Science Friday - Virtual Worlds And Wildfire Health Effects. Dec 4, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: December 4, 2020

Science Friday’s Second Life: The Voyage Home Do you remember Second Life? That online virtual world where you can create an avatar, build whatever you want, and meet people? It was a hit in the late 2000s, quickly becoming a pop culture phenomenon. Within the first few years, an average of 38,000 users were logged in at any given time. Second Life was so big that Science Friday created a community there in 2007. We livestreamed our show in-world every Friday, and a huge community of avatars—humans, fairies, wolves, dogs with wings—would gather with us every week to listen. Sadly, after a couple years, our staff left Second Life, and the space was dismantled. But we recently learned that for the last ten years, some members of that original community have still been meeting up virtually to listen to the show every week.  Producer Daniel Peterschmidt catches up with the group to find out what they had to do to survive in the virtual landscape, what the online community is like today, and what they’ve learned while spending over a decade in Second Life. We’ll also hear from Celia Pearce, an associate professor of game design at Northeastern University, and Katherine Isbister, a human computer interaction and games researcher at the the University of California, Santa Cruz, about how virtual worlds like Second Life can help us cope with the quarantine-induced reality we live in now. How Do Wildfires Affect Our Bodies? This summer, the skies in California, Oregon, and other West Coast states turned sickly orange—a hue that lingered in many places for days, due to the smoke and ash from wildfires.  It’s estimated that more than eight million acres of land have been scorched this year, and wildfires are still blazing: Nearly 40 fires are still active out west. Climate change is creating warmer, drier conditions in western states, resulting in a season that starts earlier and ends later than in the past. The foregoing of historically effective indigenous burning practices has also exacerbated the problem.  Joining Ira to explain what we know about the health effects of wildfires are Colleen Reid, assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Chris Migliaccio, immunologist and research associate professor at the University of Montana in Missoula.  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 Flato. A bit later in the hour, we're going to talk about the health effects of wildfires. As you know, the wildfire season this year on the West Coast was intense. An estimated 8 million acres burned. And we want to know how these wildfires might affect your health. There's a lot of concern about the specific gases that are released when you burn sort of man-made materials like homes and cars and all these things that have a lot of chemicals. in them that are different than the chemicals that are released when you're burning just vegetation. But at this point, we don't have any information about whether the differences in the emissions affect health differently. We'll talk to two experts, answer your questions about wildfire and health effects a bit later. But first, something a little different. We're going to take an escape into virtual worlds.

Since the pandemic started, you know, a lot of us have transitioned from living and working in the real world to the virtual world. You know what I mean, seeing our coworkers and friends and family on Zoom rather than in the office or at their house. And it's been making us at SciFri think about virtual worlds of another kind. I'm talking about worlds like Second Life. Do you remember Second Life? That online 3D virtual world where you can make your own avatar and you wander around and meet people and build things? If you recall, Science Friday actually had a big presence in Second Life in those early days.

And some of you might remember that we streamed our show there every Friday in the late aughts. And fans would come and listen and chat about the show with us. It was like a giant live book club. Tons of fun. Some really cool avatar costumes. Well, you know, sadly, we had to leave after a couple of years. But our producer Daniel Petershmit recently learned that some of our fans are still there. And things got pretty dicey for them after we left.

Daniel also learned from people who have spent over a decade in second life how virtual worlds like these can help us cope with our virtual world now. Well, better than me, let me have Daniel tell you all about it. One of my jobs at Science Friday is to help manage our Twitter account during the live show. And one Friday afternoon, last January, we got a message from a Twitter user named Baragon. He said the show's streaming link was broken and he needed a new one so we could listen on Second Life. And I was like, wait, second life?

One of the fastest growing sites on the internet is a 3D world called Second Life. This is supposed to be me. Kind of. It's called an avatar. And it's part of a world some people call very cool, while others consider it very weird. Yes, that Second Life,

the online virtual world that became kind of a cultural phenomenon in the early 2000s. If you've never seen Second Life, imagine a vast ocean dotted with thousands of small islands and large continents. Like Ira said earlier, signing up is free, anyone can create an avatar, and you can really live a Second Life there. You can meet other people, you can build bustling cities and blissful forests, you can make and sell things and earn real-world money. Second Life really took off in the early 2000s, and it had a million regular users at its peak. But it became the butt of jokes in pop culture. kind of thing that Dwight from the office was into.

You playing that game again? Second Life is not a game. It is a multi-user virtual environment. It doesn't have points or scores. It doesn't have winners or losers. Oh, it has losers. Mean dig aside, Dwight wasn't alone in loving Second Life. A little over a decade ago, Science Friday was pretty excited about it too. So excited that we started our very own Second Life community in 2007.

And then... We forgot about them. But keep in mind, this was 13 years ago. No one I talked to really remembers how it started, but Ira did remember how he felt about it. I do remember being very excited when I heard about it. Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. The idea that you could create a whole new world and put down roots and have a spot where people could come and listen to Science Friday early on, that was crazy. I thought that was kind of cool.

We basically wanted to throw an awesome Science Friday party in second. Second Life. So one day, Ira announces on the radio that we'd be streaming the show into Second Life. Anyone could log in and listen virtually with us. The thing is, we had no idea what we were doing. We started renting an island. Side note, you can rent or buy land in Second Life and kind of do whatever you want with it. But besides a couple trees in a pond, there was nothing on it. And no one wants to hang out with you on a Barron Island. Science Friday was my favorite show. And eventually, I volunteered to manage and build out the Science Friday Island. Luckily, Lynn Collins, a retired mountain line conservationist

and Science Friday Superfan, heard our callout on the radio and volunteered to be our virtual world architect and guide. Do you remember a moment early on when you were playing it and you're like, wow, this is like really working for me? There were so many. The moment when I first created a primitive object in second life and realized that I could change this world. I wasn't just playing in it, I was creating it. Designing an island isn't an easy task, but what Lynn created was beautiful. She built an amphitheater right on the water, and from it every evening you'd get this stunning view of the digital sunset.

You can check out photos of it on science friday.com slash second life. The amphitheater had big red, comfy-looking chairs where visiting avatars could come sit in a circle, and in the center was just a normal-looking office chair, where Ira's avatar, Ira Flatley would preside. Yeah, Ira Flatley, not Flato. I had a lot of trouble with the Ira Flatley avatar because I could not get it to look like me. I got as close as I could to it.

I'm not great at graphics. But not that close. This was not public radio host Ira. This was Baywatch Ira. Massive biceps, APEC abs. I never had such a good body as that avatar has. So I was happy at least with that. So Science Friday's Second Life

was all set to go. We had an amphitheater, we had a beefcake Ira. What more do you really need? People, of course. Lynn built it, and after some shoutouts from Ira on the radio, they came. All kinds of creatures. There was Violet Asimus, who showed up as a rabbit. Like a realistic rabbit. As for why, I don't know. Bunny's always spoke to me. CB Axel, a retired paramedic, came as a human. She's younger than I am in real life. She's thinner than I am in real life. And of course, Baragon, the person who wrote to us on Twitter. His avatar is tall and comic book muscular with long silky hair. My avatar is really handsome. I like my avatar to be hot. In real life, he's Matt Burr, a patent

attorney with a degree in molecular biology. Usually there'd be around 70 people who'd show up every week, but at its peak, the group had a huge amount of members, over 2,800 people. There were so many people showing up that we had to set up an overflow space so the island wouldn't crash. Daggerhead, let me see if I can get one more audio question in from second line. Absolutely. One of the group's favorite things about the shows was being able to send their questions to Ira through the chat, and sometimes overvoiced too, like this one. A few billion years from now, the sun's going to become much brighter, swell into a red giant and scorched the surface of the earth. What we're looking at on Mercury right now, will that tell us anything about what it will be like on the earth this time a few billion years from now?

Wow, that's a really good question. Whenever Ira would say, oh, here's a question from so-and-so in Second Life, everyone would get really excited. Yay, we're mentioned. Congratulations, you got your name on. It was really fun and exciting for all of us to hear. It made us feel part of the radio show. So during the live broadcast, Lynn moderated the chat and sent the best questions to the studio.

She remembers this one time while she was moderating, and there was this massive thunderstorm. happening in Sacramento where she lived. And at the same time, I was watching a hundred-year-old Elm Tree whipped wildly about and crashed through the roof of the church across the street. And I just kept typing because what was happening in my home was very different than what was happening in the studio in New York and very different from what was happening under the clear blue skies in Second Life. And that was part of the magic.

was being three places at once. But despite what a frantic job it must have been? It was an experience that I looked forward to every single week. I remember a couple of times going out with Ira and walking around the island and chatting about the show. And it's one of the highlights of that relationship for me was to be able to spend that time with Ira. You know, why did we leave Second Life?

We left Second Life on a purely monetary basis. It was too expensive, to put it simply. It was 2009. We'd been in Second Life for roughly two years. And we'd reached a point where renting an island was just outside our nonprofit budget, roughly $800 a month in rent. And as the executive producer of the show, Ira had to make a difficult call. The hardest thing was the decision to say goodbye.

And that's really was the hardest part of second life. Because we stopped paying for the island, it disappeared. Ira and our other admin stopped logging in. And Lynn, our second life maestro, left second life entirely. And that appeared to be the final nail in the coffin. Lynn was gone. We were gone. The island was gone.

The space we helped grow over two years was swiftly dismantled. Violet, one of the members of our group, says losing communities in second life is pretty normal. And at some point, you just get used to it. Well, personally, I wish more spaces would last longer. There are a lot of my favorite spaces are gone now. And I miss them. I wish I could access those spaces again. But things are more transient. An interesting thing I've noticed is the prevalence of Buddhist groups in Second Life. Sort of central to Buddhism is, you know, the idea of impermanence and letting go of attachment to things. And I've always wondered how

Literally, that can be applied to a constantly changing virtual world where things are just gone all the time. These vanishing virtual lands, it's a trend across all kinds of tech platforms. And when online community spaces disappear, users are often abandoned and left to fend for themselves. And that's what we thought happened to the SciFri Island just swept away with time. But it turns out, our Second Life listeners decided that even though we left, they weren't done with this. so they decided to pick up the pieces and ran into some snags along the way. Yeah, here we can get into the whole soap opera, which I've kind of been waiting to tell you, actually.

We have that story after the break. I hope you're enjoying this story from sci-fi producer Daniel Peter Schmidt about Second Life and Virtual Worlds. If you want to see what Science Friday Second Life Island really looked like 10 years ago, and what it looks like now, it's up on our website. site. Go to science friday.com slash second life. And stay with us to hear what happened to the Science Friday Second Life listeners and the rest of the story. It's coming up after the break. Stay with us. We'll be right back. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You're listening to a story from sci-fi producer Daniel Peter Schmidt about Second Life and Virtual Worlds. Before the break, we heard. We're heard about what happened when Science Friday built an entire Second Life island and then suddenly disappeared. Let's get back into it. When we left Second Life back in 2009, that's where we thought the story ended. It was something our longtime staff members would talk about occasionally at happy hours, that for a couple years, we did these cool, kind of kooky broadcasts from a virtual world, but then we left before our Second Life group. That was very much not the end of the story. Yeah, here we can get into the whole soap opera, which I've kind of been waiting to tell you, actually.

Yeah. At first, things weren't so bad. They went back to a public space where the sci-fri stream was originally hosted, but that soon closed down, too. After that, the group hopped from Private Island to Private Island, hosted by different members in their group who already had their own land. But their numbers dwindled to about 20 people, because, beyond Private Islands, their weekly meetups were now closed off to the public. public, plus Ira wasn't doing shoutouts on the radio anymore. One of the members, CB Axel, sent me a screenshot from this time. It's a group of about a dozen avatars, some sitting around a glass conference table,

overlooking an ocean at sunset, propped on top of a wooden box as a projector screen that reads Keep Sci Friday in Second Life. The fact that the group was starting to get so small, that bothered Matt and the others. They originally joined the Cy Fri Second Life group because of all the people, and the exciting conversations that would spring up in the chat. So they decided to do something about it. We sort of wandered the desert for a few years, basically gathering in public places.

They decided to leave their safe, private islands and head back out into public land. Matt hoped that being out in public spaces where anyone could listen in might help them recruit more people. And soon, they found a public space that hosted an NPR stream that carried Science Friday. In many ways, it seemed like the solution to their problems, But there were some downsides.

Like when anyone can join your group, anyone can join your group. We had no admin rights to control access to the land. So our gatherings in public spaces attracted an unsavory element of the public. It was basically two guys. Just greepers and trolls and climate change deniers and wacko-dews. You know, and they would come in and provoke arguments with us and stuff like that, and they would sort of end up dominating the conversation. So the griefers, which is second life lingo for trolls,

didn't just stick to climate change denial, but tackled a range of anti-scient issues like anti-evolution. They would show up every Friday at their meeting place like clockwork and harassed the group members. They wouldn't even necessarily wait for the topic. They would just start grieving us right off the bat as soon as they got there. That was their whole point. Matt and the others,

They didn't ignore them, but they actually went toe to toe with them. I generally do push back on things like that when I see them. But with someone like that who's doing it continuously and probably not doing it in good faith, it hits a point where you're just talking to a wall. Sometimes they would devolve into personal insults where we're calling each other stupid and you don't know what you're talking about and you're just a troll. And they would not take a hint. I mean, they would show up week after week after week after week with the same thing.

same routine and they didn't listen to our complaints. So it became quickly evidence that it was not being done in good faith. They were just there to disrupt us. And there wasn't much they could do. No one in the group had admin privileges, so they couldn't kick anybody out. And the group put up with all of this for a long time. So we actually tolerated it for years. Hmm. How many years do you think roughly? Hmm, five years. You know, we put up with it for a long time because we wanted to, to, we sort of had some pride in being able to listen to other points of view and to address them and so forth. But eventually, enough was enough.

We had to get control of the situation. They really needed those admin privileges back. So, roughly two years ago. So I did that. I created a new Science Friday group, Science Friday the next generation. That's great. They needed private land again. And luckily, one of their members, CB, actually had private land and offered.

up part of her space where they could all meet. Now, you know, this space is no sprawling outdoor amphitheater. It's kind of the opposite. It's basically a game room homie with lots of couches, a couple of card tables at the back, but they finally had safe haven once again. So after all the trouble they went through over the years just to listen to a show together, I was wondering, was it all worth it? Matt says, basically it was because of the community. It's like walking into the cheers bar, I guess. whenever Norm would come into the bar and everyone would go, norm, right? It's like that.

It's like everyone knows your name kind of thing. When Matt went into Second Life over a decade ago, he wasn't expecting it would end up meaning so much to him. It kind of snuck up on me that it would become so important. You know, I have a great family and I have a lot of great friends, but this is just a particular idiosancratic interest I have that I don't really have a real-life community to share it with. but here I do. And so I just don't want to lose it. Although Matt has spent less time in second life than he thought he would during quarantine, it's still a valuable place for him. If you didn't have,

you know, the history that you do in second life that you think your like emotional well-being would be like worse off right now? Yes, I definitely do. Because I have this, this great resource that's going to help me cope with it. It is a comfort to me to know that second life is right there just to click away. if I start feeling lonely or something. And that's something I was thinking a lot about as I was working on the story. You know, now during the pandemic, a lot of us are stuck at home, our previous social lives are in pieces, and Zoom calls aren't really ideal replacements for face-to-face interactions.

So could Second Life and other virtual worlds give us something that endless video meetings can't? I remember having this moment where I felt like I might be living in the Matrix where I was like, are these people anything more than talking heads? Catherine Espister is a human computer interaction and games researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And like a lot of us, she spent a lot of time in the past few months on video chat. And then I was having a co-working meeting with a friend and I could see her in the background making her tea. And it was just so comforting to see her doing that in her own space. And I think what is really interesting about shared worlds is you can go through the ritual of making tea together.

You can sit quietly and just say nothing in an online world and still feel a sense of co-presence. You know, you can get in a virtual boat and just be rowing for a while and say nothing. Seeing the avatar's whole body, even though it's virtual, Matt says that for some reason, it's actually really satisfying. I think that virtual world avatars have an unappreciated psychological power. It's especially true in a world like Second Life where you create. your own avatar from scratch, basically. So that avatar is an actual creative expression of yourself. You're emotionally invested in your avatar. So being in the presence of avatars triggers perfectly real emotional responses to things. For Celia Pierce, an associate professor of game

design at Northeastern University, this checks out with the research she's done on virtual worlds. In 2015, she released the results of a demographic survey with over 800 participants that she conducted on these worlds? Who uses them, how they use them, and why? And one of the most surprising findings was that some people reported that using virtual worlds helped mitigate depression and even suicide, especially if they were disabled or trans. Support groups in the virtual world helped, but also just regular old play, whether it was role play as different creatures like vampires, holding events, dancing, or even people creating their own games. And unlike other games, most people using virtual worlds aren't teens. They're usually

Gen Xers or Baby Boomers? In the quarantine era, like, what does Second Life have to offer to us right now? I think it offers a connection through play. In the U.S., for instance, I think we have a little bit of Protestant work ethic baggage that really kind of marginalizes play. And I think that adults just need other forms of play besides sports that are socially acceptable. What I'm seeing right now that's super exciting is we're starting to see more and more of this.

So this normalization of adult play in virtual worlds, it's helping marginalize communities with their mental health, it's allowing others to freely explore their identities, and it's helping a lot of people with loneliness. In Celia's survey, many disabled people self-reported that they use virtual worlds to mitigate loneliness. These worlds and the play that happens inside them give people social connection, connection that a lot of us are missing right now. I think we all need to play more. And how we choose to do that is really up to our personal taste. That conversation between Dwight and Jim in the office clip I played at the beginning, that's kind of how society has looked at virtual worlds like these as a sad waste of time. But it seems like we've made some progress since then.

Animal Crossing, a game that shares a lot of the social and creation DNA of Second Life, recently became one of the best-selling games of all time, proving just as popular with adults as it. is with children. Just ask the members of the Cy-Fi staff who are part of our Animal Crossing Slack channel. And in the midst of quarantine, it looks like people are responding to this return to play. Lyndon Lab has seen about a 20% increase in users that are logged into Second Life at a given time, roughly the same rise that Twitter saw with its users since the pandemic started. Now, there's about 50,000 people playing Second Life at any one time. It's clear that Second Life means a lot to people, even to someone like Lynn, who doesn't play it anymore.

You know, people that play video games, especially multiplayer online games, will recognize the poll of these virtual worlds. And Second Life is special in that regard. And after a while, Lynn realized that that poll had gotten too strong for her. Over time, I began to feel the loss of experiencing my other senses and the world outside. Lynn loved Second Life. she was able to completely financially support herself in world. But she ended up spending about 14 hours a day there for a couple years, including weekends and holidays.

And it turns out second life can't completely replace your first life. I miss things like the scent of flowers on the breeze, the buzz of insects, the taste of a fizzy drink and not just one that looked good on a screen. You know, the subtlety of a unique sunset instead of the same old sunset on the Science Friday Island. Lynn doesn't look back on her time there as a waste. I mean, she was experiencing real life and second life. She had real jobs that paid her real money.

She formed real memories and had real relationships. Here's Celia again. These are real people. They have real feelings and real experiences and they care about each other. One of the things that I try to do in my work is I try to get away from the idea that somehow digital makes things that radically different. It's all part of how people. make meaning in their life, and sometimes they make meaning in their life by exploring alternate

universes. So I think the digital sphere is just one more way that we do that. It's not really that different from going to a movie or reading a book or, you know, going to a Halloween party, right? It's just a different way of expressing ourselves and imagining ourselves in a different reality. C.B. Axel feels similarly. It gives people a chance to meet others who have their same interests. And, you know, some of the same difficulties they have in real life, and they can just shake off those difficulties and become the person that they want to be. And as far as the Science Friday Next Generation Group goes,

they've still been meeting up every Friday, continuing a tradition that, for many of them, goes back 13 years. Just to remind our listeners, I'm Daniel Petersmith, and you're listening to Science Friday from WNYC Studios. That's whoa. It was very weird just to see people flying around in the air. After catching up with the members of the original Science Friday Second Life group, after learning everything they went through,

I felt like it was only fitting that we had a reunion. And even though we'd abandoned them a decade ago, they were willing to host us. So Ira, myself, and a group of us from Science Friday made Second Life accounts, learned how to put on different outfits, and slowly learned how to move around. What are you are we all in different rooms? I'm watching the weather channel in a dungeon or something I don't know playing second life today is kind of like going back into a time machine

the graphics haven't really changed since the early 2000s but trying to learn how to use it even though it was really tricky and confusing it was actually kind of fun people are chatting me people are chatting me being like hey girl what's up in the tutorial Wow. Kathy, it's so popular. Nobody's chatting me. Me neither. It's because I look like I have a big hat on and I look like a very distinguished lady.

I spent over two hours making my own avatar, but I didn't really like it. You know, just kind of like slicked back white hair and like torn skinny jeans. And it just kind of looked like they were about to head to a pop punk concert or something. But I really dug my co-workers avatars, a mage, a werewolf. And of course, Baywatch Ira. Oh my God, we're doing it. 30 minutes later, guys. and we finally are meeting up with each other.

I think I found you all. Yeah, you're all. Yay! Eventually, we all teleported to CB's space. It was a Friday afternoon, and for the first time in a decade, we were all going to listen to the show together again, and things had changed.

There is no more amphitheater, no more giant rising sun, just the home at game room. Yeah, it seems to be people are filtering in, as we used to say. And we're not even offering hors d'oeuvres. That's the miracle of it, yeah. So we got there early, and as we were finding our seats, we watched as members of the original group teleport in one by one.

There was Bear, aka Matt Burr, looking strong and stoic. Violet was hopping around in a realistic rabbit avatar. CB was wearing a Science Friday t-shirt that she made. I see Burel and Lune. Yep. That's Lynn Cohen, Zira. Yeah. Wow.

That brings back memories. And Lynn, who hasn't really set foot in second life since 2010, returned as well. As each person teleported in, the group chat sprung to life. It was just like Matt said, like walking into the bar from Cheers. And for Ira, who since this pandemic started, has missed doing a live show and having live people calling, he was ecstatic to have something akin to a live audience. Over the course of the show, hundreds of messages were sent through the group chat, discussing the segments.

And by the time the second hour it started, there must have been about 20 people there. And the game room felt full and alive. This story was reported, written, and hosted by me, Daniel Peter Schmidt. And I also composed original music, did the sound design, and mastered the episode. I'm Ella Fedder. And I'm Lauren Young, and we edited this story. Fact-checking was done by me, Danya Abdel Hamid. I'm Jika Tam, and I illustrated original art for this episode.

Science Friday's chief content officer is me, Nadia Ortilt. And special thanks to Kyle, Marion Bitterbo, Johanna Mayer, Alexa Lim, Ira Flato, the rest of the Science Friday staff, and Liam Tolly. You can read more about the fascinating social dynamics of virtual worlds and Celia Pierce's excellent book, Communities of Play, Emergent Cultures and Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds, which helped me so much with the research for this episode. Fly! Yes, I'm flying!

Whoa, okay, wait, a little too much on the ceiling. Okay, wait, how do I get down? C, ah, yes, I rule. Oh, I fell. I totally fell and ate it. use all this audio, Daniel, of my very, very detailed explanation of this tutorial. Okay, step four. Great story from producer Daniel Petersmith. Want to hear it again? You can subscribe to our podcasts. And did you know we have all sorts of podcasts like our science diction podcast for all of you word nerds? It's hosted by sci-fi producer Johanna Mayer. They're all up on our website at

ScienceFriety.com slash podcasts. After the break, this year's wildfire season was intense. We'll talk about what we know about how all this smoke and ash impacts our bodies. Stay with us. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Hey there, folks. It goes without saying this has been a challenging year, no. And if there's one thing we know for sure, it's that the need for fact-based journalism and the need for science are stronger than ever. At a time when science is continually called into question, Science Friday remains committed to filtering out the noise and discussing the evidence, supporting the science that you need to make informed decisions.

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That's science friday.com slash give. Thank you and stay safe. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. In late summer, the summer, this is science Friday. skies in California, Oregon, and other West Coast states turned orange, and in some places, stayed like that for days due to the smoke on ash from wildfires. It is estimated that more than 8 million acres of land have been scorched this year, and wildfires are still blazing,

nearly 40 still active out west. And throughout this year's wildfire season, you've been asking us to explain how the wildfires could impact your health, and now two experts are here to do just that. Let me introduce them. Dr. Colleen Reed, assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me. Nice to have you. Dr. Chris Milaccio, immunologist and research associate professor at the University of Montana in Missouri. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me, too.

Just a quick note. This segment was recorded in front of a live Zoom audience. You can find out about joining a future recording at Science Friday.com. live stream. So let's begin. I want to hear from both of you about how the wildfire season was in your respective states this year. Colleen, you go first. Sure. In Colorado this year, we had some of the largest wildfires we've ever had. We had the Cameron Peak fire, which is now the largest on record in Colorado, and actually a couple others that beat the largest beforehand. And some of them are still burning. And the fires were also a little later in the season than normal for Colorado. Wow. And Chris, what about in Montana? We actually had a relatively mild wildfire season.

We had some small fires here and there. The worst of our smoke actually were from wildfires from Oregon, California, Idaho, and Washington. We got inundated with smoke from them, not so much from our own wildfires. We put out a call on our Science Friday Vox Pop app during the height of the wildfires, and we asked you, our listeners, how you felt your health was being impacted because you really were wondering about that. So here's a message we got from Michael in Silverton, Oregon back in September. Now that I've been close to a major fire event, been in hazardous smoke about 10 days with my family, I do have major concerns. I'll be visiting my doctor because I've had immediate symptoms of asthma, and my spouse has had heart palpitations. My

daughter's too young to tell us what she's experiencing, but she's had a cough too. Thank you. There's a lot here, but let's start with you, Chris. What do we know about how wildfires impact lungs? Yeah, so there are acute effects, especially when you get people, he mentioned asthma, and you have patients with asthma. Those are one of the first groups that are going to receive alerts that they should stay indoors once the levels start getting above what's called 35 micrograms. It's the first. particulates in the air. And so people with those types of lung issues, the particulates exacerbate and they start having like an asthma attack or their breathing is much more labored. And so, yeah, those are the ones that are going to be most acutely affected, especially at the lower levels.

Interesting. Colleen, do we know how wildfires affect the other parts of our bodies? Yeah, there's some research that shows that in addition to impacting our respiratory health system, that there are some impacts on other systems of the body. So these particles that Chris was talking about, they get into the lungs. And they cause inflammation in the lungs. And sometimes there's enough inflammation that it can spill over and affect other systems like the cardiovascular system. The smallest particles can actually translocate into the bloodstream and then get found throughout the body. I've been part of one of a couple of studies that have documented that babies that gestate during wildfires can be born.

with lower birth weights than babies that gestate outside of these high pollution events. And there's a lot more health impacts that researchers want to study related to these higher pollution events. You know, and just peripherally, they can hurt your eyes too, right? That just seems very obvious. Yeah, there's a lot of those types of effects. You get the burning in the throat because it's going to, you know, damage some of the cilia as well as some of the immune cells of the lung as well.

but you get that irritation to the eyes and other membranes that usually clear up when the smoke clears up. But sometimes depending on the exposure, I've known, I myself, in a really bad fire season, I had a cough, a horrible cough that just lasted for two weeks after the fires. Well, is there any way to know if you had permanent lung damage? Can anyone tell that a doctor? Well, in a recent study we did, following the 2017 wildfire season here, which was really bad here in the In the Missoula area, we studied a community just north of here. And we did find that the people in our cohort had alterations to their lung function

that lasted at least two years after the fire. But we have no idea of knowing because we actually had to kind of put the study on hold because of the pandemic. So we were not able to go back up there to see how they are if it's improving or if it's still remaining low. But there are tests. As far as lung function, we do what's called spirometry. And we can test people's lung function, and we know where it should be if they're a, you know, a healthy individual where the lung function should be.

These are the type of studies, though, that need to be done to see if there's long-lasting effects or if there's a cumulative effect. As people are getting exposed to fires routinely now, almost every, as we call it up here in Montana, it's fire season. We've got five seasons. Yeah. Let's go out to our audience again to a question from Autumn from California about skies in wildfires. Go ahead, Autumn. Hi there. Thank you. I was just wondering, when you see reddish oranges or yellowish skies, do we need to worry about our health? What does that mean? And what can it tell us about the air quality? Yeah, good question. What do you say about that? I'll put Colleen on the spot here. Go ahead. Yeah, what I understood of what happened those days in California was that there were particles really high in the atmosphere that were filtering the sunlight in a way that created that color. What matters for health is the particulate matter concentrations where people are breathing.

And sometimes there are smoke plumes that are aloft that are not affecting ground level concentrations. But we'd have to go back and look at the actual data on those days to see what the concentrations were where you lived to understand. what the risks were for health where you were. Now, we've heard a lot about particulate size, the actual size of the particles in the smoke, Colleen. What makes that so dangerous? Yeah, so what most of the time you get as their warnings for the air quality index is PM2.5, and that is for particles that are 2.5 microns are smaller. So a particle is any sort of solid or liquid pollutant that's, so tiny that it stays suspended in the air. And PM2.5 is all particles that are 2.5 microns or smaller.

And actually during wildfires, a lot of the particles are much smaller than that. There's a lot that are more around PM1, so one micron are smaller. And the smaller they are, the deeper they get into the lungs. So they can get past the body's natural defenses in the nasal cavity and in the trachea and get down into the deep part of the lungs into the lvuli. And then, as I said before, the smallest particles can actually cross into the bloodstream at the Lvoli and therefore get throughout the body. You know, when we think of a forest fire, we look at the trees, we look at the flames, but in these forest fires that we've been seeing, they're wiping out whole communities, right? And that means they're burning up plastics and tires and buildings, Colleen.

And that must release a lot of stuff into the air. Right. And when we study the health impacts, we're normally looking at PM 2.5 because we have a of monitoring data on that and we have ways to estimate what people were exposed to. There's a lot of other aspects of the smoke that could be affecting health. A lot of gases are released and there's a lot of concern about the specific gases that are released when you burn sort of manmade materials like homes and cars and all these things that have a lot of chemicals in them that are different than the chemicals that are released when you're burning just vegetation. But at this point we don't have any information about whether the differences in the emissions affect health differently.

Chris, clarify something for me because, you know, we've heard for years about why living in polluted cities is bad for us. Are those pollutants not a direct comparison to wildfire smoke? That's a great question, Ira. And as we've been kind of talking, Colleen brought up several times, and you asked about PM2.5. So historically, the reason the EPA puts guidelines based on PM2.5 levels is because we have a large amount of historical data on the effects of PM2.5. But that was all done for the most part on urban particulate matter, which is what you were talking about when we're talking about pollution. And people who live in high pollution areas, we know there's a lot of adverse health effects, you know, kids with higher levels of asthma and low birth weight and things like that. But what PM2.5 just takes into account the size and not the chemistry of it.

And the chemistry is going to be so different. And this is part of the difficult part of doing this type of research is the chemistry is going to be different just between wildfires and urban pollution. And then you get into like you're talking about manufactured fuels like cars and homes compared to in our terrible wildfire season, 2017 here in Montana. It was almost completely vegetation. I think there might have been one home that got burned in the massive fires we had going. So the exposure there is going to be different. And generally when you're talking out, and this is the other difficult part to compare the different exposures, is the urban studies, that's like a chronic, relatively low level, adverse level,

but a low level compared to these wildfires where people get exposed to high levels of PM2.5, For example, in that 2017 season, this community was exposed. Their daily average was 220 micrograms a day. But how does that relate to someone who's exposed to this, you know, 40 micrograms daily living in a really polluted city? So it's difficult in trying to understand, you know, acute versus long-lasting effects. I want to go back to your study that you mentioned earlier. what else did you learn about how this smoke event impacted the health of people who live there? Yeah, so we found the effects on lung function.

And what we also found, there was an increase in the immediate flu season. So the virus ended in September. That season, 2017, 2018, there was an increase in people diagnosed with flu in our cohort. and there was a subsequent study that found that, yes, there is a increase in flu. So the idea is that these types of exposures adversely affect our respiratory immunity, make us more susceptible to, well, bacterial and viral, but respiratory infections. And that's a huge concern any fire season, but especially, you know, this coming season now, with areas like where Colleen's from where they had massive fires, California and all those,

is there's a strong chance that these people who are exposed are going to be at increased risk for infections. Just a reminder that I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're talking with Colleen Reed and Chris Malaccio about the health effects of the wildfires that are burning out west, and we see that there are lots of health effects. And we're dealing, of course, with respiratory panaceous. right now. Do we have any idea how COVID would intersect with the wildfire health issues? Well, I mean, there are people that are looking at that right now. This was a huge concern

at a wildfire smoke symposium we had just this past March. And it's a huge concern. We're not sure we suppose that there's going to be an increased incidence in viral infections and higher susceptibility. I mean, you've got the fire seasons in some communities plus flu and the pandemic. It's a real big concern. Yeah, we've had listeners who are asking about what they can do, what actions they can take. For example, we had a question coming in from Hal in Cottage Grove, Oregon. During the weeks when the air quality was so bad, we limited our activities outside to the morning and we wore repurpose COVID masks to keep out the ash. Also, I ordered a peppa filter to tape onto my box fan. that would clean the air.

Colleen, was that a good idea? I mean, what can people who live out west and deal with wildfires smoke year after year do to protect themselves? Well, regarding the hepa filter, that's a really great idea. The one intervention that we have really good evidence for is that hepa filters can decrease air pollution inside homes. We know that the air pollution from wildfires can leak inside depending on how tight the home is. And heapilters can do a good job. And there's been more and more people using these, getting a really good air filter connected to a box van that you can put in your window. And therefore, as it pulls in the air, it can go through the filter and filter out some of those particles.

Regarding the masks, the masks that we're wearing to protect others from potential COVID-19 exposures is basically you're wearing it so that you're protecting others from yourself. If you were to have the virus wearing a cloth mask or a surgical mask can stop the virus that you breathe that. out to get to others, but it doesn't do such a good job of protecting you from what you're breathing in. It blocks a little bit, but not a lot of the air pollution from outside. The N95 masks and the KN95 masks, those will protect the wearer from what they're breathing in. And so one other thing I always want to say about those is that there are some of those N95 masks that also have a valve on them that makes it easier to breathe with one on. And those are actually not good for protecting others from COVID.

If you were to be an asymptomatic carrier, it will just exhaust whatever you're breathing straight out. So an important thing to note is if you're trying to both protect everyone from COVID and yourself from the wildfire smoke, get one without one of those valves. And one last question to you, Chris, is there anything we can learn from history? Has history told us anything about how we deal with smoke and fire events? I'm thinking of Pompeii even or the 9-11 smoke that hung around for weeks. So anything we can learn from that? You know, probably the biggest thing is that with anything, you know, there's probably

some adverse effects. I think just in my research and things that I've read, I think that our body can handle some exposures. You're going camping, you're by the campfire, smoke gets in your face. that's annoying, but I think for the most part, a healthy person, their body can handle those types of exposures. Something that is overwhelming, like these wildfires, like the smoke and ash from 9-11, those types of things overwhelm the system, and that's where you start to get these adverse effects, some which we're still learning about. So you want to protect yourself

if you're going to be, you know, if something like that's going to happen. I think the previous one that you just play is what we tell people to do all the time is with these wildfires, especially if you've got some conditions, create a safe space in your home with a hepa filter or something, have a room that's got this thing running constantly. It really helps people with asthma or other types of respiratory issues. That's the best you can do. Very good information for us and something I think we'll all take to heart. I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today. Dr. Colleen Reed, assistant professor of geography, University of Colorado in Boulder, Dr. Chris Molachio, immunologist and research associate professor

University of Montana in Missoula. Thanks. Thank you very much. And we want to thank our live Zoom audience for joining us for this recording. One last thing on our Science Friday Voxpop app. Next week we'll be talking about the best science books to come out this year. Was there a new published work of science nonfiction that got you through 2020. Please share it with us. That's on the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend. I'm Irafledo.