UCI physicists' theory that could change the way we study the universe, the social effect of fitness challenges, the connection between California's drought and wildfires.
How does the drought affect California's wildfires?
As the Blue Cut Fire continues to rage in San Bernardino – forcing thousands of residents to evacuate, halting highway traffic and threatening homes – researchers are asking how the ongoing drought in California is affecting the wildfires.
"What makes it dry is a lack of rain, of course, and the opposite of rain, [which is] lots of evapotranspiration, and that leads to excessive drying that's really dessicating those timbers – the timber and grasses – and turning them into a real tinder box," said Jay Famiglietti, professor of Earth System Science and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. "Unfortunately, with climate change that means we're going to see a lot more in the future as the frequency and intensity of drought increases."
Since January, more than 3,800 fires have scorched more than 112,900 acres of state land, according to Cal Fire. That's about 15 percent more fires than at this point last year, and well above the state's five-year average.
The drought, now in its fifth year in the state, also makes responding to fires in hot and arid weather that much more difficult as the water supply to fight fires diminishes and firefighters face hostile conditions.
"When it gets up to 100, 110 degrees and you're in close proximity to the fire, it's extremely challenging, it's mentally and physically exhausting ," said Famiglietti.
The Red Cross helps fire evacuees find a temporary home
As the Blue Cut Fire grew this week, more than 80-thousand people were ordered to evacuate their homes. But where did they go?
The Red Cross organizes evacuation centers for those who are displaced, providing basic needs like a bed, three meals a day, and even works with shelters to park pets.
Larry Fortmuller is the public information officer for the Red Cross of Orange County. He has also spent the last 12 years as a volunteer for the organization. Fortmuller has worked on a slew of natural disasters in that time, including Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy.
At the Jessie Turner Community Center in Fontana, nearly 160 evacuees are currently registered. Fortmuller joins Take Two from the site, to discuss the resources in play for people who have had to leave their homes behind.
For the latest updates on the fire, click here.
Interview Highlights
What’s the scene like at the center?
We’ve found that most of the residents here have jobs. So during the day, they’re out at their jobs, and they tend to come back at 5 or 6 p.m. That’s when the community regrows at the numbers you mentioned.
Being evacuated from a fire has got to be pretty stressful. What’s the mood like for everyone, not just the people who were evacuated, but also the people helping?
It is stressful. The evacuees range from those who, perhaps have lost a home and know that, to those who are waiting to find out, to those who know their home is okay. But what the Red Cross provides, is not only nurses and a doctor who’s here. We’re also providing mental health workers to help people cope with the kind of stresses that they’re undergoing. As volunteers, we tend to work long hours. We tend to have to absorb a lot of frustration that these evacuees feel. But we’re trained well too by the Red Cross. The Red Cross does not send out “green” people and in my experience over the years, that’s pretty effective.
How are the centers used? Do people primarily just check in?
There’s a check-in station here. We try to take down some basic information. We try not to pry, of course because people deserve their privacy. But we try to know where their homes were, what the situation is, contact information. And then we urge them to use our Safe and Well system, which is an online system to register themselves and indicate to relatives and close friends that they’re okay and they’re in a Red Cross shelter. The way that works is, a relative or friend that lives across the country can go to safeandwell.communityos.org if they know the person’s home address which indicates that they are a close friend and they can get the message that’s been left behind that the evacuee is okay.
How much information do these evacuees at the center get about the property they've left behind?
That varies. This has been a fire where there’s been a lot of difficulty getting information. The containment is still relatively modest and because of that, although we do have representatives from the fire here that are prepped and ready to give that information out, so far not a lot of information has been forthcoming.
Is it too early to think about these evacuees long-term concerns?
The longer term concerns are part of the recovery that each of them has to go through. What the Red Cross provides are caseworkers. So we’ll sit down with each individual family, look at their situation. Help them with their insurance needs and any state or federal aid that might be coming their way. Along with the mental health workers we have, we seek to try to provide [evacuees] with practical information. Our job isn’t done when the shelter closes. Our job is to help people get back on their feet and take advantage of all the resources that may be available to them.
What do people with pets do? Can they show up with their pets?
Pets are welcome, but as you can imagine, other residents may have fears or allergies, etc., so we don’t actually allow them inside the shelter. However, we work with animal agencies including animal services and private and public shelters to arrange for pets. During the day, a group of our evacuees pick up their pets [from shelters] and bring them back here to the center and they can hang out outside in the shade and have a small pet community, so that’s another comfort for those folks.
You’ve worked with the Red Cross during several natural disasters during Hurricane Katrina. How does the Red Cross prepare to receive hundreds, sometimes thousands of evacuees?
That’s the beauty of the Red Cross. There’s over 400 chapters across the country with trained individuals. For example, here in San Bernardino, quite a few people [including myself] are here from Orange County to help out. . . If the fires grow, we can rely on the Los Angeles chapter, the San Diego chapter, the Southern California area and neighboring states. For something like Hurricane Katrina, we mobilized volunteers from across the country.
*This interview has been edited for clarity
'Transform America' practices preventive politics on transgender issues
In recent years, conservative groups in California have tried - twice - to put a measure on the ballot that would require people to use facilities based on assigned sex at birth.
Both efforts fell short, but that hasn't stopped transgender people living here from taking political action - just in case it happens again.
A new campaign called Transform California is now attempting to shape public opinion on the issue.
Journalist Laurel Rosenhall dubs their efforts "preventive politics".
She wrote about the group for the website "Cal Matters".
Please click on the blue player above to hear the whole interview.
How a fifth force of nature went unnoticed by physicists, until now
There are four laws of physics and nature govern everything in our world.
They are: gravity (which you may have heard of), electromagnetism (responsible for electricity and so much more), strong nuclear force that holds together nucleii, and weak nuclear force, which is nuclear decay.
Now, physicists say there may be one more. A team of physicists at the University of California, Irvine, published a theory that there may be a fifth force of nature, and they found about it almost by accident. A Martinez spoke to Tim Tait, a professor in the department of physics & astronomy, who is one of the authors of the study.
Interview highlights
This new theory came about from some data that some nuclear physicists in Hungary published last year. How did you come across it, and what made you decide to take a look at it?
What these experimental physicists in Hungary did is they produced an excited state of the beryllium nucleus. (A nucleus is a ball of protons and neutrons and...if you give it a bit of a nudge, you can actually get them moving around a little faster, and we call that an excited state of the nuclues). Eventually, it decays down into a lower energy state, the lowest one, which is called a ground state, and when it does that, it emits some kind of radiation. So what these authors did is they looked for a rare type of nuclear decay where you produce an electron and a positron, which is the anti-matter particle that corresponds to the electron. What they noticed was that the distribution of energy of the electrons that came out was very surprising for them. It had this feature that looks like a bump and this actually indicates a new particle, which could actually be a new force carrier (a particle that transmits a force). We actually found out about their paper by reading it online...and we realized that we actually could add something to the story by looking at what other experiments had told us about [what] the properties of this particle would have to be. Other experiments have also been looking for a fifth force—this search has been going on for decades—and they haven't found any until this most recent hint. So, by putting that info together (the hint that you have that there is something with the results that didn't find anything), you actually get this composite picture of what the properties of this force would be, and that's really what our contribution to this story is.
What does this mean for how physicists or scientists see the universe?
This is one result so far and now there are groups all over the world which are working to try to confirm it, and make sure that it's actually something that's there. We have no indications that there's anything wrong with our findings, but you always want to have an independent confirmation—since you're making an extraordinary claim, you need extraordinary evidence.
What it means for us physicists is that we have to go back to the standard model of particle physics, which describes electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces, and we've got to add this force into it. And, of course, there's all sorts of things we're going to learn when we do that because it's a big edifice with lots of moving parts that interact with each other, and so you can expect that adding this new force is going to change the way you think about even the parts of it you thought you already understood.
Do we even have to go back to our understanding of how the universe began?
Absolutely. This particle, if it has these properties, should be produced in the early universe and that means after the Big Bang, when the universe was a hot soup, it's part of the soup! So that could change the things we would expect to see today.
So how did this particle go all this time without being noticed?
That was actually part of our motivation. We saw this claim and we though, "well, shouldn't somebody else have seen that already?" Then, by looking into all the details of the experiment, you realize, "no, actually, there is a particle that would have escaped notice until now and been discovered by this experiment." Mostly though, the answer is because: first, it's short-range...if you're looking at macroscopic distances, it just doesn't act far enough for you to see it; and also because it's pretty weak. It's much weaker than the strong nuclear or the electromagnetic or even the weak nuclear force. It's still stronger than gravity though.
So all the brainiacs are excited—what does this mean for the average person?
I don't know yet, but I think that once you understand the basic ingredients of the universe, you put them together and you figure out what great things to build with them, but that's a job for someone else.
To hear the full interview, click the blue audio player above.
GM's Rear Seat Reminder alerts drivers to left-behind kids
It's hard to believe parents could forget their own children in the back seat of a car, but it happens more often than you think.
Heatstroke is the leading cause of non-crash, vehicle-related deaths for children, according to the web site, SafeKids.org. Every eight days, a child dies from heatstroke in a vehicle.
"In So Cal, and really all over the country, this is something we need to think about all the time," said Kristen Rubi, West coast spokeswoman for the auto maker, GMC, which has introduced the industry's first alert system to notify drivers of objects left in the back seat. "Even on a temperate day, it only takes a few minutes for a car to reach really dangerous temperatures."
According to the Los Angeles Police Department, a car parked in an outdoor temperature of 80 degrees rises to a temperature of 123 degrees in just 60 minutes.
Introduced on the seven-seat SUV, the 2017 GMC Acadia, Rear Seat Reminder is activated when a rear seat door is opened and the car's engine is then turned on. When the car's ignition is turned off again, it dings five times and a message appears on the dashboard that reads: "Rear seat reminder. Look in rear seat."
The technology was devised as a response to children's heatstroke deaths in cars. Babies and young kids often sleep so soundly that drivers may forget they're in the back seat; parents are also sometimes tempted to leave a baby alone in a car while they shop, according to SafeKids.org.
Sue Carpenter is co-host of The Ride, Southern California Public Radio's series on modern mobility.
The 22 push up challenge: why fitness challenges appeal to the masses
If you've been online recently, you may have come across a video like this:
#22PushupChallenge @ChrisEvans @Miles_Teller @rise_movement @prattprattpratt #Veterans #NeverStopSayingThankYou pic.twitter.com/81JS7Z6joS
— John Krasinski (@johnkrasinski) August 15, 2016
That's actor John Krasinski taking on the 22 push up challenge. The actor posted a video of himself doing 22 push up, then challenged fellow actors like Chris Evans to do the same. The challenge has been making the rounds for some time now.
A group called 22-Kill is hopeful that the fitness challenge will help raise awareness about mental health issues in the military. One study, though controversial, estimates that 22 veterans commit suicide each day, hence the 22 push-ups.
It's part of a bigger trend of fitness challenges - where participants rely on social media, the internet and most of all, the tactic of accountability to achieve their goals.
For more on this strategy, we turn now to Michael Stanwyck - he's the creator of a challenge that started here in LA and has now grown to six continents and nearly 80,000 participants.
Interview Highlights
What do you see as the biggest challenge or stumbling block to achieving fitness goals?
"I think probably, the biggest stumbling block I've seen and I've been doing something like this for about 10 years, is that people's goals are way too big, they're way too big. And it's not that they shouldn't have some goals far out in the future but being able to have something that's small and it's bite size...the 22 push ups, it's a very small goal and as fitness challenges go and no disrespect to the challenge, it's as much about fitness as the ALS challenge was about cooling off. It's an awareness piece and the thing that may work about it is that it is a very small bite, you know, you can do it. And I think anything that gets people into the idea that they can do it is a really good entry point to fitness."
I just want to say for the record, I was actually challenged by a vet, to do this at my gym, who got up in front of our class and said 'Hey, there's this thing will you do it with me,' and it's really hard to say to a vet, 'Hey I'm not going to do this to help you raise awareness,' but then you start posting videos and people see it and there's this certain group atmosphere to it that I feel like is maybe a better incentive than something that's more isolated.
"Absolutely, what we do, the whole life challenge is very team oriented. We do have people who participate on their own but we encourage everybody to do it, either with their family, with their friends, with their workplace because that social accountability is really important. And I think social media can be really tricky, cause there's kind of that social pressure versus social accountability and going into why you're actually doing something and having to put yourself out there to prove something...it's just a fine line people have to walk between doing them for themselves and doing it for social approval."
The 22 push up challenge that I did, it's 22 push ups for 22 days, we actually started this back in March and we're still doing it, my little group, cause it was really hard to stop and we really like it...your challenge the whole life challenge it's a little bit more complicated, can you give us the down and dirty quick version of how it works.
"Absolutely. So, it's an immersive challenge. It really is about your entire life, but like I said, we don't really believe in really big hairy audacious goals. We like people to have entry points to what we call the seven daily habits which are nutrition, exercise, mobilization which some people might think of as stretching, sleep, water, various lifestyle practices, things that introduce you to destressing activities like gratitude and meditation and finally a daily reflection. The thing about each category is the requirements for fulfillment are actually quite small. While we don't really care what it is that you do for exercise, whatever you consider exercise, is your exercise for the day as long as you do something for 10 minutes. The nutrition aspect is not strict, it's not a paleo diet, it's nothing like that. We do have levels that people can buy in at, some very introductory like no bread, no cheese, no pasta, no soda, no beer and some much more stringent like paleo. And you score yourself every day based on whether you did the exercise: yes or no. Whether you did the stretching: yes or no. Whether you incorporated lifestyle practice: yes or no."
To hear the full interview, click the blue play button above.
State of Affairs: Drug prices, cap-and-trade, and gun control
On this week's State of Affairs, a drug price transparency bill stalls, a cap-and-trade extension falters, and a challenge to CA's new gun laws.
Joining Take Two to discuss:
- , Capital Public Radio's Capitol Bureau Chief
- , Professor Emeritus of Political Science at San Jose State University
New Netflix documentary shows 'other side' of Steve Aoki
Before the sheet cakes and champagne showers, DJ and musician Steve Aoki had long been building his own empire.
His love of music was born during his college days at UC Santa Barbara. He majored in women's studies and sociology, but he also kept himself busy by starting his own record label, Dim Mak.
After igniting the EDM scene about 10 years ago, he's gone on to nab a Grammy nomination, start his own line of eye wear, and reign over his own compound in Ibiza.
But a new Netflix documentary is revealing another side of Steve Aoki, says filmmaker Justin Krook. "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" takes viewers into Aoki's family life, and shows how his famous father's spotlight motivated Aoki to step into his own.
NOTE: Video contains strong language
"I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" debuts Friday on Netflix. Krook joined Take Two's Alex Cohen to tell more about the project.
Interview Highlights
How Krook linked up with Steve Aoki
"It's kind of a random story, actually. My business partner had directed a documentary called 'Jiro Dreams of Sushi,' which was a documentary about this sushi chef in Japan. We had gotten a call at the office one day from Steve's manager, and he said Steve had seen this film, he really connected with it. I had known of Steve, of his label. I had seen his shows before. I said, 'Steve connected with this movie? What's the deal?' So we flew out to Miami, we had met him, and after talking, he really connected with the father-son story in this sushi documentary. I got to meet his family, and saw this other side of Steve that I don't think anyone knew existed outside of his inner circle. And so when we kind of started delving into that story I said, there's an interesting film here beyond the caking and the rafting and his very capricious kind of nature. There was a really deeper back story to it."
About Rocky Aoki, Steve's father and founder of the Benihana Restaurant chain:
"He was an off-shore boat racer, he set world-records hot air ballooning. He flew a hot air balloon from Japan to San Francisco, which is a totally normal thing to do (laughs). He was a total wild man, and everything he did kind of drove back to his Benihana brand. The balloon would have Benihana written on the side, the off-shore boats would have Benihana written on the side. And Steve's kind of the same way. He has his label, Dim Mak, all these things he does outside of playing shows, he has a full-time videographer that travels around with him. He has a constant social media presence. In a lot of ways, he kind of is his dad."
Did Steve ever get the fatherly-approval he sought his whole life?
"I think his dad, from my conversations with him (Steve) even outside the film, his dad could kind of see it (Steve's success) coming, so I hope Steve has a little bit of closure there, for his own sake. But talking to his whole family, the biggest regret is that he didn't get to see his (success). Because where he is today is much different than where he even was when we started the film. We've been shooting this for three and a half years, and I've kind of watched his star rise further along there. It's kind of a bittersweet story but I hope he found some closure there."
What might the future hold for Steve Aoki?
"Steve's a chameleon. He's reinvented himself so many times. He started as a label A&R guy. He started in hardcore bands, and then he moved to indie rock with Bloc Party and signing The Kills. And then he again reinvented himself into a DJ — almost somewhat miraculously — and then pivoted from this kind of electro-sound he was doing to this more mainstream sound. So there's no chance that Steve won't reinvent himself again whenever the touring, 250 shows a year dries up. Because it eventually, it can't last forever. But he's a very astute businessman, which I don't think a lot of people know, and with that work ethic, there's no stopping him."
Reading by Moonlight: Ron Arias, Rafael Cardenas and more
You might have seen the full moon of August on Wednesday night — otherwise known as the Full Sturgeon moon. That's because some Native American tribes believe now marks the time when such fish can most easily be caught.
David Kipen can't help you catch fish, but he can help you catch some of the best books and literary events out there. Here are a few of his highlights:
- The Last Bookstore in downtown L.A. is commemorating the second issue of Angels Flight Literary West. The event will feature appearances from writers including Chris Morris and Deann Stillman. Click here for more information.
- Local writer Ron Arias grew up near Frogtown and went on to write "Road to Tamazunchale." "It's hard to find copies, but a joy when you do," Kipen said. Arias then embarked on 20-year career as journalist. His latest work, "The Wetback and Other Stories" debuts in September.
- Boyle Heights artist Rafael Cardenas has a new book out. "Mas Aca" is a collection of mostly black and white photographs that captures various scenes from the city.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue audio player above.