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

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Flora Lichtman?

  Science Friday is supported by Dell. Gifts mean more when they have the power to unwrap more of who you are. This Black Friday, give a gift that goes beyond the box. The Dell XPS 13 laptop. It's the thinnest, lightest XPS laptop yet with a long battery life, beautiful design, and powerful performance with Intel Core processors. The XPS laptop unlocks more of what you love. Plus, at dell.com, you'll find perks like Dell Rewards, fast free shipping, and flexible financing, and big savings on monitors and accessories. Head to dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. 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 Lichtman is joining me as host on Science Friday. Flora is here. So happy to have you here with me.

• 1:25Flora Lichtman?

  Hi, Ira. I am thrilled to be here with you.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're thrilled to have you. You know, you 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 Lichtman, our multimedia editor, is here. And I know what you have in store, because I've looked at this video, and it's unbelievable.

• 1:53Flora Lichtman?

  I know, Ira. This is a video that I don't actually think we could oversell if we tried. 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.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  OK, now tell us what it is that we're going to be blown.

• 2:11Flora Lichtman?

  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.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  The 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 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?

• 2:45Flora Lichtman?

  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 was 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, was my magnum octopus.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Ooh. Flora, with puns like that, we're going to get along just fine.

• 3:12Flora Lichtman?

  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.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Ah, 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 Sci-Fri. What have you been working on?

• 4:02Flora Lichtman?

  So in a lot of ways, you know, 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.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Loved those puppets.

• 4:32Flora Lichtman?

  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.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you share that with a lot of people, so that's very high honor, actually.

• 4:51Flora Lichtman?

  Losing to Oprah?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:52Flora Lichtman?

  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

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:07Flora Lichtman?

  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 Antonie van Leeuwenhoek?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  I remember. That was, that was the guy with the microscope, right?

• 5:25Flora Lichtman?

  Yes, the guy with the microscope, exactly. So he was born in 1632. He was actually a haberdasher 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, Leuwenhoek 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.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Leuwenhoek called them in Dutch deerkins. And deerkins, that's a diminutive of the word deer.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Deer, D I E R.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  And which is the Dutch word for animal.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  What Leuwenhoek called them was little animals.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  This was also new. The word microorganism did not exist at the time. The word bacteria is from the 19th century.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  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 it.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Wow, love that microbial zoo you had going there.

• 6:33Flora Lichtman?

  I know. It's, this is like microbiome point 001. And of course, people didn't believe Laven Hook at first because it was so shocking, you know, this idea that we were surrounded by animals no one had ever seen before.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, being a pioneer can be a pretty lonely existence at times, can't they?

• 6:53Flora Lichtman?

  I think so. And that was one of the things that I picked up doing these, these stories. But another project that really, you know, sort of shaped my experience was working with Bill Nye.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Bill just won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Congrats.

• 7:07Flora Lichtman?

  Yes, congratulations, Bill, if you are listening. Have you worked with Bill?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  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 of him doing that.

• 7:30Flora Lichtman?

  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.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Not quite like the set you work on now, right?

• 7:54Flora Lichtman?

  Slightly different. But Ira, I want to tell you about one more project that I'm really proud of. It's a podcast I created at Gimlet Media, and the show was called Every Little Thing. And it ran for five years, which I know in sci-fi 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 sci-fi 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

• 8:38Flora Lichtman?

  what we found. And the questions ranged from, why do auctioneers talk like that?

• 8:44Speaker 04

  Twenty-nine, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, forty-five, forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, sixty.

• 8:52Flora Lichtman?

  To what really lives in the New York City sewers.

• 8:56Speaker 05

  But then we start looking around the room and the wall is kind of moving and shimmering.

• 9:01Flora Lichtman?

  Um, I don't know. You may not want to know the answer to that.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Pretty brave, pretty brave subject, yes.

• 9:06Flora Lichtman?

  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.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  The flamingo. Of all the things in your life, it's the flamingo.

• 9:34Flora Lichtman?

  I've misunderstood a lot of things, Ira, but this is one of the things I misunderstood.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  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?

• 9:46Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, okay. So when I say flamingo, what adjectives come to mind?

• 9:50Speaker 01

  All right, so I see, 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.

• 10:00Flora Lichtman?

  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.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I have some pretty tough feathers, so I'm waiting for this. Go for it.

• 10:24Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, so flamingos seem maybe dorky, delicate, but that is not their lane. Flamingos are tough.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Takes a tough bird, a flamingo, they're tough?

• 10:38Flora Lichtman?

  A tough bird. This is Felicity Orango from the American Museum of Natural History.

• 10:44Speaker 06

  Flamingos are adapted to some pretty extreme habitats.

• 10:47Flora Lichtman?

  I think of them as tropical birds, but they can also live in these high-altitude wetlands, like 17,000 feet above sea level, where it freezes at night.

• 10:57Speaker 06

  They're in these high-altitude lakes, and the flamingos can freeze inside the wetlands.

• 11:03Flora Lichtman?

  What? Their legs are actually frozen?

• 11:06Speaker 06

  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.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Who knew?

• 11:20Flora Lichtman?

  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.

• 11:34Speaker 06

  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.

• 11:45Flora Lichtman?

  It's caustic enough that human skin might slough off in this environment.

• 11:51Speaker 06

  If you spent a lot of time there, I suppose that that could happen.

• 11:55Flora Lichtman?

  So yeah, they can withstand toxic ponds. Last one, my personal favorite flam fact, flamingos can drink boiling water. They live near these hot springs where water is near boiling temperatures and they can guzzle it down.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  And without a teabag, I'll bet.

• 12:19Flora Lichtman?

  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 Sci-Fry.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Well, Flora, now that you're here, I'm looking forward to keeping that love flowing. So glad, glad you're back with us.

• 12:42Flora Lichtman?

  I'm very glad to be here, Ira. Thanks.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  And you'll be hearing more from Flora later in the hour and on every hour of Science Friday going forward alongside me as Sci-Fry's two hosts.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  WNYC is supported by Bayer. Every day in America, science delivers, not just in the headlines, but in the moments that matter most. Science is a journey, one of curiosity, persistence, and progress. It's about asking questions. Testing, learning and improving again and again. Science delivers harvests that feed families, tools that help farmers grow more with less, and new ways to protect land for generations to come. Let's keep asking, keep testing, keep discovering, so science can keep delivering. Learn more at sciencedelivers.com. Support for Science Friday comes from USA for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Here's a problem.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  How do you keep a house above freezing when the windows are gone and the power is out for 16 hours a day? In Ukraine this winter, the answer fits in a box. Reflective insulation, plastic sheeting to cover broken windows, draft blockers for the doors. Simple materials installed the same day a team arrives. Your gift delivers them, and until December 31st, it's matched. Donate at unrefugees.org/friday. I'm Kevin Ruess. And I'm Casey Newton. And together, we've been tech journalists for decades. Now, we're your hosts of Machine Gods, a new podcast from NPR that makes sense of what AI means for your work, your life, and all of our futures. Twice a week, we'll be exploring the biggest moves in tech and give you unmatched

• 14:47Speaker 01

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• 15:00Speaker 01

  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, DC. 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?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  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 and towards Los Angeles. And this, 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.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Wow. You know, we're, 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 low down on that winter air. Right. And there's this interconnection between both the, 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 in 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.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  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 US. 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

• 18:38Speaker 01

  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, let's move on to some virus news and actually, unbelievably, some good news. There's, 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 metapneumovirus or HMPV. And there was some information and misinformation and some viral reports that there was another outbreak that

• 19:21Speaker 01

  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 a sigh of relief about this virus because this

• 20:06Speaker 01

  is the virus season. And unfortunately, Eventually, there's some not great news about another virus, the norovirus. Tell us about that one. Right. The Centers for Disease Control reported this week that actually the norovirus levels in the US 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 norovirus is a stomach bug. It causes, you know, gastrointestinal problems. It causes, you know, vomiting and diarrhea and then a lot of other unpleasantness. And we do see it tend to rise more in the winter.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  But a 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 of 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, the, the basic measures that, that we, we all know and love. I mean, you know, washing your hands appropriately, you know, this is something that, that can be transmitted through, through your hands and through contact with people who are infected.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  And then also, you know, maintain good hygiene, distancing, and some 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 US coasts in a way that would be hard for President Trump to reverse. Tell me about that. Right. Basically, they issued this new ban 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.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  This, these are areas where we don't see much drilling to begin with, and we haven't seen 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.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  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-elect 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?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Well, the authors of this study that was published this week in JAMA Pediatrics note themselves that basically the main conclusion of this study, 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 in 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,

• 24:25Speaker 01

  this is not a very robust finding. And 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 lighten 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,

• 25:09Speaker 01

  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 Avatum banduvice. 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 reevaluate 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, Umer. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Umar Ifan, senior correspondent at Vox, covering science, climate change, and the environment. He's based in Washington DC.

• 26:05Flora Lichtman?

  That's just about all the time we have for today. Lots of folks helped make this show happen, including

• 26:10Speaker 06

  Emma Gomez. Sandy Roberts. Robin Casmer.

• 26:14Flora Lichtman?

  Diana Plasker. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.