn, NY, but did you know about the wild parrots? Several communities of Quaker Parrots (Myiopsitta monachus), believed to hail from the mountains of South America, are nesting in the New York area. So we asked Steve Baldwin, the creator of http://BrooklynParrots.com, to point out the parrots. He gives free group tours about once a month, if you're in the area....

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Musk oxen are not the only charismatic creatures perfectly suited to the wind-blasted, tundra of the Alaskan Arctic. Meet Joel Berger, Wildlife Conservation Society senior scientist, Colorado State University professor - as well as expert on hoofed mammals. In addition to gathering photos to track how fast musk oxen are growing, Berger conducts a seemingly hazardous test: He dresses up as a grizzly bear, approaches the herd, and gauges their reactions. Berger uses this unusual technique to find out whether the presence of more male oxen makes the herd safer from bears.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Christian Baker and Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Production Assistance and Guide by Erik Snuggerud
Additional Stills and Video by the Joel Berger/WCS , Shutterstock , Musk Oxen Hunt shots © GSSafaris
Special Thanks to Joel Berger, Erik Snuggarud, Ellen Cheng, Jenny Shalant, and Jessica Brunetto

Sam Penix and Sam Lewontin, of Everyman Espresso in New York City, and Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking, percolate over how to get the most out of your grounds. From the chemex to the wood neck, the brewmasters filter out reasons to choose one brewing device over another.

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How do naked mole rats live to 30 years without getting cancer? New research by Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov of the University of Rochester shows how these aesthetically challenged creatures live long, cancer-free lives.

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With their probing paws and destructive behavior, the raccoon has gained a reputation as a garbage bandit, capable of finding a meal in any urban landscape. Yet despite their proximity to our homes and their evident resourcefulness, very few researchers have truly tested the problem-solving abilities of the “trash panda.” As part of a multi-year study exploring the cognition of raccoons, researchers at the University of Wyoming’s Animal Cognition Lab are pushing the limits of the species’ learning by providing both captivity and street-dwelling specimens with a variety of tests.

Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional Footage ands Stills by Lauren Stanton, Rachel Fanelli, Wyoming Raccoon Project,
University of Wyoming Animal Behavior and Cognition Lab, Pond5, Lawrence W. Cole,
Yu-Yuan Chen (CC BY 2.0.),Brian Crockford (CC BY 2.0.), Youtube User Iv D. A. (CC BY 2.0.),
Youtube User Kings of the Road (CC BY 2.0.), Benjamin Ballerstein (CC BY 2.0.),
David Edgar Stahl (CC BY 2.0.), SMM Exhibits (CC BY 3.0),
Jelbert SA, Taylor AH, Cheke LG, Clayton NS, Gray RD (CC. BY 2.0)
Special Thanks to Lauren Stanton, Sarah Benson-Amram, Volcano, Hudson, Paprika, and Tarragon.

Michele Bertomen and David Boyle bought an empty 20-by-40-foot lot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They planned to build something traditional, but when the bid for the masonary envelope (the building without plumbing, electricity) came back at over $300,000, they re-evaluated. The couple decided to try shipping containers--which cost them about $50,000 for the building envelope. Bertomen, an architect, and Boyle, the general contractor, designed and oversaw construction of their home. We stopped by for a tour.

"I have always emphasized the willingness to discard," says psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus at Princeton University. That philosophy works on two levels -- forget desk trinkets, Kahneman doesn't have a desk -- and he doesn't hoard ideas either, he says. If an idea doesn't work, he lets it go. Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economic sciences for his research with Amos Tversky on how people make decisions, is retired and works from his New York City apartment.

It's a potato on toothpicks! No, it's a hopping noodle! A fuzzy rodent T-rex! Any way you look at them, jerboas are about as cute as they come. These adorable critters bounce about on long, springy legs - appendages that just might help us better understand and perhaps manipulate the growth of human bones.

Coffee beans are filled with oils that emerge from coffee grounds under high pressure. These oils form the crema—the frothy stuff on top of an espresso. In the last installment of Science Friday's series on coffee, food-science writer Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking, explains the chemistry of crema.

Video by Jenny Woodward

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This video is part of Science Friday's #CephalopodWeek 2015! Join the cephaloparty starting Friday, June 19th. http://cephalopodweek.tumblr.com

Crawling, swimming, squeezing, jetting—the range of movement available to an octopus is impressive. Yet some species occasionally choose to stand up on two arms and "run" backwards. Chrissy Huffard, a Senior Researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, explains the pros and cons of this seemingly silly behavior and why an octopus might find looking foolish useful.

Plants may be stationary but they're rarely still, says biologist Roger Hangarter, creator of the website Plants in Motion. Researchers are using time-lapse photography to study the biomechanics of plant movement. For example, this week in the journal Science, physicist Sharon Gerbode, of Harvey Mudd College, and biologist Joshua Puzey, of Harvard University, explain how they used time-lapse, mathematical modelling and a prosthetic plant to understand how cucumber tendrils twist.

Flaunting frilly tentacles and a curious ability to reflect light, these tiny aquatic anomalies are reminiscent of the flashy balls and shag carpets of the '70s. Biologist Lindsey Dougherty of UC Berkley investigates the aptly dubbed, "Disco Clam," revealing molecular foundation for how they get so groovy.
Produced by Christian Baker
Music by Audio Network
Additional Stills and footage courtesy of Lindsey Dougherty