Above: Jessica Gamboa, at left, and Brian Aspinwall watch a short film while waiting for panel speakers.

Last Thursday, L.A.'s tech-savvy socialites met downtown to mingle among "immersive technology" exhibits at Mindshare L.A.'s annual masquerade ball. All photos by Cheryl A. Guerrero for Brand X.

More mindsharing after the jump >>

Breaking news for fake-bakers! Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have recently isolated the enzyme that keeps pasty people pasty, and are developing a cream that would block the enzyme which blocks melanin production. This breakthrough can help patients develop a tan from the inside out, which may have an impact on future skin cancer rates. And bikini seasons.

But don’t count on a cure for blindingly pale skin any time soon. First, they do trials on mice, then eventually move up to more challenging specimens such as “Jersey Shore” cast members. We’re speculating on that last part, but think they’d make a reasonable test group.

For more information,  see Booster Shots, but for long strings of words that you won’t understand, see the research published today in the journal Genes & Development.

--Alie Ward

 Photo: A deep, disturbing tan is an essential accessory for Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi of MTV’s "Jersey Shore.” Credit: Emily Shur/ MTV

Any fool can get flirty over body shots of Jäger, but it takes true chemistry to bond over items of antiquity and glass cases of curios. L.A. eggheads rejoice, as the Natural History Museum gives auto geeks and science buffs two more destinations which are perfect for a nerd date. Let’s just call them nerdates.

Starting today, the NHM cracked open its crypt of cars, and if you’re willing to score tickets now for a date in December -- and get yourself to the museum’s Gardena storage facility -- you can stroll via guided tour past 63 beautifully crusty automobiles of yesteryear, including a 1908 Pierce Great Arrow and a 1932 Duesenberg. Bonus: Schlepping a date out to this not only makes you seem complex in your appreciation of old timey items, but it will also make your 2001 Hyundai look futuristic by comparison.

If Gardena is too, well, in Gardena, the Natural History Museum hosts a truly rad event this Sunday. And by rad, we mean RAAD.  Reptile and Amphibian Appreciation Day (see how they did that?) at the museum’s Exposition Park location takes over the halls with exhibits of tiny, slimy friends and exotic reptilian critters. Also making an appearance is the “godfather of turtle biology,” Dr. Peter Pritchard, who’ll give a chat on chelonian conservation.  Note: Chelonian means “of or relating to turtles,” so drop that vocab bomb on your nerdate. Just make sure that your object of affection doesn’t get confused by the meaning of “herpetology.” Oh, and try to refrain from stammering "I like turtles!," like this kid:

-- Alie Ward

Call (213) 763-3218 for more information on the automotive exhibit, or click here for info on RAAD.

Photo: 2009's Reptile and Amphibian Appreciation Day at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, California. Credit: Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging.

“I always know that there will be three or four months of utter confusion and no sense of what the book will be.”

Mary Roach is discussing the process of writing her new book, “Packing for Mars,” and she is nothing if not self-deprecating.

“Usually there's a period of low-grade panic, of sad flailing,” she admits.

The 51-year old author started her writing career as a copy editor and publicist before penning her first freelance column for the San Francisco Examiner over a decade ago, later writing for publications including National Geographic and the website Salon.com. With her 2003 debut book, “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” she accidentally launched a bestselling series of hybrid humor-science books that subsequently included “Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife” and “Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.”

Speaking via phone from her home in Oakland, she recounts her expectations for “Stiff”: “I thought it was a one-off for sure. I thought no one will (A) buy this book, (B) read it and (C) like it. It sounds like one of those annoying things people say to seem full of humility, but it's actually true. It's hard for me to envision a scenario where people walk into a bookstore and say, ‘Oh, a book about cadavers! That's what I'm going to read next.'”

But her tales about dead bodies — or “mounds of tissue,” as she puts it — piqued the public interest and garnered her a fan base.

Continue reading after the jump...

Hold the presses. “Encino Man” was not based on a true story? The 1992 flick about a thawed-out Neanderthal, played too well by Brendan Fraser, also featured Sean Astin, Pauly Shore and heaps of flimsy scientific premises. Tote a picnic blanket to the Page Museum at the La Brea Tarpits for an outdoor screening of the film, along with a pre-show lecture that will address why, exactly, you will never encounter a caveman weazin' the juice in a mini-mart in the Valley. Now if only they would call in a linguist to demystify Pauly Shore's dialect.

Page Museum, 5801 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles; 7:30 p.m.; free

--Alie Ward

Clip: The bar scene from "Encino Man."

Irony of ironies: He may have been the father of evolutionary theory, but when it came to practicing what he preached, Charles Darwin seemed to have missed his own memo.

Charles Darwin often expressed his worries that rather close and widespread interbreeding in his family was responsible for his own ill health and the early deaths of three of his 10 children before they reached their teens. The interbreeding between the Darwin and Wedgwood families was widespread — his wife was his first cousin, but they were by no means the only kissing cousins in the two families. A new study suggests that his considerable anxiety about the hereditary ill-health of his linage was well-founded.

From New Scientist:

The analysis supports Darwin's fears that inbreeding was damaging his health and that of his children, following his ground-breaking studies demonstrating that cross-bred plants are far fitter and more vigorous than self-fertilised plants. "This caused him to reflect on his own condition," says Tim Berra of Ohio State University in Mansfield.

After Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, they had 10 children, three of whom died as children. Three of the others married but remained childless, suggesting infertility problems. And Darwin himself, who suffered unremitting ill health following his epic trip on The Beagle, was the product of an "inter-Wedgwood" union, his maternal grandparents being third cousins to each another.

During Darwin's lifetime, so-called blood marriages were common. About 10% of the population in Britain was married to a relative. A typical reasoning behind such unions was to keep family fortunes intact. In 1870, Darwin campaigned without success to have questions about intermarriage added to census forms.

— Richard Metzger

Photo credit: Associated Press

Case studies published in Current Biology magazine examine how chimpanzees mourn their dead. In some ways the primates behave similarly to human beings, but the reactions varied. The emotional responses can range from loud and seemingly violent to apparently deeply felt anguish. Video cameras at a safari park in Britain were able to capture some chimps in the mourning process. Things that seem certain are that our primate cousins have an awareness of death and can to a certain degree also anticipate it. There are certain types of death-related rituals that chimps indulge in.

"[T]hree chimps gathered around another, elder female of the group as she neared death. Pansy was more than 50 years old, and had been slowing down for some time. For days before her death, the group was very quiet, and paid her lots of attention. Just before she died, the group continually groomed and caressed her, which researchers think was partly to test for signs of life. When she died, the group left, but her adult daughter came back, and spent the night with the body.

The next day the keepers removed the corpse, and the other chimps remained subdued. For a number of days they avoided sleeping on the platform where she died -- usually a prized location, and remained generally quiet for long period afterward.

At the opposite end of the age spectrum, a group of researchers were studying chimpanzees in Guinea, and observed the death of two infants from flu-like respiratory infections. The mothers responded by carrying around the bodies of their children for weeks or months, to the point where the corpse was mummified. They would take them everywhere, groom them, and take them to sleep. Slowly, over the course of this period, the mothers would begin to let the other chimps come in contact with the dead babies for longer and longer periods. They would increase the length of time they could handle being separate from the bodies, even allowing other young chimpanzees to play with them (like in the video below). They appeared to slowly and gradually accept the passing of their young.

James Anderson of the University of Stirling says of the safari park chimps:

"Several phenomena have at one time or another been considered as setting humans apart from other species: reasoning ability, language ability, tool use, cultural variation, and self-awareness, for example, but science has provided strong evidence that the boundaries between us and other species are nowhere near to being as clearly defined as many people used to think. The awareness of death is another such psychological phenomenon. The findings we've described, along with other observations of how chimpanzees respond to dead and dying companions, indicate that their awareness of death is probably more highly developed than is often suggested. It may be related to their sense of self-awareness, shown through phenomena such as self-recognition and empathy towards others."