The Brief

An endangered flower one scientist called a “tiny mystery” has cropped up in astonishing numbers in San Luis Obispo County.

Scientists were stunned this spring to find 16,000 Camatta Canyon amoles at Las Piletas Ranch, about 50 miles inland from San Luis Obispo. The flower was previously thought to have a worldwide population of 10,000 plants.

The Camatta Canyon amole had only been known to grow in two locations within a 90-acre area of the Los Padres National Forest. The rare flower is protected under the state and federal Endangered Species acts, but this discovery by scientists from the Nature Conservancy and the California Native Plant Society could challenge that status.

The amole — with royal purple blooms atop eight-inch spiny stalks — can be tough to spot. The amole, a Spanish word that loosely translates to soap root, refers to the Chlorogalum genus that often makes strong soaps and detergent. Its scientific name is Chlorogalum purpureum var. reductum.

Though there are other types of amoles in western North America, this one is unique.

“Often, rare plants live their life without a lot of media exposure,” said Tim Becker, director of horticulture at the Thomas Payne Foundation. “This one’s definitely what I would call a deeper cut of native plants.”

Scott Butterfield, the lead scientist with the Nature Conservancy in California who surveyed and discovered the amole with his team, certainly dug deep to find the flower, which grows in a distinct topography.

He found the plant growing on the slope between vernal pools — springtime ponds typically caused by heavy rainfall — and the natural, domelike hills called mima mounds that surround them.

Heather Schneider, a senior rare plant conservation scientist at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, led a three-year conservation project of the Camatta Canyon amole. Why is it so scarce? Human-driven off-road vehicles and livestock grazing smash it, and it has such a limited geographical range. Some years, the amole doesn’t bloom at all.

“There’s still a lot we don’t know about how and why it germinates abundantly in a given year,” she said.

Butterfield and Schneider hypothesized that weather conditions may have led to this year’s extraordinary uptick. Drought-like conditions, which harm plants in competition with the amole, were followed by a few years of higher rainfall. Becker added that wildfires and late rain may have also led to similarly favorable conditions for the amole. That may have strengthened amole bulbs underground.

The amole is only known in two locations and is protected under the state and federal Endangered Species acts.

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The Nature Conservancy

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Butterfield also noted the possibility that the amole has existed there the whole time. He had found a few flowers in 2024, which led him to officially survey the land this year.

“We’ve only owned the property for about five years, so it is very likely that the plant has existed there,” he said.

Butterfield’s discovery hints at the possibility of finding other amole blooms, potentially even challenging its endangered status.

Every five years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services conducts a review of plants and animals listed as threatened. By the next review, Butterfield hopes to have established a new location where the amole grows and have added enough numbers to the population that it can be taken off the endangered species list.

This change in standing, he hopes, may lead to more attention on the plant.

“Until you find a plant like this on your landscape, there aren’t that many people out there looking for it,” he said. “It might exist in other locations; we just haven’t looked.”

For a plant that had been on the decline since the 1980s, simply the potential for research is exciting.

“Until a couple months ago, I never would have even contemplated a study around Camata Canyon amole, or a rare plant on our property,” Butterfield said.

Schneider agreed that this discovery is encouraging and stressed conservation efforts. Having collected five seed samples during her study in 2021 to 2024, collecting more would be important for the future of the plant, especially in uncertain temperature conditions.

The amole may have blossomed because of drought-like conditions followed by higher rainfall in recent years, scientists hypothesize.

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The Nature Conservancy

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“Every opportunity we have to get genotypes into long-term conservation is a little insurance policy against extinction,” she said.

She echoed Butterfield’s optimism and offered a broader perspective on conservation.

“Nature doesn’t work on our time scales,” she said. “All is not lost. There’s still hope. Nature waits. And I hope it inspires people that putting efforts into conservation and looking for plants pays off.”

Everyone knows the frustration of bad sleep on a hot night, tossing and turning in the sheets as the hours slip away.

That experience is becoming more common thanks to climate change, according to a new study from the research organization Climate Central. The analysis finds that on average, people around the world lose about 56 hours, or seven full nights of sleep each year to uncomfortably warm temperatures. About 10% of that lost sleep—roughly 5 hours—can be pinned to human-driven climate change.

"Summertime is hot. It's always been," says Kristina Dahl, the lead scientist at Climate Central. "But climate change is making them hotter, and making nights hotter. So it's really amplifying the sleep loss that would happen naturally."

The study looked at temperature records from 1,300 cities around the world. The Climate Central team knew from a study published a few years earlier that the amount of time people sleep is tightly tied to overnight outdoor temperatures. So they could extrapolate the total time people spent sleeping based on the temperatures where they lived. That number represented the real sleep people got in a world that has been heated up by climate change.

Then, the Climate Central researchers used a climate model that presents a hypothetical world: one where human-driven climate change hasn't happened. The researchers could estimate temperatures in all those same locations—and see how much people would have slept in that cooler scenario.

The difference, Dahl says, isn't enormous for each person: it's on the order of 5 hours a year so far. But that number has doubled since the 1970s, and it will continue to rise as climate change marches onward, she says.

That's in part because overnight temperatures have crept upward much faster than daytime ones. The causes are complex, but one factor is the shape of the atmosphere: At night, the layer of air closest to the ground, where people actually live, is short and compact. During the daytime, that layer expands. Heat absorbed during the day gets trapped into that compact band of air during the night, pushing temperatures up.

Sleep is tightly tied to temperature. Sleep laboratory studies consistently show that hotter and more humid conditions degrade sleep quality. People's ability to fall asleep in the first place decreases, and the sleep that does occur gets fragmented and less restorative.

Particularly, says sleep doctor Daniel Rifkin from the sleep consultancy group Ognomy Sleep, the type of sleep that leads to dreams: REM.

"If it's too hot," he says, "your REM sleep is extremely broken, and we lose our dreams."

Sleep lab studies helped scientists understand the best temperature conditions for sleeping indoors. But until recently, it wasn't clear how real-world weather conditions affected people's sleep.

But a few years ago, environmental data scientist Kelton Minor and his colleagues set out to figure out that relationship. They collected sleep data from nearly 50,000 Fitbits around the world, along with detailed overnight temperature data from sleepers' locations.

"The warmer it gets, the less that people sleep," says Minor— especially once nighttime temperatures crept above about 50 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Beyond that, Minor and his colleagues found, "every additional increase per degree on that hot side leads to progressively less sleep."

The new Climate Central analysis used Minor's sleep-temperature relationship to estimate climate-induced sleep loss.

Sleep is already a precious and threatened commodity, says Minor. In 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared sleep problems like disorders and simple insufficiency to be a public health crisis.

So far, the climate impact adds up to just a few minutes a day during summertime. But because the relationship between sleep loss and health is so strong, the cumulative impacts of that loss on public health could be significant, says sleep doctor Rifkin. The impacts also fall hard on people who don't have access to cooling technologies such as air conditioning, or who can't afford to run them.

"Heat really finds the vulnerable people first," he says. "It affects those the most that need the help the most."

He recommends doing whatever possible to cool your sleep space. If nothing else is possible, sticking your feet outside the sheet or blanket can help your body shed heat and cool down enough to sink into sleep.

Beyond those recommendations, Dahl says one of the best sleep aids isn't a pill or a meditation app, but cutting back on burning fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Artist Betye Saar, whose work reflects Black identity, culture and spirituality, died Sunday morning in Los Angeles at 99.

Saar’s death was confirmed Monday by relatives. She would have turned 100 this week.

A central figure of the 1960s Black Art Movement, Saar pioneered assemblage boxes, or sculptures made of found objects, and reclaimed Jim Crow-era memorabilia as powerful totems of Black liberation.

“Her symbolically rich body of work has evolved over time to demonstrate the environmental, cultural, political, racial, technological, economic and historical context in which it exists,” according to Roberts Projects, the Los Angeles gallery that represents her.

Saar began her career in design and shifted to art at age 35. She continued to make art into her 90s. She grew up in Pasadena and was part of a community of Black artists in nearby Altadena; she often cited Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers as an early source of inspiration.

Saar’s practice incorporated painting, printmaking, sculpture and found objects including dolls, washboards and other antiques. Boats, clocks, cages and altars recur in her practice, as well as symbols of the occult and cosmology. She often referenced her astrological sign of Leo in the form of lions, punctuating many works.

“Her appropriation of Black collectibles, heirlooms and utilitarian objects are transformed through subversion,” the gallery said. “Among the older generation of Black American artists, Saar is without reproach.”

Made in 1969, “Black Girl’s Window,” was groundbreaking. Still, it wasn’t widely celebrated until decades later, and it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2019.

“There weren’t that many galleries in Los Angeles at the time and there certainly weren’t any for Black artists,” she once said in an interview.

“The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” created in 1972, is one of her most important works. It features memorabilia she collected that denigrated Black people, included a “mammy,” or 19th century minstrel character who smiled while serving white slave owners.

In Saar’s hands though, the figure is reclaimed: She smiles, but holds a rifle and has a hand grenade.

It came in response to the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. Saar said King’s death “triggered a rage within me, and the mystic transformed into the warrior.”

“I had a lot of hesitation about using powerful, negative images such as these — thinking about how white people saw Black people, and how that influenced the ways in which Black people saw each other,” Saar said. “What saved it was that I made Aunt Jemima into a revolutionary figure.”

After more than 130 years, Quaker Oats announced it would retire its Aunt Jemima brand in 2020, acknowledging the logo and its origins were “based on a racial stereotype.”

Saar taught and mentored generations of Black artists, including painter Kerry James Marshall.

Though Saar’s work was exhibited in a 1975 solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in the decades that followed large institutions have exhibited her work only sporadically. In 2019 though, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MoMA mounted concurrent solo shows.

In spring 2026, Saar was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

“She had boundless energy for making art. I think she had a lot to say and was tired of the art world being dominated by white males,” said Angela Robinson Witherspoon, who produced and directed a documentary in 2023 on Saar’s life. “Betye Saar: Ready to Be A Warrior” features interviews with John Legend, Tina Knowles and other prominent voices.

“She was raising her three young daughters and she wanted to be part of the Civil Rights Movement,” Robinson Witherspoon said.

“Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” which focuses on costume design, is currently on view at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles, and there are 26 of an eventual 100 dolls on view at The New York Historical in Manhattan.

Associated Press writer Anna Furman contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

International students in Southern California say new visa time limits imposed by the Trump administration don’t square with the realities of trying to complete a degree in four years.

Under the new rules, there is now a limit to how long international students can remain in the country, as opposed to remaining in the U.S. for as long as it took to complete their degree program.

Department of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said in a statement that the previous rules allowed thousands to become “forever students” by perpetually enrolling in courses to avoid departure. LAist has reached out to the department about how many of these students are in Southern California.

California State University spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith said international students from over 160 countries “add to the rich diversity, voices, and perspectives that enrich our campuses.”

Rachel Zaentz, senior director of strategic and critical communications at the University of California Office of the President, told LAist in a statement that the new policy “significantly changes the way international students have studied in the U.S. for decades.”

“The prior Duration of Status rule provided international students and scholars with the time needed to complete their studies, conduct research, teach, train and work, provided they maintained their nonimmigrant status, in support of the country’s global competitiveness and innovation economy,” she added.

Studies have also shown that international students help boost colleges’ financial footing since they aren’t eligible for aid.

In a letter to DHS , the UC Office of the President said international students contributed $6.4 billion to California’s economy during the 2023-24 academic year and supported more than 55,000 jobs.

Katherine S. Newman, UC System Provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, wrote that the then-proposed visa limits would deter international students from pursuing doctoral programs in the U.S. and instead turn to countries like China, which has been heavily investing in doctoral programs.

Additionally, the letter highlights how students take varying times to complete their degrees. The new changes set limits to four years for visas with an option to apply for extensions. But Newman wrote that the graduation rate for almost 90% of incoming freshmen is six years.

Adding to worries 

Reva Kaneri, a graduate student from India pursuing a degree in data science from the University of California, San Diego, said the new rules affects her mental health.

Reva Kaneri, a graduate student from India, is pursuing a degree in data science from the University of California, San Diego.

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Courtesy Reva Kaneri

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“It adds a layer of uncertainty and pressure that international students already live with,” she said. “As someone who simply came here to pursue an education, build a career, and experience a new country, that uncertainty can be scary at times.”

The new visa limits, she said, reduces the flexibility international students had to find a job.

Kaneri took out a loan to pursue her degree so she wouldn’t be a financial burden on her parents.

“At one point, I genuinely thought I’d have to give up on my dream because every door seemed closed,” said Kaneri, who also worked on campus as a teaching assistant to help cover some of her tuition.

But, she said, it’s worth it.

“I honestly didn’t want to settle for average. I wanted to learn from some of the best people in the world. The U.S. has an incredible tech ecosystem, from Silicon Valley to Seattle and beyond, and many of the world’s leading technology companies are headquartered here,” Kaneri said. “I wanted the opportunity to work with talented people, network with founders and innovators, and absorb as much as I possibly could. For the goals I had, I felt there wasn’t a better place.”

For Rohit Nair, an international student from India pursuing a master’s degree in business analytics at USC, finding a job is not optional.

Rohit Nair is an international student from India pursuing a master’s degree in business analytics at USC.

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Courtesy Rohit Nair

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He took out a loan of around $87,000 to come to the U.S. to study. But if he doesn’t get a job in the U.S. after graduating, it would be impossible for him to pay it back in Indian rupees.

“ I would be in generational debt if I take that step,” he said.