The Brief

Entomologist Sarah Han has always been into spiders.

"I grew up in California and there are a lot of black widows," says Han. "I would keep them as pets. One day, one of them escaped. That's a mistake you only make once."

The black widow proceeded to build its characteristic cobweb right under its cage. Han noticed the messy upper part where the spider hung out and an array of vertical threads glued to the ground. "When an insect walks by," explains Han, "it will dislodge these trap lines and get pulled into the air a little bit, which is really cool."

The black widows were an early demonstration of a fundamental principle about the spider world. "There's a huge diversity of webs and the ways that spiders use these webs to try to catch prey," she says.

In research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Han and her colleague showcase another instance of that diversity. Scientists knew that the tiny ray spider can fling its web to snag prey out of the air rather than waiting for insects to fly into the silky strands. But Han deduced the spider launches its web in response to the vibrations of airborne insect wings.

A silky slingshot

The ray spider is smaller than a grain of rice. It spins its web as a classic set of concentric "circles" with spokes radiating outwards. But then, the spider strings a thread from the center of the web to a nearby rock or twig. It then grabs the middle of the web with its back legs and then pulls itself along that tension line with its front legs.

"That is what turns that web from a flat shape into a cone shape," says Han. The conical web is now spring loaded. When an insect flutters by, the spider releases the tension line, flinging the web forward and entangling the prey.

"So they're not just passively sitting there," Han says. "They're using the web like a slingshot without the insect ever touching the web."

This is unusual, and Han wanted to know how the ray spider figures out when to sling its web.

During her Ph.D. at the University of Akron, she collected ray spiders from the local parks. "I would just go around peering into cracks and crevices," she recalls. "I would see that tiny little spider. Then I would grab it."

Han also grabbed a bunch of spider prey. "I was just standing around in various places waiting for mosquitos to land on me and then I would catch them," she says.

Back in the lab, she glued those mosquitos to little paper strips. "We started calling them mosquito lollipops because it was just like this mosquito flying around at the end of the stick," she says. "So I would then slowly move it in towards the spider," all while recording everything using high speed video.

Three out of four times when Han moved the tethered mosquito towards the front of the capture cone, the spider launched its web at an acceleration up to 51 g's.

"It's just like instantaneous practically — a fraction of a fraction of a second," says Han. An insect "would never really see it coming."

Han then tried the same experiment with a tuning fork that vibrated at a frequency akin to an insect beating its wings — just much stronger. The ray spiders flung their webs when the tuning fork was farther away than the mosquitos had been.

Han concluded that ray spiders release their webs in response to airborne prey vibrations, determining both the direction and distance to those vibrations to capture the insect at the right moment.

A little inspiration

"There still are a lot of questions in exactly what's going on," says Han. For instance, she isn't sure how the spider detects the vibrations.

"The vibrations are hitting the silk," she says. "They're also probably stimulating the spider's body, its sensory hairs. So through one of those or some combination, the spider becomes aware that this insect is approaching the web."

Han also can't be sure how the spider deduces when an insect is close enough to the web to capture it.

Nevertheless, she says this is the first time to her knowledge that scientists have documented spiders activating their whole webs to attack prey before they hit those sticky filaments.

"Spiders may be using their webs as greater sensory devices than we previously thought," suggests Han. "The web is kind of like the spider's ear."

"It's exciting to see it in print now because we've been talking about [the idea] for years," says Symone Alexander, a chemical engineer at Auburn University who wasn't involved in the research. She says that spiders are masters of designing webs that allow them to detect stress and strain precisely.

"These spiders — the geometry of their web is slightly different and it's tensed in a different way," Alexander says. "Can we use that as inspiration for building these sensing systems in airplane wings or other materials?"

In other words, Alexander is hoping that scientists can continue to invite the spider-verse to improve the human-verse.

At 5 a.m. California time, when it is still dark outside, a member of the state's Department of Public Health gets on a weekly call.

The topic? Health emergencies all over the world.

For years, the U.S. federal government participated in these calls, which are organized by the World Health Organization. Now, as the Trump administration says it has withdrawn from WHO over its handling of COVID, among other things, California is stepping in.

It is the first state to join WHO's Global Outbreak Alert & Response Network, also known as GOARN. Dr. Erica Pan, director of the California Department of Public Health, says she's been in touch with other states hoping to follow suit. Illinois, in a press release, said it's "making preparations" to join.

"The Trump administration's withdrawal from WHO is a reckless decision that will hurt all Californians and Americans," said California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a statement. "California will not bear witness to the chaos this decision will bring."

This move by states to take things into their own hands is part of a broader trend, according to Dr. Gavin Yamey, a professor of global health and public policy at Duke University.

"I think this is a very smart and savvy play," says Yamey. "The federal government has reneged on its public health protection responsibilities, and you're seeing states taking steps so they still are part of the international response to outbreaks and emerging threats."

Not quite a member but still a participant

That doesn't mean California, for example, could become a full-fledged WHO member. Many forums and meetings hosted by WHO are limited to member states — meaning national governments. But some parts of WHO, like GOARN, are open to a broader array of groups, including nonprofit and multinational organizations, academic centers and different levels of governments. Like American states. 

GOARN is made up of over 350 such groups that work together to detect and respond to infectious disease outbreaks and public health emergencies. The network was created in 2000 after leaders realized that a lack of coordination was hindering outbreak response. Since its creation, GOARN has helped organize, analyze and respond to emergencies like SARS, Ebola and mpox.

Members of GOARN participate in weekly calls, get regular outbreak updates and also get access to WHO Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources platform, which "is continuously scanning global open sources for signals of outbreaks and health events," says Pan. "We're just now getting training and onboarding."

Pan says participating in the network and platform brings better awareness of global health threats — and lets the state respond accordingly. "[It] helps us anticipate threats earlier," says Pan, noting a drop-off in federal health guidance, including the lack of a national flu vaccination campaign this flu season.

Indeed, the U.S. federal government has said it does not plan to continue participating in groups like GOARN. In a statement sent to NPR earlier this month, the U.S. State Department wrote: "The United States will not be participating in regular WHO-led or managed events."

"Charting its own course"

Instead, the U.S. is taking a different approach, pursuing health and aid agreements directly with individual countries. These agreements often include sharing disease outbreak information.

"The United States is charting its own course on global health engagement, grounded in accountability, transparency, and the expertise of America's public health institutions," said a statement from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to NPR. "States do not set U.S. foreign policy."

Not everyone agrees with this stance.

Some conservative voices have urged the U.S. to continue participating in certain WHO forums, particularly those that provide information, data and assessments for emerging infectious disease outbreaks. For example, Brett Schaefer — a senior fellow at the right-leaning thinktank the American Enterprise Institute — said, even as the U.S. withdraws from WHO, the U.S. should continue to participate in initiatives like the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources platform "to make sure that you have full, robust access to the information."

This type of international platform would be "a very difficult thing for the U.S. to replicate or to try and build outside of the World Health Organization — also [it'd be] somewhat inefficient," says Schaefer.

However, he said over email that the jury is still out on California's decision to join GOARN. "It's interesting but unclear at this point," he wrote, noting that WHO has not clarified California's status. He added: "It also could just be a PR stunt by Newsom."

WHO did not respond to NPR's requests for comment on California's participation in GOARN or any other parts of WHO as well as on other states that have reached out to join.

This new model does have a potential downside — a split between states that join part of WHO and states that don't, says Yamey: "You could end up having this awful, tragic divide" where some state leaders have access to better, more up-to-date outbreak information for making public health decisions than leaders in other states, he says.

Pan says California is hoping to partner with other states that don't join GOARN. "Our intent is really to — acknowledging that we are the biggest state with the largest state health department — step up and provide some leadership."
Copyright 2026 NPR

A five-day fan festival will take over the L.A. Memorial Coliseum in June to welcome the World Cup to Los Angeles.

The festival will kick off the same day as the tournament, June 11, and run through June 15. It will include live broadcasts of the games, music and food, and provide a place for fans to celebrate as Team USA plays its first game against Paraguay at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood on June 12.

"For the first five days of the World Cup, the fan festival will be the heart of the World Cup experience for many people in L.A.," said Kathryn Schloessman, the CEO of the L.A. World Cup 2026 Host Committee.

Angelenos will need to purchase tickets for the fan festival, but prices and details will be announced in March, according to Schloessman.

The Los Angeles host committee for the 2026 World Cup announced the details of programming for fans across the city on Wednesday. They include nine "fan zones" that will pop up across the L.A. area throughout the World Cup's 39 days of soccer matches.

Here are where the zones are located:

• The Original Farmers Market from June 18-21 
• City of Downey on June 20
• Union Station and the Plaza de Cultura y Artes from June 25-28
• Hansen Dam Lake from July 2-5
• Earvin "Magic" Johnson Park from July 4-5
• Whittier Narrows from July 9-11
• Venice Beach on July 11
• Fairplex from July 14-15 and July 18-19
• West Harbor from July 14-15 and July 18-19

LAist has a fan guide for the 2026 World Cup.

California Democratic senators advanced a measure Tuesday that would make it easier for people to sue federal agents over civil rights violations, a bill shaped by fears of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement practices.

The bill from Sens. Scott Wiener and Aisha Wahab, both Bay Area Democrats, took on additional significance after federal agents gunned down Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen and ICU nurse, in Minnesota last weekend. Senators discussed the measure on the floor for more than 90 minutes before voting along party lines, 30 to 10, to send it to the Assembly.

“It’s a sad statement on where we are in this country that this has to be a partisan issue,” Wiener said just before the vote on his bill, which is also known as the “No Kings Act”. “Red, blue, everyone has constitutional rights. And everyone should have the ability to hold people accountable when they violate those rights.”

It’s among several bills lawmakers are moving forward in the new year to confront an escalation of aggressive immigration enforcement tactics and to protect immigrant communities. They include bills that would tax for-profit detention companies, prohibit law enforcement officers from moonlighting as federal agents and attempt to curb courthouse arrests.

Those efforts follow a slate of legislation signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year to resist the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign in California, including a first-in-the nation measure to prohibit officers from wearing masks and others that limit their access to schools and hospitals.

While some of those laws are facing legal challenges, the new batch of proposals offer “practical solutions that are squarely within the state’s control,” said Shiu-Ming Cheer, deputy director at California Immigrant Policy Center.

Here’s a look at some of the key bills lawmakers are considering:

No moonlighting as a federal agent

Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, a Democrat from Culver City, authored a bill that would prohibit law enforcement from taking a side job as a federal immigration agent.

At a press conference in San Francisco earlier this month, Bryan said the measure is especially timely as the federal administration ramps up its recruitment of California’s local law enforcement.

“We don’t collaborate in the kidnapping of our own community members, but there is a loophole in state law,” he said. “While you can’t collaborate with ICE while you are working in your police shift, you can take a second job with the Department of Homeland Security. And I don’t think that that is right.”

In an interview with CalMatters, he said the legislation is intended to bring transparency and accountability, and to close that loophole.

“The federal administration has created not just a secret police but a secret military at the expense of health care, social safety nets, and key benefits that the American people need and rely on to make it through the day,” said Bryan. “All of those resources have been rerouted to the unaccounted militarized force patrolling our streets and literally killing American citizens.”

Keep ICE awy from courthouses

Sen. Eloise Gómez Reyes, a Democrat from San Bernardino, introduced legislation to prevent federal immigration agents from making “unannounced and indiscriminate” arrests in courthouses.

“The issue is clear cut,” said Gómez Reyes in a statement. “One of the core responsibilities of government is to protect people — not to inflict terror on them. California is not going to let the federal government make political targets out of people trying to be good stewards of the law. Discouraging people from coming to court makes our community less safe.”

The legislation was introduced nearly two weeks after a federal judge ordered that the U.S. Justice Department halt civil arrests in immigration courts across Northern California, ruling that its deportation policies hadn’t addressed the “chilling effects, safety risks, and impacts on hearing attendance.”

Efforts to bolster protections in California courthouses have also been championed by Sen. Susan Rubio, a Democrat from West Covina, who introduced a bill that would allow remote courthouse appearances for the majority of civil or criminal state court hearings, trials or conferences until January 2029.

Taxing detention centers

Assemblymember Matt Haney, a Democrat from San Francisco, introduced a bill that would place a 50% tax on profits from immigration detention centers. Over 5,700 people are being held in seven immigration detention centers across California, three of which are located in Kern County.

Escalating 'resistance'

Cheer, of California Immigrant Policy Center, said the early introduction of the bills demonstrates more urgency from the state Legislature to tackle issues around immigration enforcement.

“My hope for this year is that the state can be as bold and innovative as possible seeing the crisis communities are facing from immigration enforcement,” she said.

That means ensuring funding for attorneys to represent people facing deportation, addressing existing gaps in state laws around information sharing with the federal government, and looking into companies that are directly profiting from the business of arresting and deporting people, Cheer said.

Republicans have criticized the measures, which they characterize as overstepping on federal priorities.

"No one likes to see what’s happening in Minnesota. No one wants to see that coming to California," said Sen. Tony Strickland, a Republican representing Huntington Beach. Instead, he argued, cities and states should jettison their so-called "sanctuary" policies that hamper coordination between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.

He also criticized Democrats for taking precious Senate time to prepare for hypothetical scenarios rather than addressing existing problems in California.

“At the end of the day, we have a lot of serious issues here in California, and we need to start focusing on California-specific issues.”

Kevin Johnson, an immigration law professor and former dean of the UC Davis School of Law, said state and local governments are trying to figure out how far to go in resisting federal immigration enforcement given Trump’s threats to pull funding from sanctuary jurisdictions.

“While there’s concern and fear in immigrant communities, there’s some solace being given by the support expressed by state and local officials,” he said. “As the Trump administration escalates its aggressive deportation tactics across the nation, California has escalated its resistance.”

CalMatters reporter Wendy Fry contributed to this story.

Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

President Donald Trump has reshuffled the leadership of his immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota in the face of wide-spread anger over two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens by federal agents. Operation commander Gregory Bovino is out, and Trump is sending Border Czar Tom Homan to take over.

But it's not clear changes at the top can solve a more basic problem: the immigration agents flooding the Twin Cities are generally less experienced in urban policing and crowd control than other police.

"The skills that these federal immigration agents are bringing to these cities are a complete mismatch for what we actually need," says Irene Vega, an associate professor of sociology at UC Irvine. "That's not what their job has been, historically, and I just think it's a very dangerous situation."

Vega studied the attitudes of Customs and Border Protection officers regarding use of force, a project that involved interviewing more than 90 officers. The CBP appears to make up the largest contingent of the roughly 3,000 agents deployed to Minnesota.

"They saw themselves as very different," she says. "They would tell me that they were trained to hike in the desert. They often told me about arresting 10, 15 people who were very compliant."

She says the isolation of the border region influenced the officers' calculus about use of force. She recalls one officer who explained that in the desert, he doesn't have the option to duck into an alley for cover.

"And so he said, 'I'm going to have to do what I have to do,'" Vega says.

Over the years, CBP has come under pressure to rein in its officers' use of deadly force along the border. Incidents of officers shooting at people for throwing rocks came under special scrutiny, and an external review in 2013.

"Too many cases do not appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the use of deadly force," the report found. "[I]n some cases agents put themselves in harm's way by remaining in close proximity to the rock throwers when moving out of range was a reasonable option."

The report recommended equipping CBP officers with less-lethal weapons such as pepper spray, a requirement that was added to the agency's handbook in 2014.

Now, in Minneapolis, CBP has come to rely heavily on sprays and other chemical irritants to push back protesters and observers. In some cases, such as the moments leading up to the fatal shooting on Saturday of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, the use of pepper spray appeared to inflame confrontations.

"There's a duty of obligation that you have in policing, if you incapacitate someone," says Leon Taylor. He's a retired Baltimore police officer, who also served as a military peace keeper in the Balkans He and other former police have been discussing the scenes coming out of Minnesota.

"If [a pepper-sprayed person] stumbles out into traffic and gets run over and killed, that's on me. There's a duty of care."

He says the videos appear to show federal officers escalating conflicts, instead of defusing them.

"They live in a toxic environment of their own creation that has nothing to do with policing," Taylor says, and he blames the message from high-level officials – such as Vice President Vance – that they have "immunity."

"If they told these guys instead, before they turned them loose, that you have an absolute responsibility, instead of absolute immunity… it starts with the mindset about what you are doing," he says.

David "Kawika" Lau was a senior instructor at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, which trains CBP and other federal agents. He says in the years after the external report on CBP use of force there was an increased emphasis on teaching de-escalation techniques – training he helped to shape.

"We teach them emotional intelligence, self-regulation, self-awareness. Because you can't bring calm to any situation if you yourself are not calm," Lau says.

But he cautions that those techniques are meant to defuse one-on-one confrontations. He's not sure how well CBP is prepared for the raucous crowds in the Twin Cities.

"They may have some training and expertise in urban operations," Lau says. "But that is not what that position [CBP officer] was designed to do. Therefore, that's not what the training is designed to produce."

Federal immigration agencies say they're being forced into an unfamiliar role. CBP commissioner Rodney Scott told Fox News over the weekend, "The primary training was to go out and arrest suspects, which is already dangerous. This entire environment, where the community is encouraged by local leaders to come out and actually prevent you from making a felony arrest, it's a new dynamic. We're trying to evolve to it."

Minnesota leaders have largely encouraged protesters to be peaceful; they have not explicitly called for people to prevent immigration arrests.

But federal officials say that's still the effect, as protesters tail immigration agents and try to warn people at risk of arrest. And these officers may now be more inclined to respond to such protesters as law-breakers: A recent Attorney General memo on "domestic terrorism" lists potential charges, including "impeding" federal officers, and "seditious conspiracy to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States."

Minnesota officials say the feds' approach to urban law enforcement has distracted them from their immigration enforcement mission. On Sunday, Governor Tim Walz said federal agents had neglected to take into custody a non-citizen with a serious criminal record as he was released from a jail outside the metro area.

"They're too busy up here, doing what they did yesterday [the Pretti shooting] to go pick up someone who actually should be removed from this country," he said.

"It's their job to do immigration and customs enforcement. It's law enforcement's job to do law enforcement in Minnesota," Walz said. 

On Monday, as the political backlash against the federal presence in Minnesota grew, Walz had what he called a "productive call" with President Trump. He said the president told him he would consider reducing the number of federal officers in Minnesota.
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