The Brief

At first glance, the fountain at the new Mathews Street Park in Boyle Heights looks like any other fountain. It’s round and lined with shiny tiles in tones of aquamarine blue.

But take a closer look and you’ll see that first, there’s no water. Walk around it, and you’ll find that many of the painted tiles depict Boyle Heights landmarks — places like Mariachi Plaza and the Breed Street Shul, along with less-familiar landmarks like the old Japanese Hospital on Fickett Street, and the Mt. Carmel Missionary Baptist Church.

Then, look really closely at the tiles and you’ll see QR codes. Scan them with a cell phone and you’ll find a collection of oral histories from the historic L.A. neighborhood.

Colorful tiles depict the Breed Street Shul in Boyle Heights to the left; note the QR code at bottom right.

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Leslie Berestein Rojas

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LAist

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This interactive public art project is the brainchild of local artist Mike Saijo, a longtime Boyle Heights resident.

“It’s titled Intersections, about the intersection of the Jewish, Japanese, Mexican, and Black communities in the Boyle Heights area,” Saijo said.

Saijo, who is Japanese American, has long been drawn to Boyle Heights’ past as a haven for people who, due to restrictive covenants, were unwelcome elsewhere in L.A. Over the years. All of these communities put down roots in the neighborhood. It’s a theme that Saijo has explored in his art before.

“I wanted to create a public art version of this concept,” Saijo said.

And that’s what he did.

The pocket park opened in February on the onetime site of a large house that, along with a smaller one behind it, sat abandoned before catching fire. Saijo, who lives across the alley, remembers that day.

The fountain structure at Mathews Street Park, a recently opened pocket park in Boyle Heights.

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Leslie Berestein Rojas

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“I saw the house catch on from my place,” he said. “I was kind of watching to see what's happening, and they started building this park.”

The city acquired the property and built the park for about $5 million using state Proposition 68 funds. Saijo got involved when he learned there was a callout for a public art feature.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, this is like right behind my studio, like, I gotta apply for this,'” Saijo said.

He applied and received the commission. Working with the Department of Cultural Affairs, he completed the project in about a year.

A tile rendition of the famous stone "kiosko" from Boyle Heights' Mariachi Plaza adorns the Mathews Street Park fountain.

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Leslie Berestein Rojas

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To design the tiles, he used old photos and hand-drawn sketches, working with several tile shops to produce them. Some of the tiles — like those depicting the iconic stone “kiosko” of Mariachi Plaza, the old Sears retail building and the Breed Street Shul — were intentionally made to look vintage using an old-school production process.

Some of the tiles are on the fountain structure, others are embedded in the concrete around it, which is designed to look like a street grid of Boyle Heights.

A fountain of stories

The heaviest lift was the oral histories. Saijo says he first reached out to the Boyle Heights Historical Society, and then began making connections.

Part of it involved paying visits to “the churches and temples that I've been living next to, but never really talked to anybody there,” he said. “So I had a reason to go over there and start asking questions.”

Mike Saijo scans one of the tiles embedded around the Mathews Street Park fountain.

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Leslie Berestein Rojas

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LAist

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Saijo said that, altogether, he recorded 25 oral histories from Boyle Heights stakeholders: A pastor whose Creole great-grandfather started the Mt. Carmel church, once a beacon for Boyle Heights’ Black community; the granddaughter of a pioneering female doctor, an immigrant from Japan who treated Japanese patients in Boyle Heights when few doctors or hospitals would; the founding president of the Breed Street Shul Project, a group dedicated to preserving the historic synagogue; the owner of the venerated Candelas Guitars shop, owned by the same Mexican American family for decades.

Saijo worked with an audio professional, Alex Gomez, who worked on production and also provided narration.

There are also poems and stories about more offbeat landmarks, like “El Pino,” the giant pine tree made famous in the movie “Blood In, Blood Out.”

‘Like being in a research library’

Some of the oral histories are not necessarily related to landmarks, but family stories. One recent Friday, Saijo was joined in the park by Shirlee Smith, 87, who grew up in Boyle Heights. She’d just driven out from Las Vegas with her daughter to see the park for the first time, and to hear her story — about her dad, Eugene Pickett.

As Smith took a seat at the fountain, Saijo scanned a nearby tile showing an old photo of kids swimming in a pool. Smith closed her eyes and listened to herself tell the story of how her father and other Black parents protested racist policies at the local playground.

Mike Saijo, left, and Shirlee Smith at Mathews Street Park. Smith, who grew up in Boyle Heights, contributed one of the oral histories for Saijo's public art project.

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“They protested segregation of the swimming pool at Evergreen Playground, where colored people could only swim on Wednesdays, the day the water was drained and the pool was cleaned,” Smith’s recording goes. “They then took their protests to the Los Angeles City Council. They won.”

After her recording ended, Smith paused for a bit before speaking.

“Amazing,” she said quietly. “Technology. What can I say? I’m wordless.”

Smith added that she grew up swimming in that public pool whenever she wanted to. And she didn’t know until adulthood that her dad had helped make that possible.

“It's just amazing because there is so much information here in this area,” said Smith, who formed her own remembrance project a few years ago, Black Boyle Heights. “I mean, it's like being in a research library.”

Saijo agreed.

“Yeah, that's the idea of creating a place where we can archive all this,” he said.

And as he sees it, not necessarily in a research library, but at the local park.

Mini-lightning strikes created by whirling dust devils on Mars have been detected accidentally by the microphone on board the Perseverance rover.

The chance discovery is direct evidence of a form of lightning on Mars, researchers say in a report published in Nature. They describe how the rover's microphone picked up signs of electrical arcs just a few centimeters long, which were accompanied by audible shockwaves.

"There's been a very big mystery about lightning on Mars for a long time. It's probably one of the biggest mysteries about Mars," says Daniel Mitchard, a lightning researcher at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, who wasn't part of the research team but wrote an accompanying commentary for the journal.

"The key thing here," he explains, "is that we actually have a rover on the surface of Mars that appears to have detected something that fits our idea of what we think lightning on Mars would look like."

Besides Earth, flashes of lightning have been seen in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, and lightning has also been detected on Neptune and Uranus. But finding lightning has proven more elusive on our closest planetary neighbors — even though experimenters in the 1970s did lab work that suggested lightning should exist on Mars.

For example, when researchers put volcanic sand into a flask and pumped it down to Martian atmospheric pressures, swirling the sand in the flask created a glow that could be seen in the dark, says Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

The glow came from electrical charges caused by the friction between the bits of sand. If you had a bigger buildup of electric charge, he says, that could produce a more sudden discharge, like what happens with spark plugs in a car, or on a larger scale, lightning. After all, even on Earth, lightning can occur in turbulent clouds of volcanic ash.

"So there's no reason that blowing dust or sand on Mars shouldn't become electrically charged," says Lorenz.

Recently, he and some colleagues were reviewing audio picked up by the Perseverance rover, a car-size robot that's been trundling around the Red Planet since 2021. It's got a microphone, and a few years ago scientists reported hearing the sounds of a whirling dust devil passing over the rover.

Besides the wind and the hiss of the dust, Lorenz says, there was a brief sound of a snap or crack in the middle of the encounter. "We just assumed it was a big sand grain or a small gravel grain just, you know, hitting the structure," he says.

But not too long later, one of their team members attended a science conference and heard a talk about atmospheric electricity. "I thought that if there were discharges, we could hear them. And then, I remembered this recording," says Baptiste Chide, who is with the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Toulouse, France.

So he did some experiments here on Earth, using an electrostatic generator, to see how electric discharges would affect the microphone. What he saw was the same signals that had been captured on Mars; there was a distinctive pattern of a brief electrical interference followed by the acoustic signal of a shockwave.

Fifty-five such events were picked up by the microphone over two Martian years, the researchers say, and the sparks were usually associated with dust devils and the fronts of dust storms.

The electrical arcs would feel and sound like strong static electricity sparks, says Chide. If an astronaut was on Mars, it might be possible to see them, although "small discharges are hard to see in strong sunshine, and it's the sunniest times of day that have most dust devils and maybe most of the strong discharge events. That said, some events were at night," he says.

The researchers think it's important to study this atmospheric electrical activity to understand the hazards it could pose to future robotic or human missions. While most space hardware is designed to be robust, they note that the Soviet Mars 3 mission landed during a dust storm and only operated for about 20 seconds on the surface before suddenly and mysteriously ending its transmission.

"Something changed in 20 seconds," says Lorenz. "Could it have been an electrical discharge event? I don't think we can rule that out."

Copyright 2025 NPR

You don't have to walk by a dog park to know that domestic dogs come in all shapes and sizes. From 2-pound Chihuahuas to 150-pound Newfoundlands, chunky Labradors to slender Vizlas, our canine companions are some of the most physically diverse mammals on the planet.

It's commonly believed that this vast range in physical attributes is a product of the Victorian era, when kennel clubs started selectively breeding dogs to produce certain characteristics roughly 200 years ago.

A new analysis of hundreds of prehistoric canine skulls, spanning the last 50,000 years, shows it emerged much earlier.

"By about 10,000 years ago, half of the amount of diversity present in modern dogs was already present in the Neolithic," said Carly Ameen, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Exeter and one of the lead authors on the new study. "So very early on in our relationship with dogs, we not only change them from wolves but they begin to change amongst themselves and generate a lot of diversity."

To determine when those changes happened, Ameen and a team of international researchers created 3D models of 643 skulls of ancient and modern dogs and wolves. The models allowed them to discern subtle changes in the skulls' shape over time.
The results, published in the journal Science, show that by nearly 11,000 years ago, just after the last ice age, dog skulls were already different from those of wolves. They were shorter and wider. But perhaps more surprising, Ameen said, is that the dog skulls were already different from each other, meaning that the switch from wolf to dog had to have happened much earlier.

"The relationship between wolves and dogs had to already have been ongoing," she said. "It's not an instantaneous change — the dog comes from the woods into your house and changes the shape of its skull."
Those kinds of changes typically accumulate slowly, over many generations.

Scientists have long wondered when the domestication of dogs first started. Dogs are believed to be the first domesticated species — before cows, pigs, sheep, or plants like wheat.

The new study doesn't answer the question but "it narrows the window," Ameen said, and gives us insights into how humanity's mutually beneficial relationship with dogs physically changed them over time.

That relationship was the focus of another new study, published in Science, that used ancient DNA from dogs to find that humans were traveling with — and even trading — domestic dogs in Eurasia for at least the last 10,000 years.
The study's lead author, Minmin Ma, a researcher at Lanzhou University in China, said it makes sense that prehistoric hunter-gatherers were bringing dogs with them during migrations because they could assist with hunting.
But for prehistoric farming and pastoral societies that raised animals like cattle, sheep and horses, "dogs weren't particularly essential in that economic sense," she said. And yet, their study found that those groups made the effort to bring dogs with them during migrations too.

"Although the roles [dogs have] played varied across different periods, they have consistently been close companions to humans," Ma said. "We should cherish this bond even more."
Copyright 2025 NPR

This story was originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on Nov. 26, 2025.

The LA Phil on Wednesday said it secured new donor funding that would allow it to fully continue the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles program at Esteban E. Torres High School in East LA, just days after community outcry and Boyle Heights Beat reported that programming at YOLA’s Torres site would be reduced.

“YOLA is fundamental to the LA Phil’s mission of sharing the transformative power of music, so we are thrilled our donors recognized that this funding provides vital access to music education for the East LA community,” said Kim Noltemy, president and chief executive officer of the LA Phil, in a statement.

“Joining together, we have and will continue working tirelessly over the coming months to ensure we remain in a position to support this program, because it is more important than ever,” Noltemy added.

Programming was set to take place through Dec. 12, with orchestra rehearsals scaled back from four to two days per week. Parents said cuts at Torres involved beginner programs. They were also told that all instructors at the Torres site would be removed except for the conductors.

In response, families and community members held meetings and launched a campaign on Instagram, urging the LA Phil to save the program at Torres.

In a press release, parents noted that cuts come at a time when communities like East LA are grappling with fear and instability due to immigration raids that began over the summer. YOLA, they said, has been a safe space. They emphasized that no other YOLA site in LA “is being cut or reduced due to ‘funding.’”

“Only Torres — the site serving East LA’s predominantly Latino community — is affected,” they said in the release.

Students and parents share their concerns about cuts to YOLA programming at a meeting Wednesday at Esteban E. Torres High School.

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The announcement of programming reduction comes as staff at all YOLA sites filed for union representation with the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada, according to the YOLA United Teaching Artists Instagram page.

YOLA, which was founded by the LA Phil, provides free instruments and ensemble training for thousands of young musicians who are 5 through 18 years old. The after-school program operates at sites across LA, including in Inglewood, Rampart District and Rampart/MacArthur Park. YOLA at Torres serves 165 students who attend East LA area schools, such as James A. Garfield High School and KIPP charter schools.

In the statement, the LA Phil said its board is working to “ensure the program is positioned for lasting success.”

“We will evaluate whether Torres remains the best and most sustainable location for YOLA programming after this school year,” the statement read.

The LA Phil also said it is establishing a parent advisory committee “to maintain consistent dialogue with YOLA families as future decisions are made.”

“We know how difficult and disruptive the initial decision to reduce the YOLA program at Torres has been for students, families, and teaching artists, and we are deeply apologetic,” Noltemy said in the statement. “We are profoundly grateful to the generous donors who made it possible for us to continue this essential program.”

Often described as housing of last resort for some of the city’s poorest renters, single-room occupancy buildings in Los Angeles are operating at a financial loss — and losing more money every year.

That’s according to a November report from Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable housing nonprofit. The report surveyed 39 buildings across California. It found that only two — both located in San Francisco — have positive cash flow.

All of the L.A.-area properties are run by organizations that keep buildings financially afloat by digging into their own budgets, making up for rental income that isn’t enough to cover operating costs.

“Owners that are carrying these properties are really trying to make them work,” said Marc Tousignant, who oversees vulnerable populations for Enterprise’s Southern California market. “They're really at the front lines of ending homelessness.”

Losses have tripled

The buildings surveyed in the report contained more than 3,000 single-room occupancy units in total. These are bare-bones apartments, usually just a bedroom without a private bathroom or kitchen.

Many are located in old residential hotels, often in downtown L.A.’s Skid Row neighborhood.

The report found building owners have needed to triple the amount of money they’re advancing per unit over the last five years. Losses cost organizations an average of $971 per unit in 2020. Now, that figure is up to $2,866 per unit.

Some, like the storied Cecil Hotel, have struggled to attract tenants. The report found an average vacancy rate of 20% in the surveyed buildings. Some of the aging properties are unattractive to prospective tenants because of deferred maintenance or damage caused by residents with untreated mental health issues.

“There have been discussions around, should we just abandon this model and convert them completely?” Tousignant said. “But they are really serving, I think, an important role.”

What could turn them around?

The two buildings in San Francisco that are financially healthy both have project-based vouchers through the city’s Section 8 program. These vouchers help tenants pay for rents in the building, and the vouchers cannot be transferred to other properties.

Tousignant said this approach could help improve the financial outlook for buildings in L.A.

“Unfortunately, in L.A., we haven't really been dedicating any new project-based vouchers to older or existing buildings,” he said. “They've really been going towards newer buildings.”

Rehabilitation is another approach that could improve vacancy rates at the buildings. The estimated cost of fixing up each single-room occupancy unit was $165,000 on average, according to the report. Some of those plans could involve converting units into studio apartments, complete with kitchen and bathroom facilities — though that could involve reducing a building’s total number of units.

“It's this sort of trade off,” Tousignant said. “What's more important? Making these complete units or losing a little bit of affordability in terms of the amount of units?”

Tousignant said if the affordable housing field doesn’t find solutions to these problems, more buildings could find themselves in court-ordered receivership, with tenants facing an uncertain future.

That’s the situation the Skid Row Housing Trust found itself in, before developer Leo Pustilnikov bought its troubled portfolio of buildings.