Daily briefing: The science behind the deadly Los Angeles firestorm

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A coloured scanning electron micrograph of Staphylococcus bacteria. — *Staphylococcus* bacteria are responsible for many infectious diseases.Credit: Steve Gschmeissner/SPL

Ten bacteria hog scientists’ attention

Scientists have identified more than 45,000 bacterial species — but just a handful of these have been deeply studied. Paul Jensen, a microbial-systems biologist, discovered that just 10 bacterial species account for half of all publications, whereas nearly three-quarters of all named bacteria don’t have a single paper devoted to them. “Automating microbiology with robotics and artificial intelligence will accelerate our field, but we need to apply these tools to the myriad species that live in the understudied corners of our world,” Jensen wrote, including ones important to human health and those found in the ocean or soil.

Nature | 4 min listen

Reference: bioRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

Facebook axes fact-checking: does it matter?

Facebook’s parent company Meta has announced plans to scrap the platform’s fact-checking programme, which pays independent groups to verify selected articles and posts. The programme could be replaced by a system similar to the ‘community notes’ used by X (née Twitter), in which corrections and context are crowdsourced from users and added to posts. “Studies provide very consistent evidence that fact-checking does at least partially reduce misperceptions about false claims,” says social psychologist Sander van der Linden. “Replacing fact checking with community notes just seems like it would make things a lot worse.”

Nature | 5 min read

Los Angeles wildfires

Deadly fires spare observatory and JPL

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the historic Mount Wilson Observatory are among the infrastructure that survived the fires that have caused horrific damage in the Los Angeles region this week. Fires driven by ferocious winds have killed 24 people, and another 16 are missing. Flames reached as high as one of the observatory’s parking lots on 9 January. “For us, the story is about our employees, and not about the facility,” says Veronica McGregor, a spokesperson for JPL. More than 150 of the lab’s staff have lost their homes to fire.

Science | 5 min read

‘Hydroclimate whiplash’ worsens hazards

One of the reasons that southern California’s wildfires have been so intense this year is ‘hydroclimate whiplash’ — a sudden, intense swing between very wet and very dry weather. In California, this whiplash meant lush plant growth leading up to fire season — which became a tinderbox of fuel in the extreme dryness and warmth that followed. Another recent example is the torrential rain and flooding in East Africa following years of drought, which destroyed thousands of hectares of crops and displaced more than 2 million people from their homes. Efforts to adapt must take into account both wet and dry extremes, says climate scientist Daniel Swain, who has co-authored a new paper on the phenomenon.

Earth.com | 5 min read

Reference: Nature Reviews Earth & Environment paper

The science behind the flames

Fires have been part of the evolution of the ecosystem in southern California for at least 20 million years, says fire ecologist Jon Keeley — playing a key role in the propagation of dozens of plant species, such as wildflowers, that only bloom after a fire. Now human factors — including climate change, weeds pushing out native shrublands, ignition by power-line failures and expanding residential areas — are raising the risks of fire disasters. For those living in the area, ‘hardening’ your home by making it more fire-resistant and clearing plant material around your property that could act as fuel can help prevent the worst fire damage, he says.

Mother Jones | 6 min read

Quote of the day

“The quintessential historic preservation threat of the 20th century was symbolized by the bulldozer… Today, it’s the extreme climate event.”

Wildfires, sea-level rise and extreme winds pose a constant threat to our most cherished historical and architectural landmarks, saysKen Bernstein, principal city planner at Los Angeles City Planning’s Office of Historic Resources. More than 30 historically significant structures have been destroyed in the ongoing conflagration in the area. (Los Angeles Times | 6 min read)

Features & opinion

A new take on an old theory

“Evolution must proceed where development leads,” write Kevin Lala and four other eminent evolutionary biologists in their book Evolution Evolving. Their argument challenges a central tenet of the theory of evolution, reasoning that the development of an organism impacts its evolution, not just natural selection. Their intention is not to overthrow modern thinking, but to offer “a fresh vision of how evolution works”, writes evolutionary geneticist Eva Jablonka in her review. “It’s rare that researchers question theories that make up the backbone of whole fields,” says Jablonka. But Lala and his colleagues “do just that”.

Nature | 7 min read

Why I gave my spin-off a silly name

Genomics researcher Richard Kuo launched a biotech spin-off company called Wobble Genomics, which is using breast-cancer testing as a proof-of-concept for the idea that long-read RNA sequencing can be used to detect signs of diseases in the blood. Along with the tech-transfer team at his university, he was aided by a government grant programme and mentorship by a life-sciences venture capitalist. As for the name, it came from Francis Crick’s term for the way that for every three nucleotides, the third base in that triplet could pair in a more flexible way, or with a ‘wobble’. “I had this test for myself: if your company name could be used as the name of an evil organization in a sci-fi film, it’s probably not a great name,” says Kuo. “I thought, with Wobble Genomics, that probably wouldn’t happen.”

Nature | 9 min read

Where I work

Sang-Wook Han sitting behind an optical table trying to intercept a green laser beam with a paper card. — Sang-Wook Han is the head of the quantum technology centre at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology in Seoul.Credit: Dave Tacon for *Nature*

Sang-Wook Han leads the quantum-technology centre at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology. “These machines will be able to do massive computations that were impossible with conventional methods, sparking innovation in materials science, drug development, finance and defence,” he says. “Better technology can come from simply advancing existing methods, but innovative and disruptive technology requires something entirely new. This is the essence of quantum technology.” (Nature | 3 min read)

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Even if [AES] do a perfect job, using perfect lights that probably don’t even exist and perfect shielding, there will be an impact and that will be significant.”

Xavier Barcons, director of the European Southern Observatory, reacts to the AES Corporation’s proposal to build a green energy project just a few kilometres away from some of the world’s most powerful telescopes in Chile’s northern Atacama Desert. Stray light from the project threatens to pollute some of the darkest skies on Earth. (Science | 6 min read)

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