The Brief

The middle school once attended by — and eventually renamed for — the author Octavia E. Butler will hold its third Science Fiction Festival on Friday.

The multi-award winning and best selling author graduated from what was then Washington Junior High in 1962 and wrote some of her earliest stories while a student.

School librarian Natalie Daily organized the Octavia E. Butler Magnet’s first science fiction writing contest in 2020, the same year the school’s library was renamed in her honor. The school itself was renamed two years later.

“I want [students] to realize that their ideas matter,” Daily said. “I think that Butler is a testament to that, you know, she was writing stuff and thinking about really, really deep ideas when she was a student here.”

"It kind of sometimes feels like her eyes are watching you," librarian Natalie Daily said of the chalk portrait of Butler by Bianca Ornelas in the library. "I just kind of think, would I be making a space that she would have liked?"

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In 2022, the school expanded the contest into the first Science Fiction Festival.

“It's just ways for kids to be engaged in both science and art, and creation,” Daily said. “To see themselves as part of all of it.”

Students and families can learn how to code robots, talk to an astronomer, create space-inspired art, and might even spot their favorite Star Wars character.

“Last year, the fungal expert was such a hit,” Daily said. “I had to have them back this year because the kids just thought it was so cool to see all those different weird mushrooms.”

The festival will also reveal the winners of the 2023-2024 science fiction contest. The now- annual school-wide competition includes art, short narrative, poetry, and graphic fiction.

A new generation of science fiction creators

LAist caught up with a few of the students who’d won first place in their respective categories in 2022 and will graduate later this year.

Roffman wrote "Savages" after watching Disney's Pocahontas and thinking about how aliens would view humans.

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"I wrote a poem and I realized, wait a second, this is really fun," Roffman said. "So I put a lot of work into the poem."

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Then-sixth grader Brooklyn Roffman wrote a poem called “Savages” that imagines aliens demeaning earthlings the way European colonists did Native Americans.

“I wrote it and then I had a lot of thoughts about it — mostly negative thoughts,” Roffman said. “So then I just changed it, like, word by word.”

Her revisions paid off — she won first prize in the poetry category.

“It felt amazing,” Roffman said. “I put a lot of work into it and it felt really good to do something right for once.”

"I'm not very great at expressing my feelings, like, socially, so I just let out on writing," student Dayana Diaz said.

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Diaz shared this excerpt from her story: "I bet you would think living on Mars in the year 3268 would be horrible, but its beauty speaks for itself. We humans came to Mars when it was finally very full of life. Earth, of course, still exists and is habitable, but we prefer to stay on Mars either way. Its atmosphere holds a soft pink sky with white clouds."

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Dayana Diaz wrote a short story about people who built a life on Mars and a war with Jupiter that threatens to destroy it.

“It's similar to Earth — although it's, like, obviously not the same at all,” Diaz said. “It still has the same, like, beauty to it.”

Diaz said she was inspired by research about the possibility of sustaining life on the red planet.

“I feel like there's a good possibility that we could go there one day, and I would like that to happen,” Diaz said.

When she found out she won first prize, Diaz said she was surprised, happy, but also a little bit nervous.

“It just made me realize that I actually really do like writing,” Diaz said. “Like I should write a little more.”

Molnar's drawing was inspired by a science project about the impact of humans on coral reefs.

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"Whenever I feel like unmotivated or, like, I just not in the mood to draw, I usually think about the things that I have done that went really well," Molnar said. "That kind of helps me."

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Maxine Molnar’s winning illustration shows a girl standing on a cliff looking out over a receding ocean. A spaceship and red sedan float above the water. Dots of color in the distance imply an airborne freeway.

“I learned more about endangered coral reefs, and I discovered how much I love to draw in perspective,” Molnar said.

Molnar said middle school has been full of opportunities to learn — academically — and about herself.

“I've explored more of, like, what I enjoy doing,” Molnar said. “What I'm really good at and things that I also need to work on.”

Enjoy the cool mornings while they last. Coastal areas will continue to see low clouds and some patchy fog this morning. Otherwise, we can expect a mostly sunny afternoon.

Along the coast, L.A. County beaches will be cooler with highs from 63 to 70 degrees. Meanwhile, along the Orange County coast, temperatures will range from 70 to 80 degrees.

L.A. County valleys and inland Orange Empire will see temperatures from upper 70s to mid-80s. The Inland Empire however will continue to breach 90-degree weather, with a high of 91 expected today in some areas. And temperatures in Coachella Valley could reach from 95 up to 100 degrees.

California’s native scarlet monkeyflowers usually love water and moist areas. Their little red petals attract hummingbirds, making them popular for gardens. But during the state’s historic drought in the 2010s, they suffered.

“ It was really hard to watch these populations dwindle,” said Amy Angert, a professor at the University of British Columbia who’s been studying the wildflowers for nearly 30 years. “[It] was really heartbreaking.”

The plants were dying off, even fully disappearing in some places. They couldn’t survive in the extremely dry soil. But then something surprising happened. The wildflowers adapted.

A new study from researchers at Cornell University and the University of British Columbia has found that over a few years, some of the state’s scarlet monkeyflowers successfully, rapidly evolved to save themselves from climate change, likely the first fully recorded finding of such for plants.

The ground-breaking study

Plant adaptation can be compared to like jogging on a treadmill — and climate change is speeding that treadmill up really fast. Researchers have been concerned for years that plants might not be able to run fast enough to keep up, which could cause them to go extinct.

When the study started in 2010, the team set out to monitor monkeyflower populations over time to see how they waxed and waned in different conditions. They observed the plants in places like the San Bernardino mountains, Sequoia National Park, Kings Canyon and Yosemite.

Angert, who was the team leader and senior researcher, had no idea the drought would come two years later. But the heavy dry-spell created an opportunity: The team used a “time capsule” of old seeds to see how newer monkeyflowers were faring in the bone-dry soil. Some populations were luckier than others.

Through genome sequencing, researchers found that some genetic differences that appeared in plants in hot and dry places were occurring more often — even in spots where they weren’t that common before the drought.

It seemed some monkeyflowers were evolving themselves to have this adaptive trait, allowing them to not only survive the drought but also recover. This process has an official name: evolutionary rescue.

When it comes to the scarlet monkeyflowers’ physical traits, they aren’t sure what the genetic differences do. However, Angert says the populations that recovered the best were the ones that lost less water through the pores on their leaves — the stomata — while they were opening up for photosynthesis.

What this means for other plants

Angert was excited to see climate resilience in action, but cautions against taking this as a sign that we don’t need to worry about monkeyflowers or nature in general.

“Even in this species, it wasn’t all the populations that actually were resilient,” Angert added. “We saw three of them go to local extinction, and one of them hasn’t come back yet.”

It’s a hopeful tale — not a silver bullet. Still, the findings are significant. Angert says that, according to her knowledge, this is the first recorded finding of evolutionary rescue in the wild — a plant evolving to save itself and successfully doing so.

The million-dollar question is whether it can apply to other species. For now, the study suggests that if there are other species with the right set of genetic differences, they could also be resilient.

“ But of course, the challenge is figuring out which ones those are,” Angert said.

A federal judge in San Francisco said on Tuesday the government's ban on Anthropic looked like punishment after the AI company went public with its dispute with the Pentagon over the military's potential uses of its artificial intelligence model, Claude.

U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin made the remark at the outset of a hearing about Anthropic's request for a preliminary injunction in one of its lawsuits against the Pentagon, which has designated the company a supply chain risk, effectively blacklisting it.

"It looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic," Lin said, adding she was concerned that the government might be punishing Anthropic for openly criticizing the government's position.

Lin said she expected to make a ruling in the next few days on whether to temporarily pause the government's ban until the court decides on the merits of the case.

The hearing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is the latest development in a spat between one of the leading AI companies and the Trump administration, and it has implications for how the government can use AI more broadly.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei announced in late February that he would not allow the company's Claude's AI model to be used for autonomous weapons, or to surveil American citizens. President Trump subsequently ordered all U.S. government agencies to stop using Anthropic's products.

The Pentagon designated Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" earlier this month, citing national security concerns. That designation is normally reserved for entities deemed to be foreign adversaries that could potentially sabotage U.S. interests.

Anthropic has filed two federal lawsuits alleging that this designation amounts to illegal retaliation against the company for its stance on AI safety. It argues that the label will cost it both customers and revenue, since it will bar Pentagon contractors from doing business with the company, as well.

The lawsuits, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., allege the Trump administration violated the company's First Amendment right to speech and exceeded the scope of supply chain risk law.

In Tuesday's hearing, lawyers for Anthropic said it was apparently the first time such a designation had been made against a U.S. company.

Lin said the Pentagon has a right to decide what AI products it wants to use. But she questioned whether the government broke the law when it banned its agencies from using Anthropic, and when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that anyone seeking business with the Pentagon must cut relations with Anthropic.

She said the actions were "troubling" because they did not seem to be tailored to the national security concerns in question, which could be addressed by the Pentagon simply ceasing to use Claude. Instead, she said, it looked like the government was trying to punish Anthropic.

But a lawyer for the government argued that its actions were not retaliatory, and were based on Anthropic's disagreement with the government over how its AI model could be used — not the company's decision to speak out about it.

The government also argued that Anthropic is a risk because, theoretically, in the future the company could update Claude in a way that endangers national security.

Anthropic did not respond immediately to an emailed request for comment.

A Pentagon spokesperson said that the agency's policy is not to comment on ongoing litigation.

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An oil pipeline that was shut down after a 2015 environmental disaster is flowing again after President Donald Trump issued an executive order earlier this month.

California mounted a legal fight against the pipeline this week. But environmentalists have won court rulings against the pipeline in recent years too.

Before state Attorney General Rob Bonta filed his suit, the Environmental Defense Center, a nonprofit focused on Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, was already involved in its own ongoing lawsuit to keep the pipeline system shutdown. Last year, a judge granted the group a preliminary injunction to keep the pipeline closed.

“ It's a really dangerous project," said Linda Krop, chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Center. “It would not only cause harm to the environment, but it also threatens public health and safety and our local economy.”

The backstory

The pipeline runs through Gaviota State Park, known for its natural beauty and coastal biodiversity.

The 2015 Refugio Oil Spill released more than 123,000 gallons of crude into the waters off Santa Barbara’s Gaviota Coast, killing hundreds of birds and other wildlife, and spreading more than a hundred miles south into Los Angeles.

The Santa Ynez offshore oil platform and Las Flores Pipeline System responsible for the spill (then operated by Exxon) were shuttered — until the federal government ordered it to restart earlier this month, citing emergency powers and an energy crisis caused by the war in Iran.

Who gets to decide?

California regulators previously ruled that the company now operating the pipeline, Sable Offshore Corp., based in Houston, had to repair the pipeline system before operations could resume.

Krop said the federal government agreed in 2016 that the California fire marshal would have jurisdiction over the pipeline’s safety. And in 2020, she said, a court ruled that only the state could approve restarting the system — an agreement the federal government signed.

“It's not proper for the Trump administration or the secretary of energy to override a court order,” Krop said.

Now, the legal battle will be over who is in charge: the California fire marshal or the Department of Energy as ordered by Trump?

The Department of Energy did not respond to LAist’s request for comment.

Krop told LAist that Californians should be concerned from both an environmental and a constitutional perspective.

 “This is not just about Sable. This is about a constitutional crisis,” Krop said. “This is going to be the new precedent. … If they care about the ability of states to enforce their own laws, if they're worried about State Parks saying what can happen within their boundaries, then they should care about this.”

Is an energy crisis the real reason?

In a statement, Sable said the the federal intervention was “to address the energy scarcity and supply disruption risks caused by California policies that have left the region and U.S. military forces dependent on foreign oil.”

The U.S. is a net exporter of oil, though the global oil market’s complexity means that what is produced here doesn’t necessarily stay in the U.S.

Krop took issue with the characterization of an energy crisis to begin with, a sentiment shared by Bonta and other Democratic leaders in California.

Krop also challenged the assertion that restarting the pipeline would help lower gas prices.

“Gas prices are set on a global market, and right now they're influenced by what's happening in Iran and the war. This project will not make a bit of difference with gas prices,” Krop said. “People don't realize probably oil from this project, it's very heavy, low quality crude oil. There's not any guarantee that it's going to even make it to the gas pump.”