Photo by Christine N. Ziemba/LAist It has long been held that the mysteries of the human body be revealed to a select group of degree laden individuals, physicians and scientists alike, whose rigorous scholastic upbringing served as an all access pass to our anatomy and physiology. The layperson, meanwhile, was left to entrust his or her precious and vastly complicated system to the aforementioned guru or, more often then not, lay awake at night......

Photo of Volunteer Park in Seattle by sunrisesoup via Flickr Forget New Years resolutions! Now is the perfect time to make a change in your life and make a difference the lives of others. Here's a very brief list of just a few organizations around L.A. that are currently looking for volunteers. For additional resources visit www.vcla.net or www.laworks.com. Animal Support Friends of Animals- works to cultivate a respectful view of nonhuman animals, free-living......

If hitting a 95-mile and hour fastball is a monstrous feat of athletic ability, then competing in the Tour de France is an almost incomprehensible feat of brainpower. When your brain says no, when your muscles ache, and when your body begins to shut down from the pain of riding 100 miles every day for a month, how do you continue to ride up the face of some of the tallest mountains in the world?...

- Is LAX really trying to more than double the rent on several low-cost airlines? - Daily News - Speaking of LAX, SkyWest celebrated their 30th anniversary with the airport - Yahoo - Speaking of anniversaries, Little Ethiopia is preparing to celebrate Big Ethiopia's millennium - Nazret - Brandy is being sued by the sons of the woman who died in last year's car crash - AP - The LA Daily News takes a......

- When TomKat, J.Lo, and Marc Anthony all have to cram into the back seat of a Rolls because one of their cars breaks down, the li'l guys sit on the hump - Celebrity Puke - Donald Trump gets his hard-earned star on the walk of fame after his years of innovation on television - ABC - LA has the largest amount of homeless people in the USA - VOA - Ontario and Palmdale......

"They're giving it away free? It must be good!" Put on your best pair of ripped jeans and a collared shirt (floss it, of course). It’s time for all the broke posers of LA to pretend they’re cultured! You can’t miss with the second annual "Museums Free-For-All" day on Sunday, October 1. Of course, those broke non-posers will probably realize that most of the 20 participating museums are normally completely free (Getty Center, California......

So, you're seen the banners (Bruce, and otherwise) all over town, hanging from lightposts. You've wondered what they are all about. Well, it's time to activate your latent mutant genes, and go find out for yourself at the California Science Center. Last month they opened the brand spanking new Marvel Superheroes Science Exhibit, and it's one of the most exciting and innovative ways we've seen to get both children and adults interested in science.......

If you want a dose of smartness on Saturday, what could be better than the Science Matters panel on The Science and Ethics of Reproductive Cloning? The 2-hour discussion starts at 1:30pm at the California Science Center at Expo Park and is absolutely free. Smart, lively Geoffrey Cowan — Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at USC — will moderate, which is a good sign. The panel will talk about hard science, perhaps......

Some women hit that thirty-something time of life and go a little crazy. Take, for example, the two who were caught on tape pocketing a plastinated 13-week old fetus at the BodyWorlds2 exhibit at the California Science Center. They absconded with their little bundle of joy around 3am Saturday, when the exhibit was open overnight as part of its closing weekend. Maybe they just couldn't bear to leave emptyhanded — LAist was compelled to......

Body Worlds, the display of anatomical specimens preserved by plastination, leaves the California Science Center on the 23rd. During a visit last night, we overheard a woman mumur to her sullen, teenage son as they both examined the tar-blackened lungs of a deceased smoker: "Look at that. Aren't you at all affected by this? It makes me want to vomit!" Worry not if you can't get to the exhibition before it closes. Body Worlds......

We here at LAist don't consider ourselves squeamish. On the contrary, we like to think of ourselves as a hard-bitten news organization, full of cynical chain-smokers who fire questions at homicide dicks as they work a bloody crime scene (what other people think of us is their own business). But then came plastination, the process in which a human body is, in effect, transformed into a skinless action figure. This fascinating, though creepy, process......