Kevin Scanlon

Jorge Cham

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

Jorge Cham got his introduction to cartoons as a child in Panama. His parents were engineers who worked on the Panama Canal. When an American family they knew moved away, they left behind a big box of comics, including Archie, Richie Rich and Peanuts.

Cham devoured them. His only other exposure to the medium was through anonymous underground newspapers. These were the Noriega years, and the papers carried biting political cartoons that satirized the ruling regime.

But it wasn't until many years later that Cham began to draw. He was a graduate student in robotics at Stanford, facing tremendous pressure to compete and succeed. As an outlet, he started sketching a cartoon that satirized the grad school experience and poked fun at the professors who ruled his existence. It was called Piled Higher and Deeper — Ph.D. — and it ran in the Stanford Daily.

Cham spent another five years in grad school before getting his doctorate, then a teaching job at Caltech. He did cartooning on the side, while focusing his research on "brain-machine interfaces."

"You know the plug in The Matrix?" he asks. "I was working on that plug."

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Drew Barillas

Mary Roach at the Natural History Museum

See also:
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament

When organizers of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum's First Fridays series asked the public what sorts of programming it wanted to see, people overwhelmingly said that they wanted (a) sex, and (b) science author Mary Roach. Oddly enough, organizers found they could kill two birds with one stone.

So, on a rainy Friday evening in February, Roach, having just flown in from her home in the Bay Area, is sitting in the Hall of North American Mammals, waiting to talk about her book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. As sound techs fiddle with microphones, Roach looks around and declares the stuffed badger to be "fabulous."

People who love dioramas and museums and dark stormy nights also love Roach for her deeply, and humorously, reported stories about bizarre subjects. Roach is the kind of person who will figure out exactly how much food it takes to make a stomach burst. She is the kind of writer who will eat boiled rodent knees with a blow dart–wielding tribe in the Amazon, just to tell the tale.

"You really have to choose carefully," she says. "If you're not interested in something for 2½ years of your life, it's gonna show in your book. You have to ask, will your readers read 300 pages of it?"

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A real live zebra

With the internet slowly becoming a cat-photo-based economy and content providers creating human work days filled with animal cuteness overloads, it's a wonder that a slow, pensive film like Denis Côté's Bestiaire didn't come along sooner. Or perhaps, given it's thoughtful observation of beast behavior, it's really not that surprising.

Bestiaire, a 73-minute documentary, was the centerpiece to Friday night's Cinefamily and Mastodon Mesa-hosted evening of animalian panopticism that also included two short films, Primate Cinema: Apes as Family and Moving Stories , as well as an animal cognition expert and a live goddamn zebra.

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ILLUSTRATION BY NOAH PATRICK PFARR

See also:
*Living on Mars Time: What If Your Day Lasted 24 Hours, 39 Minutes and 35 Seconds?
*Lily Simonson's Paintings of Yeti Crabs and Other Creatures Merge Art and Oceanography

Once a year, or maybe every four years — no one knows for sure — jumbo squid make their creepily delightful presence felt in the coastal waters off Southern California. When that happens, Captain Jack Van Dyke of Dana Wharf Sportfishing in Dana Point ferries people out to catch them.

One evening approximately 16 days into this season's squid news cycle, Van Dyke is on his boat, contemplating the blobby red animals that have lately been occupying his time. Misconceptions abound. Jumbo squid, aka Dosidicus gigas, or Humboldt squid, or diablo rojo, have a reputation as creatures of the night. But Van Dyke has caught them in the middle of the day. He's also seen them in the early morning, sitting on the surface of the water, hundreds of little heads popping up like carrots in a field.

Some people believe the cold brings them out. Which is sort of true. "We tend to catch 'em in the middle of wintertime," Van Dyke allows. "But I've caught them in the summer. So you're talking a 30-degree water temperature change." You can't count on them at any particular time of the year: "They could be out there in the canyon at 2,000 feet, year-round."

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Photo by NASA/JPL-CalTech

The NASA Mars rover Curiosity used its left navigation camera to record this view of the step down into a shallow depression called Yellowknife Bay.

Kirsten Siebach didn't want to go to the party.

"There's just no way I can make it at 10 p.m.," she found herself thinking, "because that's breakfast time."

For weeks Siebach had been falling asleep in church and calling her mother daily to check her own sanity. But it was her friend's birthday, so she decided to give the party a try. She walked in eating a banana and attempted some chitchat, but within minutes she fled, nauseated by the smell of beer. "I couldn't even talk about anything on Earth. ... My friends probably thought I was on Mars."

And she was on Mars — or, at least, on Mars time.

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The Institute for Art and Olfaction

Olfactory taste-makers at Scent Bar during last week's teaser event for The Institute for Art and Olfaction

I spent a solid 30 minutes last Friday night attempting to figure out what exactly was "old lady" smell, sniffing through several bottles trying to find a version of it, before I finally gave up -- but not without learning a thing or two about scents.

If that doesn't strike you as an evening of enchantment, you've probably never been to Scent Bar in West Hollywood, a boutique perfume retailer specializing in indie and hard-to-find scents. Sipping on some champagne, munching on a delicate selection of crackers, salami and cookies amidst a bouquet of festive sweaters, my olfactory senses were awakened to a world of perfume that exists outside of the typical "My dear God get me out of here" trek through the entrance of any given Macy's.

The modest gathering was a feast for the senses, and an excellent teaser for the up-and-coming Institute for Art and Olfaction. Founded earlier this year by native Angeleno Saskia Wilson-Brown, the organization is set to officially launch with its first project at Lincoln Center in New York in January, and is expected to open its doors in downtown Los Angeles at L.A. Mart in March. With Scent Bar co-founder Franco Wright and manager Steven Gontarski sitting on the Institute for Art and Olfaction's board of advisors, the cozy retail space served as a perfect host for IAO's impending brick-and-mortar location, and provided an essential introduction to the wide world of smells.

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UCLA Newsroom

OH HAI! Didn't see you there. You just happened to catch us reading this paper. You know, together. Left: Martie Haselton, right: Christina Larson.

Blaming your girlfriend's mood swings on her period is so last century. According to UCLA psychology and communications professor Martie Haselton, ovulation is "the new time of the month."

"This research... [has] been sort of a mini-revolution in understanding women's sexuality," Haselton says, referring both to her own work and to studies done by fellow evolutionary psychologists. Just before ovulation, she's found, women avoid contact with male kin. Their voices rise in pitch. And most recently, in a study published in November's Hormones and Behavior journal, she and graduate student Christina Larson determined that during this highly fertile window, women devalue relationships with partners that have long-term potential and feel closer to partners with more sex appeal.

Because, according to Haselton's dual mating hypothesis, women have evolved to want a hot, masculine lover and a high-status, caring husband -- and few men are both.

If that dichotomy sounds unreasonable or offensive, join the club. Evolutionary psychology remains a contentious discipline, seen by some as a legitimate field of study and others as a murky pseudoscience.

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Tad Motoyama

UCLA's Barbara Natterson-Horowitz leads a discussion at the Zoobiquity conference, in front of the L.A. Zoo's gorilla enclosure.

Clad in a white coat, teal scrubs and leather clogs, the doctor describes the case to the group. He explains that 27-year-old Rosie had painful periods and trouble conceiving. "She just wouldn't get up in the morning, and she wasn't eating or drinking during her periods," he says. After a sonogram and consultation, the medical team did what it could: surgery to remove the uterine fibroid.

This patient, though, is different from the hundreds of others the doc has treated: Rosie's a 130-pound orangutan at the Los Angeles Zoo.

If her case sounds familiar, it's because animals and humans often have the same afflictions. Some experts believe that increasing communication between veterinarians and physicians might benefit all animals, even the human ones. That's the idea behind Zoobiquity, a second-of-its-kind conference held two weeks ago at UCLA and the Los Angeles Zoo.

Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, who started the Zoobiquity movement and published a book by the same name in June with science writer Kathryn Bowers, tells the audience of nearly 200 veterinary and medical professionals that the conference is "a living laboratory. Not only is this conference interprofessional and interdisciplinary, it's also interspecies."

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You see ordinary contrails; they see poisonous "chemtrails."

On a recent Saturday morning, a small buzz of activity emanates from the stately Wilshire Ebell Theatre abutting Hancock Park. This is not a theatrical production but rather "Consciousness Beyond Chemtrails," a conference for those sharing belief in "chemtrails" -- a theory alleging that the government is spraying us all with toxic chemicals via the seemingly ordinary condensation trails emitted by airplanes. The roster of speakers includes Roseanne Barr and former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.).

"I would show those who are unfamiliar how to identify the difference between a jet contrail and a chemtrail," declares conference speaker Deborah Whitman, founding president of the Davis-based nonprofit Environmental Voices. "It's affecting our health and our trees and the oxygen that we breathe, and it's serious."

The sturdily built, silver-haired Whitman radiates a wholesome, Middle American, can-do energy. It's hard not to like her. Were she an actress, she could convincingly play Roseanne's plucky older sister in a sitcom.

In her case, chemtrails awareness originated in personal experience.

"I suffer from severe multiple chemical sensitivities," Whitman says. "I was going into emergency on an average of once a month before I found out what it was. I get irregular heartbeats when they're spraying, my heart skips beats, my voice changes, sinuses swell up, skin burns and itches, I can't breathe, and my blood pressure goes to stroke levels."

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Lily Simonson/CB1 Gallery

Lily Simonson: Like Bunnies (Sea Hare Mating Chain), 2012

Lily Simonson is not your typical L.A. artist. Engaged in producing science as well as art, she creates a unique view of the natural world in her paintings. Her first solo show, "Wet and Wild" which is up at CB1 gallery in downtown, shows some of the fascinating creatures -- alien and familiar -- that reside in the deep ocean.

"Wet and Wild" comes in two parts. The main gallery room includes eight oils on canvas depicting some of the life in the deep -- yeti crabs that live at hydrothermal vents and breathe methane, jelly fish that reach maturity only to regress back to the polyp stage, and a clusters of sea hares mating in a chain, as sea slugs tend to do. Each canvas is glossy and lush; Simonson uses a glossing technique reminiscent of old Dutch masters.

The second room features five more paintings of crabs and other creatures, but this time, Simonson has painted over her works with glow-in-the-dark paint, and the works are illuminated with a black light. The effect is a trippy, '60s-esque world, but it also evokes ideas of bioluminescence of the sea.

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