On Wednesday, May 1, at 6:30 pm, followers of @AMNH and Scientific American (@SciAm) on Twitter are invited to explore Whales: Giants of the Deep after hours, meet curators and scientists, and enjoy free drinks and snacks in our historic Hall of Northwest Coast Indians.

With help from Lima’s International Potato Center, Andean farmers are preserving potato diversity, as this new video from Science Bulletins evocatively reveals. Also, next Monday, April 29, and Tuesday, April 30, taste different varieties of Peruvian potato chips in the working kitchen in the Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture exhibition. 

Science fiction portrays our Milky Way Galaxy as filled with habitable planets populated by advanced civilizations. Back in our real universe, not a microbe has been found by scientists observing exoplanets—Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.

In this podcast, join Geoff Marcy, Professor of Astronomy at University of California, Berkeley, as he discusses the Earth-like worlds discovered by NASA’s new space-born Kepler telescope.

This Saturday, at 1 pm, model and journalist Gail O’Neill will moderate a Museum panel on the Power of Beauty, at Expressions of Beauty: Sights and Sounds, a two-day festival about beauty across cultures and time.

Excavations at Mexico’s Valley of Oaxaca have recovered the region’s earliest known temple precinct, which, according to a new study by the American Museum of Natural History, existed about 1,500 years earlier than similar temples described by colonial Europeans. The findings are described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.