Mysteries

They arose early and got themselves all decked out: she in a midcalf dress of some soft beige, he in a jacket and tie--the first tie Scott Roston's roommate had ever seen him wear. Scott Roston and Karen Waltz raced to Las Vegas on Feb. 4 in his leased red Toyota two-seater and were wed in a $25 civil ceremony in a marriage commissioner's office enlivened by some blue and white artificial flowers. Then they raced back to Santa Monica.

The Catalina Island Museum has opened a window into a dark period of life on the island with an exhibition devoted to a pseudoscientist who looted Native American graves for profit eight decades ago. "The Strange and Mysterious Case of Dr. Glidden," which opened over the weekend, examines the life and times of Ralph Glidden, a hucksterish entrepreneur who in the 1920s and '30s excavated bones and relics from Tongva Indian burial grounds for sale...

The most enduring and romantic legend of the Russian Revolution -- that two children of Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, survived the slaughter that killed the rest of their family -- may finally be put to rest with the positive identification of bone fragments from a lonely Russian grave.

For the first half of the 20th century, the cell was a mysterious, unfathomable entity. Nutrients went in and hormones, wastes and other products came out. But what happened in between was anybody's guess. Light microscopes could reveal the rough details of the cell's interior, but not with enough precision to illuminate function. Chemical studies were rudimentary at best. Three men changed that. Albert Claude of the Rockefeller Institute - now University - adapted the electron microscope to image cells, allowing a much higher resolution.

Light does not easily penetrate the clouded story of Betty Short, a 22-year-old unemployed cashier and waitress whose body was found cut in half and gruesomely mutilated 50 years ago this month in a vacant lot in Southwest Los Angeles. The unsolved killing remains Los Angeles' premier myth noir, a tale of a tragic beauty clad in black, prowling the night life, a cautionary fable that rings as true today as it did in 1947. The legend insists on a shadowed, epic tone.

The mob-style rub-out of Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel 50 years ago today at the Beverly Hills mansion of his street-wise, auburn-haired mistress has endured as one of Los Angeles' most romanticized murder mysteries.

When it happened, more than 19 years ago, it was a shock. And, in a way, it's still a shock. Sonny Liston dead? How could it be? He was a mountain, a guy who had muscles in his ears. He had a left hook that could take down buildings. Before his two questionable performances against Cassius Clay-Muhammad Ali, he was generally perceived as indestructible.

The news accounts, now 70 years old, offer only fragments of the "ghastly drama" that surrounded the marriage of Mary Kenan Flagler Bingham, "the richest woman in America." She was the widow of Standard Oil co-founder Henry Flagler and her estate was worth between $60 million and $100 million. Her bridegroom was Judge Robert Worth Bingham, a Kentucky lawyer without independent means. Their wedding in 1916 made headlines, even in New York. And so did her mysterious death eight months later.

One warm Friday night in late spring 10 years ago, Kristin Denise Smart and three other young women started walking from their dorms at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. They were headed for the neighborhoods of apartment complexes and overpopulated "Animal House"-like bungalows that border the campus. They were looking for a party. It was Memorial Day weekend. Kristin's first year away at college was coming to a close. The 19-year-old from Stockton would have considered that something to celebrate.

The death of Crystal Spencer has evolved into a bizarre mystery--a tangled web of rumors and botched evidence, lawsuits and personal obsession. Nearly four years ago, the 29-year-old topless dancer was found dead in her disheveled Burbank apartment. She was half-nude, her body decomposed beyond recognition. Her telephone was off the hook. Whether she was murdered, or merely died of a sudden illness, is a lingering question.

Here are three tweets I would have sent from my recent stay at Santa Barbara's just-reopened El Encanto hotel if I hadn't been busy behaving like royalty and pretending the Internet didn't exist: - Arriving Encanto. Tab for a 375-sf room w/fireplace and regal bathroom: $575 for 1 night, $35 for pkng, plus tax. Hey, what's with extra stairs? - Sunset on terrace. Ordering abalone. Below: lush grounds, distant sea, SB's red roofs. We're 200 ft above normal life. - Waiting for dinner.

When James Watson and Francis Crick deciphered the structure of DNA in 1953, their discovery answered a crucial question in biology: How is genetic information passed down from parent to child? Their work also created conundrums, however. They and others showed that every cell of an organism contains all of its genetic material. How, then, does an individual cell know which genes to use and when? And how does information from DNA get to the cell's protein-making machinery? The seminal insight into those questions came from three biologists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris - Dr. Francois Jacob, Jacques Monod and Andre Lwoff.

Even from his earliest days as a musician, Rob Zombie displayed a deep-rooted interest in aesthetics and visual style, in creating an entire world stewed in a distinctive brew of horror movies, true crime, the occult and general weirdness. His latest film as writer and director, "The Lords of Salem," might be his most undiluted vision yet, a movie intended as a contraption for unsettling audiences, a mood piece meant to evoke a particularly dark turn of mind. PHOTOS: Movies Sneaks 2013 Set in modern-day Salem, Mass., the story concerns the spiraling downfall of a local radio DJ (played by Sheri Moon Zombie, the filmmaker's wife and something like the Leslie Mann to his horror Judd Apatow)

Ted Kamp wanted to make sure his daughter received the medical treatment she needed. That was his first priority. His second was making sure his insurance would cover things and that he'd pay a fair price for any procedures. The fact that this proved so difficult highlights one of the crazier aspects of the U.S. healthcare system: the inability of patients to know how much their treatment really costs. "It's infuriating and it's exhausting," Kamp, 50, told me. "It's clear that the entire system is designed to bully you into submission.

Of the many indignities visited upon Fern Dell, the garden oasis in Griffith Park, one remains a mystery: Who turned off the water? Starlets and health-seekers lined up in the 1920s to fill jugs from the spring that fed this 20-acre fantasia of ferns, footpaths and picturesque bridges. They thought it was a fountain of youth. Now, only the lower stream beds run, and the pools lie motionless and gummy. You might think the city would do something. But instead, Friends of Griffith Park - the nonprofit group that stepped in three years ago to try to reverse the 95-year-old garden's long, sad decline - is on the case.

Contrary to the adage, what we don't know about North Korea could hurt us. It's not known whether the intermediate-range Musudan missiles poised for imminent firing could reach U.S. bases on Guam or Japan, though at least the latter is thought to be likely. Neither do the geopolitical experts who track every inscrutable move of the hermit country know if a missile launch would be meant to salute late North Korean founder Kim Il Sung on his 101st birthday Monday or to demonstrate that Pyongyang has the power to instigate a nuclear conflagration.

The tearful and tearless both cry on William Frey's shoulder. Among those seeking his help since he published "Crying: The Mystery of Tears" three years ago were a woman whose husband alternated bouts of tears and laughter, and a restaurateur whose cooks cried chopping onions. For the restaurant owner, the answer was easy and time-honored: Chop the onions under a mist of water. Other times, it's more complicated.

Down, down, down the robotic rover descended into the Pacific Ocean's cold-hearted depths, searching for signs of a 46-foot commercial fishing vessel that had gone missing. Veteran captain Bill Burchell and his two crewmen aboard the trawler Marian Ann vanished one evening in late September as the trio worked the long nets they used to scour for rock cod 40 miles northwest of this scenic fishing port. With all three men presumed lost at sea, U.S.

If you have ever arrived at a hospital writhing in agony and had the six faces of the "Wong-Baker Pain Assessment Scale" thrust in front of you, you know that the medical profession's understanding of pain is, shall we say, in a rudimentary state. But a new study suggests there may be a more revealing way to communicate the experience of pain than pointing to a grimacing stick-figure face with furrowed brows and some tears. A group of scientists at the University of Michigan have succeeded in using functional magnetic resonance imaging to tease apart the brain's consistent response to physical pain from its very similar response to emotional pain.

Unearthing the mystery of Pablo Neruda's death Monday, April 8 : Did famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda die of cancer or was he poisoned? The remains of the Nobel Prize laureate will be exhumed Monday from his Isla Negra grave on the Chilean coast as authorities probe allegations that he was murdered in the wake of the 1973 military coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. The cause of death was listed at the time as advanced prostate cancer. But Neruda's chauffeur and bodyguard, Manuel Araya Osorio, came forward two years ago with a report that the 69-year-old leftist had appeared well on the morning of his death and, after suddenly becoming feverish, told of being given an injection by a doctor the previous night.