The Brief

The first crewed launch of Boeing's troubled Starliner spacecraft has been delayed again, to May 25, this time because of a helium leak in the service module.

NASA had set the liftoff for May 21 after scrubbing a May 6 launch but the helium leak was discovered on Wednesday. While the agency said the leak in the craft's thruster system was stable and wouldn't pose a risk during the flight, "Boeing teams are working to develop operational procedures to ensure the system retains sufficient performance capability and appropriate redundancy during the flight."

While that work is going on, NASA said its Commercial Crew Program (CCP) and the International Space Station Program will review data and procedures before making a final determination whether to proceed with a countdown.

The delay is the latest for the Starliner's first crewed mission, which will carry NASA astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams to the International Space Station. The astronauts are to spend about a week aboard the space station before making a parachute and airbag-assisted landing in the southwestern U.S.

If that mission is successful, NASA will begin the final process to certify Starliner for crewed rotation missions to the space station.

The delay comes roughly a decade after NASA awarded Boeing a more than $4 billion contract as part of the agency's Commercial Crew Program, which pays private companies to ferry astronauts to and from the space station after the space shuttle was retired in 2011.

SpaceX, which was also awarded a $2 billion contract under the CCP initiative, has flown eight crewed missions for NASA and another four private, crewed spaceflights since 2020.

A history of delays and design problems

But the Starliner program has been plagued with delays and design problems for several years.

It failed to reach the space station during its first mission in 2019 after its onboard clock, which was set incorrectly, caused a computer to fire the capsule's engines too early. The spacecraft successfully docked with the space station during its second test flight in 2022, despite the failure of some thrusters during the launch.

Boeing then scrapped the planned launch of the Starliner's first crewed flight last year, after company officials realized that adhesive tape used on the craft to wrap hundreds of yards of wiring was flammable, and lines connecting the capsule to its three parachutes appeared to be weaker than expected. The launch was delayed indefinitely.

The May 6 launch was scrubbed because of a faulty oxygen relief valve, NASA said.

Wilmore and Williams remain quarantined in Houston and will fly back to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida closer to the new launch date, NASA said. The Starliner, which sits atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, remains in the Vertical Integration Facility at Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Boeing has faced intense scrutiny this year on the commercial aviation side of its business after a rear door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight shortly after takeoff in January.

Whistleblowers have since come forward to detail alleged quality control lapses at the storied company, and the Federal Aviation Administration said it was auditing Boeing's production. The Justice Department also announced it would open a criminal investigation into the Alaska Airlines incident.

Now’s the time to prepare for this year’s potentially historic El Niño season.

The climate pattern could bring rain, flooding and mudslides in the next few months. Surging sea levels could hit even sooner, along with the coastal erosion that comes with it.

El Niño is driven by abnormally warm ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Sea surface temperatures hit record levels more than a month ago. That means there’s more than a 90% chance that this year’s El Niño will be extremely strong, according to the National Weather Service.

Strong El Niño years have historically brought heavy rain and elevated sea levels to Southern California, although scientists warn that it’s impossible to predict exactly where and when those effects will hit.

Emergency management officials are preparing for severe impacts on the region by readying flood-control infrastructure, building up coastal defenses and deploying extra crews and equipment.

They’re also urging residents to prepare for themselves.

“The most important step is to prepare before a warning is issued,” said Jon O’Brien, chief deputy of emergency operations for L.A. County. “Know whether your home or route is vulnerable to flooding or debris flows. Sign up for local emergency alerts. Make a plan to leave if directed.”

Here are a few steps you can take to start preparing now for El Niño.

Sign up for alerts

Signing up for emergency alerts from trusted sources is a key first step in preparing for extreme weather.

“One of the most important things that residents can do is make sure that you have multiple ways to receive forecasts, watches and warnings from credible sources,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Ariel Cohen.

Public safety officials emphasize that when you do receive an emergency alert, it’s important to take it seriously and follow any instructions that come with it.

Understanding risks

Next, you should learn how weather events and coastal hazards can affect you specifically.

The MyHazard tool from the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services lays out the risks that could affect your property and the surrounding area and how severe those risks could be.

Understanding the specific threats you face is key to planning your response. Those that are likely to come with El Niño include flooding, landslides, sea level rise and debris flows in postfire zones.

It’s also important to consider risks beyond your property and neighborhood. Look for hazards along the routes you take to important places, such as school and work, or would take to places like a hospital or an evacuation shelter. Make a plan for alternate routes in case roads are flooded, washed out or blocked.

Making a plan

Emergency management officials say developing a clear plan is one of the most effective ways to ensure your family is resilient during an emergency or disaster.

Here are some recommendations for what to include in an emergency plan:

• Identify a meeting place for your family outside of your home and neighborhood.
• Know your evacuation routes. Identify the quickest, safest way to leave your home and neighborhood.
• Know the location of utility shutoffs so that you know how to turn off your water, gas and electricity in an emergency.
• If you don’t know already, ask schools and adult-care centers what their emergency plans are, especially when it comes to supplies and transportation.
• Keep important documents accessible and ready in the event of an evacuation, as well as other important items, such as family photos.
• Keep an inventory of extra medications that you and your loved ones may need.
• Make special provisions for children, seniors, pets, people with disabilities, and non-English speakers.
• Schedule an annual family run-through of the emergency plan. 

It’s a good idea to put together a household communication plan that includes contact information for family members and other important people, including an out-of-state emergency contact. It should also have contact information for nearby hospitals, family doctors, schools and employers.

Another important consideration is planning for family members or neighbors who rely on electricity to power medical equipment or other essential support devices in case there’s a power outage. Officials recommend making a plan for accessing a backup power source in the case of a power outage.

If that plan includes a generator, however, it's essential to follow safety rules. That includes keeping a generator at a safe distance and never operating one indoors, as that can cause a buildup of deadly carbon monoxide gas.

Officials are urging residents to reach out to their neighbors ahead of time, especially those who need special assistance.

“ Connect with family and neighbors in your community, and build out that network. Neighbors helping neighbors is a really important point,” said L.A. County’s director of aging and disability, Maral Karaccusian.

It’s also important to have a plan in place for pets and other animals.

For dogs and cats, make sure your contact information is listed on their collar and that you bring pet food with you in an evacuation. It’s also a good idea to have your pet microchipped — if you’ve had your furry friend for a while, double-check that the info associated with the microchip is current.

Olivia Sanderfoot stands on a flower-freckled hillside in Amherst in Western Massachusetts. She listens for a moment — and a volley of birdsong flutters forth.

An Eastern Wood-Pewee. A goldfinch. A downy woodpecker.

"It's just magical," she says with an air of reverence. There are birds foraging among the flowers. Fluffy fledglings are darting about, learning the ways of the world.

"Every day that I get to start birding is a good day," she says. "If you want to get the widest range of species and hear the most songs, you want to be out here in the morning."

Sanderfoot, a global change ecologist at Cornell University, knows that for the birds that live here, not every morning is this idyllic. Over the summer, this area was suffused with toxic smoke from distant wildfires in Canada. It's an increasingly common problem, even in places untouched by flames. Fire season is starting earlier, lasting later, burning more land — and as a result, producing far more smoke.

"Smoke can blow hundreds to thousands of miles away from that burn site," Sanderfoot explains. "That means that the footprint of a smoke event greatly exceeds that of any fire. How do birds deal with that?"

This is the central question animating Sanderfoot's desire to form a new field of study called "smoke ecology." The goal, she says, is to understand how the smoke billowing off of wildfires may be disturbing wild places and creatures — and whether anything can be done to prevent possible harm.

Air today, gone tomorrow

Sanderfoot's curiosity about how birds cope with smoke emerged in 2018 when she was living in Seattle and wildfires blazed in Eastern Washington. "The air smelled acrid," she recalls. "The city was just blanketed in this sickly yellow, gray haze."

She was told it was a one-time event — yet the same thing happened two years later.

"I remember walking outside and my eyes were just burning," Sanderfoot says. "And I thought, 'What on earth are animals doing? Are they OK?'"

An adult bluebird sits atop a nesting box containing its chicks at the Mass Audubon's Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary.

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Aaron Gouveia/Mass Audubon

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Very little was known apart from anecdotes — like the absence of birdsong or the arrival of droves of birds to a backyard, famished and parched.

"Smoke is a toxic soup of substances," she says. "It's not just about what [birds are] inhaling, which is inevitably bad for them. It's also about how the cues that they use to navigate their world are upended when it gets smoky outside."

To puzzle out what was going on, Sanderfoot realized that she needed to collaborate with researchers from a range of other disciplines, including conservation biology, statistics, ecophysiology and atmospheric chemistry.

"Real-world problems don't map cleanly onto the same academic silos that have been set up for decades," says Tracey Holloway, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the lead of NASA's Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team, and a colleague of Sanderfoot's. "We need to be tackling new problems with new partnerships."

For instance, in order to understand what birds are inhaling, one has to know what's moving through the air in time and three-dimensional space. "It depends on which way the winds are blowing," says Holloway, "what chemical processes are happening in the air, and also patterns of rainfall and where the emissions are coming from." The science depends on air quality monitoring, satellite data, and evermore sophisticated computer modeling.

Birds are especially sensitive to smoke in large part because of how they breathe. A human being has soft lungs that allow inhalation and exhalation of air. By contrast, birds have rigid lungs surrounded by a collection of air sacs that act like bellows, pushing air continuously through the system.

"This allows birds to take up about twice as much oxygen with each breath that they inhale compared to us," says Sanderfoot. "This means that they're vulnerable to all the other things that are in the air, too."

Morgan Tingley, an ecologist at UCLA, is another member of the burgeoning smoke ecology cohort. "What we're trying to do is getting smoke to be recognized as a disturbance in and of itself distinct from fire that is worthy of our concentrated attention," he says.

For much of his career, Tingley has studied wildfires — events with a clear start and stop, and defined borders. But the smoke produced by those wildfires can present its own unique set of problems, as it can spread far from the original blaze.

"Smoke is extremely hard to predict and it's highly variable," he says. "It can be there one day, one hour, and gone the next. Which means that it's hard to actually disentangle what its impacts are because you can't really control it."

This means that it's not possible to anticipate where smoke will appear, or when. Scientists also prefer not to subject animals to smoke intentionally.

So when it comes to studying wildfire smoke and birds, the trick is to gather data everywhere. To do so, the researchers rely on legions of amateur birders and professional conservationists and ornithologists across the country who are already on the ground collecting data when smoke happens to blow in.

Big army, little birds

One such individual is Pam Sowizral, the bird project coordinator at Mass Audubon's Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary in Lincoln outside of Boston. On a sunny morning in late August, she walks up to a bluebird nest box and gently raps on the outside.

Pam Sowizral is one of the legions of birders and conservationists across the country who are already on the ground collecting data about birds when smoke happens to blow in.

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Ari Daniel

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NPR

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"Always give a little knock first," she advises quietly. "Let them know you're coming." When she lifts the side panel, she reveals two feathery puffballs huddled on a bed of pine needles. These baby bluebirds are the last of the season here.

Sowizral says that nearly every year for the last 20 years, three times a week in spring and summer, she and her volunteers check the bird boxes here and count the nests and the eggs and how many chicks fledge. They check when the weather's good, when it's bad (within reason) — and when the smoke rolls in.

"Those periods of time when the smoke was here, the air somehow felt a little different," she says. But "that didn't stop us from doing our usual monitoring of our boxes."

That's key. Nationally, counts like this one, which is part of Cornell University's NestWatch project, provide a portrait of bird activity and behavior before, during and after smoke events.

Two feathery puffballs huddle on a bed of pine needles in a nesting box. These baby bluebirds are the last of the season.

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Ari Daniel

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NPR

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Sanderfoot of Cornell University says she's using these kinds of observations, alongside observations of breeding behavior, to help her understand how birds are coping with wildfire smoke in a variety of places.

She's revealed three distinct strategies, depending on the species and the individual birds. They either hunker down and stay put, fly away, or shift their behavior — by not vocalizing as much or venturing out less often, say.

"This could be an attempt to mitigate their exposure," says Sanderfoot. "It might also be how they are forced to respond if they feel unwell."

In addition, she and her colleagues have observed that repeated exposure to smoke appears to impair the body condition of a variety of birds, leading to lower weight overall.

"They all respond in different ways," she says. "And we need to figure out what those ways are and how effective they are in order to design effective conservation strategies for a rapidly changing world."

This is one of Sanderfoot's top priorities: determining what might constitute what she calls smoke refugia for birds — safer spots where they can hunker down until conditions improve. "I want to know where birds are going when it's smoky," she says, "what resources they're seeking out, and what we could provide to help them during a risky time" — like water and perhaps shelter or food.

"I would like to be able to give people something they can do to help," she says.

Sanderfoot's personal experience with wildfires didn't end in Seattle. "I almost feel like the smoke is following me," she says.

In early 2025, she and her family fled the fires in Los Angeles, where they were living at the time. And this summer, she watched as a blanket of smoke descended upon parts of the U.S., including Ithaca, where she lives now, blowing off the remote Canadian infernos. She says she doesn't think it's a coincidence.

"Let's put it this way," she says: "We can expect that the future will be smokier."

It's a fact that's true for birds and people, which means that what Sanderfoot and her colleagues learn about smoke ecology may reveal a clearer way forward — for us all.

"By learning more about birds," she says, "I think we might learn something about how we can take care of ourselves and each other."

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Despite an intense heat wave scorching Southern California this week, temperatures will begin to cool, just in time to enjoy car-free streets in Boyle Heights for CicLAvia this weekend.

On Sunday, Oct. 11, a 6.5-mile stretch of road will be closed to cars from Mariachi Plaza to Echo Park for CicLAvia’s Heart of L.A., encouraging residents to enjoy open streets in their neighborhood. This year, Boyle Heights Beat and The LA Local will be tabling at CicLAvia to share more about our community-centered reporting.

Whether you choose to walk, run, or roll, be sure to enjoy the fresh air, drink plenty of water, and wear sunscreen (and don’t forget your helmet if you’re on wheels!). 

Here’s what to know about street closures, local gems to explore across the neighborhoods and how to get reimbursed for parking. 

Cyclists and pedestrians head down 1st Street during CicLAvia on Oct. 15, 2023.

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Andrew Lopez

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Boyle Heights Beat

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When is it and what can I expect? 

CicLAvia Heart of LA will take place Sunday, Oct. 11 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. 

Participants can expect to see local gems along the route, restaurants and vendors, and event hubs featuring activations and water refill stations.

What is the route? 

The route spans 6.5 miles through Boyle Heights, the Arts District, Little Tokyo, Downtown, Chinatown and Echo Park.

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Courtesy of CicLAvia

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What kind of vehicles are allowed at the event?

Only people-powered vehicles are allowed, including bikes, scooters, skateboards, and rollerblades.

Motorized wheelchairs and mobility devices for people with disabilities are allowed. E-bikes are allowed with some restrictions. See the full guidelines here.

What streets in Boyle Heights will be affected?

Stretches of 1st Street, St. Louis Street, Boyle Avenue, Whittier Boulevard and the 6th Street Bridge will all be closed to car traffic. Check out the full event map here.

Street closures will begin as early as 4 a.m. on the day of the event. Streets are expected to reopen by 6 p.m.

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Courtesy of CicLAvia

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Parking and transportation 

No street parking is allowed along the CicLAvia route from 1 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday. Driveways along the route will also be inaccessible from 7 a.m. to approximately 6 p.m. on Sunday, so be sure to plan ahead and move your car before 7 a.m. if you need to use it. 

According to the CicLAvia website, cars will be towed if they are parked along the event route.

If you live or work directly on the route, CicLAvia says you may be reimbursed up to $20 per vehicle for any parking costs incurred from 8 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 10 through 6 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 11.

To request reimbursement:

• Email a copy of your parking receipt and proof of residence or employment to info@ciclavia.org with the subject line “Parking Reimbursement.”
• Reimbursement requests must be submitted within 30 days of the event date.

All buses that usually run along the CicLAvia route will be detoured on the day of the event. A full list of bus detours can be found here.

In Boyle Heights, these Metro stations are located less than half a mile from the route:

• Pico Aliso, E Line – 0.4 miles
• Mariachi Plaza, E Line – less than 0.1 mile
• Soto, E Line – 0.3 miles

Where to find Boyle Heights Beat

Be sure to check out a range of event hubs, local gems, shops and restaurants along the route using this interactive map. And come say hi to the Boyle Heights Beat team—we will be stationed at the Mariachi Plaza Hub from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.