Science Friday - Meet Flora Lichtman | Los Angeles Wildfires Stoked By Santa Ana Winds

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

After her SciFri internship 20 years ago, Flora went on to become a beloved science journalist, video producer, and podcaster. Now she’s back! Also, several different fires are causing extreme damage in the Los Angeles area. Strong Santa Ana winds are one factor behind their rapid spread.Science Friday Now Has Two Hosts: Meet Flora Lichtman!Big news! Science Friday now has two hosts—Ira Flatow, the program’s founder, and veteran science journalist Flora Lichtman. Going forward, you’ll hear both of them regularly on the air and on our podcast. Flora joins Ira to introduce herself and talk about her background, from her start as an intern at Science Friday 20 years ago to her role as a video producer, then a writer for Bill Nye, and as creator of the podcast “Every Little Thing.”Los Angeles Wildfires Burn For Days, Stoked By Santa Ana WindsThis week, the Los Angeles area has been battered by at least five separate wildfires. Tens of thousands of acres have burned, and thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes. Fire experts had warned on January 2 that conditions were ideal for wildfires in parts of Southern California. One factor that has helped these fires spread rapidly? Unusually strong Santa Ana winds.On the other side of the country, Winter Storm Blair has caused freezing temperatures and up to a foot of snow across the Midwest and up into the East Coast, putting more than 60 million people under weather alerts.Joining Ira Flatow to discuss these and other top stories of the week is Umair Irfan, science correspondent at Vox, based in Washington, D.C.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Before we get to our usual science news, I have some other really big news to share with you this week. And that is we are adding a host. Flora Lickman is joining me as host on Science Friday. Flora is here. So happy to have you here with me. Hi, Ira. I am thrilled to be here with you. Yeah, we're thrilled to have you. You know, your longtime sci-fi listeners may remember Flora years ago. She was our video. editor often came on the show to do the video pick of the week like this one. Time now for our video pick of the week, Flora Lickman, our multimedia editor is here. And I know what you have in store because I've looked at this video and it's unbelievable. I know, Ira, this is a video that I don't actually think we could oversell if we tried. This is like this is a run, don't walk to your laptop or desktop computer video because it's really your mind's going to be blown. It's going to be great.

Okay, now tell us what it is, that we're going to be blown. Now that you're primed, it's about cephalopods, which are squid, octopus, and cuttlefish. And it's about how they camouflage. Yes, where's the octopus, a classic. Where's the octopus film, if I remember it? That one is one of your most popular. I know it's been seen more than a million times,

and it starts out so wonderful with the octopus. Octo expert Roger Hanlon. He comes upon what looks like a rock on the ocean floor. And it just turns it to something else, right? Yes, it looks like a rock. And then it becomes very suddenly an octopus. And it's totally shocking. I remember Roger Hanlon told us that when he captured that footage, he screamed. You know, he's diving and he screamed. And people thought he was having a dive accident because it was just like he knew when he caught it. I mean, that video, I think, at Science Friday, for me, it was my magnum octopus. Ooh, Flora, with puns like that, we're going to get along just fine.

Where do you think I learned them? So that tape, I think, was from 2011, but I actually started at Science Friday as an intern in 2005, you know, exactly 20 years ago. And I'm sure you remember, but I started as a listener, and I think this probably qualifies me for superfan status. because I remember I emailed you out of the blue to see if I could work on the show. And by some miracle, you didn't file it in your fishing folder. And instead, you gave me a shot. You gave me my first gig in journalism. So thank you for that.

Not to be cheesy, but it did change my life. Yes, I remember it well to quote a song from My Fair Lady. So tell us about what you've been up to, right, since your time with SciFri. What have you been working on? So in a lot of ways, I think Science Friday set me on my path. And my whole career really has been about making science fun and accessible and human. And one of the projects I'm really proud of is a series of short films that appeared on the New York Times that I co-directed. And they were about seminal scientific discoveries.

But there's a twist. They were all animated with paper puppets that we made in our living rooms. Love those puppets. Yeah, I know. I mean, despite the DIY element and the fact that they were put together with glue sticks and construction paper, the project got nominated for an Emmy. In fact, we lost to Oprah, which I'm only saying because it's my crowning achievement in life. Yeah, you share that with a lot of people. So that's very high honor, actually. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, the thing is, these films taught me so much about the history of science. And I know you know this, too, Ira, how much resolve. it takes to make and kind of stand by big discoveries because discoveries that challenge people's assumptions about how the world works, you know, often, I don't know, maybe almost always

are met with some skepticism. So let me give you an example. Ira, have you heard of Antony von Leavenhook? I remember that was the guy with the microscope, right? Yes, the guy with the microscope, exactly. So he was born in 1632. He was actually a haberdack. He was actually a haberdack. in the Netherlands, but he had this side hustle making microscopes. And they were like these little handheld single lens devices. No one really knew how he made his lenses. But they were better than anyone else's at the time. And so Leavenhook saw things no one had ever seen before, you know,

microorganisms that people didn't know existed. So here's a clip from that film. Leibou called them in Dutch Dieuarkens. And Deerkenz, that's a diminutive of the... The word deer, deer, D-I-E-R, which is the Dutch word for animal. What Lavinhoe called him was little animals. This was all so new. The word microorganism did not exist at the time.

The word bacteria is from the 19th century. And that strikes me as Adam in the Garden of Eden, who in Genesis named all the animals. It was just a brand new world. And he was the first person in him. Wow, love that microbial zoo you had going there. I know. This is like microbiome. 0.001.

And of course, people didn't believe Lavin Hook at first because it was so shocking. You know, this idea that we were surrounded by animals no one had ever seen before. Yeah, being a pioneer can be a pretty lonely existence at time, can't they? I think so. And that was one of the things that I picked up doing these stories. But another project that really, you know, sort of shaped my experience was working with Bill Nye. Bill, just won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Congrats. Congratulations, Bill, if you are listening.

Have you worked with Bill? Yeah, I worked with Bill for a while on various projects. And I think one of the most famous moments on the show was when Bill came into the studio and I asked him to show us how he tied a bow tie. And somewhere, somewhere we have a video with him doing that. His bow ties are on point. He always looks dapper. So I worked with Bill as a writer on his Netflix show, Bill Nye Saves the World, which was kind of like one part geeky science demos that we know Bill Nye for and one part late night talk show. And it was extremely fun and very different from my public radio roots.

Not quite like the set you work on now, right? A little slightly different. But I want to tell you about one more project that I'm really proud of. It's a podcast. I created a Gimlet Media, and the show was called Every Little Thing, and it ran for five years, which I know in SciFry years is short, but it's long in podcast years. And that show, no coincidence, shares a lot of DNA with Science Friday. You know, one of the things I've always loved about SciFri is that this show centers listener voices. And so we did the same thing on every little thing. Every episode was built around a listener's burning question. And then we found kind of the world's top experts who could answer that question, and we called the listener back and told them what we found. And the questions ranged from why do auctioneers talk like that?

$20.9. David, $25 at my $30, $0.35 at my $40, $5. $45 at $45 at my $50. To what really lives in the New York City sewers. But then we start looking around the room, and the wall is kind of moving and shimmering. I don't know. You may not want to know the answer to that. Pretty brave. Pretty brave subject. Yes. Yes. Picture a dark, dank room, wallpapered with cockroaches. But, you know, maybe our most famous episode was this story that honestly blew my mind, too. I learned that for all of my life, I have completely misunderstood the Flamingo. The flamingo. Of all the things in your life, it's the flamingo.

I've misunderstood a lot of things, Ira, but this is one of the things I've misunderstood. But what is there to misunderstand about the flamingo, right? You see it standing there with its legs in the water and stuff like that? Yeah. Okay. So when I say flamingo, what adjectives come to mind? All right. So I say, as I said, that long, scrawny legs, it's got its beak in the water. It's pink. It's kind of weird looking from another planet. Yes. Okay. So they're a little bit goofy. They've got these gangly legs. And yes, critically, they are pink, a color that not, you know, that historically has not had a lot of power, paging Barbie, the whole subtext of that movie. But Ira buckle up. Feathers will be ruffled. Well, you know, I have some pretty tough feathers. So I'm waiting for this. Go, go for it.

Okay, so flamingos seem maybe dorky, delicate, but that is not their lane. Flamingos are tough. It takes a tough bird, a flamingo, they're tough? A tough bird. This is Felicity O'Rango from the American Museum of Natural History. Flamingos are adapted to some pretty extreme habitats. I think of them as tropical birds, but they can also live in these high-altitude wetlands, like 17, thousand feet above sea level where it freezes at night. They're in these high altitude lakes and the

flamingos can freeze inside the wetlands. What? Their legs are actually frozen into the ice. Yep. And as the sun comes out and it begins to warm up and eventually the ice around their legs melts and they'll get up and they'll just walk away. No. Who knew? Wow. I know. It is surprising. And that's not all. So these wetlands, they're not just icy. They can also be extremely salty and even filled with toxic chemicals. Some of the wetlands have even arsenic in them. I've also known of researchers that have had some of their skin peel off and react to these extreme chemicals. It's caustic enough that human skin might sluff off in this environment.

If you spent a lot of time there, I suppose that that could happen. So yeah, they can withstand toxic ponds. Last one, my personal favorite flam fact, flam fact, flammingos can drink boiling water. They live near these hot springs where water is near boiling temperatures and they can guzzle it down. And without a tea bag, I'll bet. They're fierce. They're formidable. They are freaking tough. And I think they get underestimated, this is my theory, because they're pink.

So the flamingo became a little bit of a mascot for ELT, and I hope we can keep the flamingo love flowing here at SciFri. Well, Flora, now that you're here, I'm looking forward to keeping that love flowing. So glad you're back with us. I'm very glad to be here, Ira. Thanks. And you'll be hearing more from Flora later in the hour, and on every hour of Science Friday going forward, alongside me as SciFRIZ 2 hosts.

After the break, outgoing Surgeon General Vivek Murthy joins me to talk about his time in office, what comes next, and his latest report highlighting how alcohol use increases the risk of cancer. Stay with us. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. As we've all been watching, Los Angeles County has been battered by devastating wildfires. Tens of thousands of acres have burned and thousands of people have. been forced to flee their homes. So why are these fires raging like this? And burning down homes, some of them not even in forests. It has to do with the wind. Joining me to tell us about this and other science news of the week is Umer Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox covering science,

climate change and the environment. He's based in Washington, D.C. Welcome back to Science Friday. Hey, Ira. Thanks for having me. Nice to have you. Okay, let's get into these California fires. I talked about the wind. What factors are coming to make this place so ripe for fires right now? Right. These winds are actually a seasonal phenomenon. They're typically called the Santa Ana winds. And usually in the wintertime, they start to pick up.

They blow from the northeast towards the southwest towards Los Angeles. And they occur basically when you have this air over the mountains start to roll downhill. And as they build up pressure, the air dries out. It speeds up. and they start gusting towards cities like Los Angeles. This year, though, they've been exceptionally strong with gusts reaching up to 100 miles an hour. And that's part in because of this high pressure system that has kind of parked over the mountains that is helping squeeze more air outward and westward towards the city.

And that's adding this additional gust. You know, meteorologists were able to actually see this coming. They've been warning about very, very high winds this year since the beginning of the year. And then on top of that, you know, Los Angeles, the area saw an exceptionally dry start to its winter, which meant that a lot of the vegetation around it, which is mainly grasslands and chaparral with a few trees here and there, it dried out very quickly. And the key thing to note is that while this winter was very dry, the prior winter was very, very wet. And so over the past year, basically through most of 2024, there was this bumper crop of grasses and fast-growing shrubs that built up. It dried out in the record heat. and now in this dry winter and the combination of high winds has created basically the ideal conditions for a major fire.

Wow. You know, we're keeping all of you out in Southern California in our hearts, but for those of us on the other side of the country, many of us are dealing with an extreme cold snap. Give us the lowdown on that winter air. Right. And there's this interconnection between both the fires and the cold snap across much of the country as well. and that is this phenomenon called the jet stream. This is a high altitude, fast-moving band of air. It normally circles the Arctic and sort of an even circle, but every now and then as it weakens,

it starts to sort of meander and snake across parts of the northern hemisphere. So as it pushes down in some areas, like it's doing over the eastern United States, it lets cold Arctic air start to spill over and help fuel these bouts of extreme cold. And then in other parts of the country, it starts to move upward and allows warm air to sort of hold in place. And that's kind of what we're seeing across the west of the U.S.

And so that's kind of the interconnection here. And so on the East Coast, yes, we're seeing this burst of cold air. And scientists expect that potentially if the Arctic continues to warm, it can cause these kinds of destabilization events to happen more often. That may seem strange in people's minds, you know. It's getting warmer, but we're getting these polar vortexes. Right. I mean, the key thing to remember is that the Arctic is,

warming about four times faster than the rest of the planet. And so a tiny bit of warming on the rest of the planet usually means a lot more warming there. And warm, quote unquote, air in the Arctic is still frigid by our standards. So even warmish Arctic air when it spills down can induce a lot of ice and snow when it reaches the lower 48. All right. Let's move on to some virus news and actually, unbelievably some good news. There's a viral outbreak in China that's actually not as bad as many experts feared. Tell us about this. Right. There was some news going around that there was this spike in this respiratory infection caused by this virus called the human metanumavirus or HMPV. And there was some information and misinformation and some viral reports that there was another outbreak that was

happening in China of another respiratory virus that was raising a bunch of alarm. But this week, health officials at the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, they analyzed the data and they said that basically what we're looking at is an ordinary seasonal uptick in respiratory viruses in China. Now, the HMPV cases are making up a larger share of these respiratory infections, but the overall rate of infections is basically what they would expect for this time of year. That essentially, as more people gather indoors in the winter, colds and other kinds of infections will spread more readily. And that's kind of what we're seeing happening right now. And this virus itself tends to cause fairly mild cold-like symptoms. So it's not severe even if you get it. Okay. It's good that we can breathe the sigh of relief about this virus because this is the virus season. And unfortunately, there's some not great news about another virus, the neurovirus. Tell us about that one. Right. The Centers for Disease Control reported this week that actually the norovirus levels, and in the U.S. are unusually high right now, probably at the highest levels they've seen in more than a

decade. In the real world, the numbers might be even higher because this is just based on cases that have been reported or have interacted with the medical system. You know, the neurovirus is a stomach bug. It causes, you know, gastrointestinal problems. It causes, you know, vomiting and diarrhea and a lot of other unpleasantness. And we do see it tend to rise more in the winter. But part of the reason we're seeing an unusual spike right now is maybe some of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Basically, immunity to norovirus usually lasts a couple years, but during COVID-19, when people were isolating, there was much less transmission of norovirus. And so a lot of that natural immunity that had built up for a while had died down.

And then as people started gathering once again, that disease has now come roaring back. And how do you protect yourself from this miserable, miserable virus? Well, again, the basic measures that we all know and love, I mean, you know, washing your hands appropriately, you know, this is something that that can be transmitted through your hands and through contact with people who are infected. And then also, you know, maintain good hygiene, distancing, and wearing masks if you're not feeling well and wearing masks around people who are likely to be infectious. Right. All right. Let's move on to a bit of political news. As we know, we're going to have a change in presidents this month. But President Biden, at the 11th hour has banned new oil and gas drilling along most of the U.S. coasts in a way that would be hard for President Trump to reverse. Tell me about that. Right. Basically, they issued this new band on drilling in coastal waters across basically 625 million acres. This includes pretty much the entire East Coast and the West Coast, as well as parts of the Gulf of Mexico

and parts of Alaska. These are areas where we don't see much drilling to begin with, and we haven't see much oil and gas industry interest, but this designation also basically kind of closes the door to that, that essentially sends a signal to the industry that this is going to be something that's going to be off limits for the foreseeable future. The White House also said that they're going to maintain federal protections for 2,000 grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains. The population of these bears has recovered pretty extensively over the past few decades, and their range is expanding, but it's also leading to more conflicts with locals. And so they've been seeking approval to hunt and to contain these bears,

but these federal protections mean that they're going to be off limits for the foreseeable future. And in addition to that, you know, President Biden this week also announced new monument designations in California, protecting about 800,000 acres of new land, and for similar reasons to protect them against, you know, new oil and gas development, and trying to use legal mechanisms that they hope won't be easily overturned, by the next administration, although President Electoral Trump has already said that he wants to reverse a lot of these protections. Okay, let's talk about another story that's been in the news this week.

There's been a review of 74 medical studies that links higher fluoride exposure to lower IQ in kids, but it might not be as straightforward as that. What does this survey say, and why are people pushing back on it? Well, the authors of this study that was published this week in JAMA Pediatrics note themselves that basically the main conclusion of this review is that the data out there just isn't very good. They looked at 74 medical studies, as you noted, looking at these links between lower IQ and children and basically found that the quality of the research isn't very good. All of the research is based on studies that were conducted outside of the United States, most of them in China. and they were conducted in communities that have much higher levels of fluoride exposure

than you would find in the United States. And the quality of those studies are not very good. And so while they did show a link when you pull them all together, they did issue this major caveat that essentially this is not a very robust finding and that if you wanted to make any kind of statement about this, you really need to do a lot more research. Right, right. All right.

Let's light up a little bit at the end here with a topic that we all love. Dinosaurs. A new dinosaur? What's going on here? Well, right. Researchers this week at the University of Wisconsin-Madison described these fossils that kind of upend the timeline of when they think dinosaurs originated. Basically, you know, millions of years ago, most of the continents were pushed together in this giant supercontinent called Pangaea. And the prevailing theory was that essentially dinosaurs originated in the southern part of the continent and millions of years ahead before they started moving and migrating further and further north. But these new fossils, they were found in essentially an area that was in the northern hemisphere of the supercontinent around the same time, basically around 230 million years old. And that indicates that essentially the dinosaurs have been roaming much further and more widely earlier than they had expected.

And this dinosaur, it's about the size of a chicken with a long tail. The name of it is Avetum Banduviche. It's from the name drawn from the Shoshone language, which means long ago. dinosaur. But basically, this finding kind of really forces them to re-evaluate exactly when dinosaurs originated. And perhaps they may have started, you know, spreading across the earth even earlier than we realized. Wow. Wow. Love our dino news. Umair, thank you for taking time to be with us today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Ummer Afan, senior correspondent at Vox, covering science, climate change and the environment he's based in Washington, D.C.

That's just about all the time we have for today. Lots of folks help make this show happen, including Emma Gomez, Sandy Roberts. Robin Casmer. Diana Plasker. I'm Flore Lichten. Thanks for listening.