James' World 2

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The Los Angeles area has been at the mercy of fire and wind this month, and this weekend a third element will join the mix: water.

Rain is forecast to begin as soon as Saturday afternoon and to continue as late as Monday evening, says meteorologist Kristan Lund of the National Weather Service’s Los Angeles office. The area desperately needs the precipitation, but experts are warily monitoring the situation because rain poses its own risks in recently burned areas—most notably the potential occurrence of mudslides and similar hazards.

“Rain is good because we’ve been so dry,” Lund says. “However, if we get heavier rain rates or we get the thunderstorms, it’s actually a lot more dangerous because you can get debris flows.”

Fires do a couple of different things to the landscape that can increase the risk of burned material, soil, and detritus hurtling out of control.

When fires burn hot or long enough, they leave an invisible layer of waxy material just under the surface of the ground. This develops from decomposing leaves and other organic material, which contain naturally hydrophobic or water-repellent compounds. Fire can vaporize this litter, and the resulting gas seeps into the upper soil—where it quickly cools and condenses, forming the slippery layer.

When rain falls on ground that has been affected by this phenomenon, it can’t sink beyond the hydrophobic layer—so the water flows away, often hauling debris with it. “All of the trees, branches, everything that’s been burned—unfortunately, if it rains, that stuff just floats,” Lund says. “It’s really concerning.”

Even a fire that isn’t severe enough to create a hydrophobic layer can still cause to debris flows, says Danielle Touma, a climate scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. Under normal conditions, trees and other plants usually trap some rain above the surface, slowing the water’s downward journey. But on freshly burned land there’s much less greenery to interfere; all the rain immediately hits the ground.

And whereas healthy vegetation holds soil together with its roots, fires can easily burn off the fine roots that do most of that work. “So then you have all this loose soil that can be transported by water as well,” Touma says.

This month the three largest Los Angeles–area fires have created nearly 50,000 acres of fresh burn scar, Lund notes, and some of that scar is in mountainous terrain that facilitates mudslides. Current forecasts suggest the rain will mostly fall below the rate of a quarter-inch per hour—below the intensity that tends to increase the risk of debris flows, Lund says. But this weekend the region does face a 10 to 20 percent chance of thunderstorms, which can cause short bursts of rain that may be heavy enough to trigger flows.

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The first time you hear about the newborn scrunch, you may not know exactly what the phrase refers to. But once you see it, you’ll remember it in your very bones: When you scoop up a newborn, they tend to bunch up their little legs and curl their arms inward, and often lay on Mom or Dad’s chest froggy style too. So, why do babies do the newborn scrunch? This adorable little movement is just a remnant from their time in the womb, and is something they’ll grow out of eventually (*sob*).

While it’s not clear exactly when the term “newborn scrunch” came about, it’s definitely taking hold — the hashtag #newbornscrunch has more than 700 million views on TikTok alone. (Its many misspellings and typos have hundreds of thousands of views too.) Watch one video and you’ll see why. Parents are capturing their baby’s scrunches to share with the world — lifting them out of the car seat, and we all get to sigh at how cute their bunched up arms and legs look. The scrunch also happens when babies are resting on their bellies during tummy time or on a parent’s chest. For parents of older kids, these videos are wistful reminders of those very first days with their own babies, all cozy, scrunch-y, and perfect.

Why do babies do the newborn scrunch?

Basically, they’ve been balled up in the womb their whole lives so far. So, the newborn scrunch feels comfy and familiar, and they just have to figure out they have room to stretch now, experts say.

“This scrunch [is a] physiological movement that imitates what has been happening starting in the womb, where you are kind of scrunched in that uterus, and exiting out into the real world,” says Dr. Nicola Chin, M.D., Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics at the Morehouse School of Medicine. “Babies are acclimating to the real world now. They’ve been released from this warm fetal position and they are saying, ‘Hmm, what am I supposed to do?’”

“It’s very common for newborns to have that instinctual feeling of going into a position of comfort, a position that protects them in some ways from the outside world, which can be very stimulating, especially in those very first weeks of life and the new noises and those things. So, it lets them pull into themselves and feel safe and protected, especially when being picked up by caretakers,” explains Dr. Jenna Wheeler, M.D., pediatrician at Orlando Health Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children.

How long do babies do the newborn scrunch?

So, how long will they have this adorable habit? Not long enough for the parents who love it. “Around the 6-week point they seem to be a little bit more comfortable in their environment, they’re more comfortable being held and with the noises around them, and they start to stretch their arms and legs out a little bit more,” says Wheeler.

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As the bird flu outbreak affecting poultry, dairy cows, and humans in the U.S. continues to make headlines, here’s what to know about the situation as of January 23.

Human Cases

The U.S. reported its first human case of H5N1 avian influenza in two years in April 2024. Since then the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported a total of 67 confirmed human cases. The first U.S. death from bird flu was announced earlier this month in Louisiana, but most human cases in the country have remained quite mild.

The CDC maintains that there is no evidence of spread between humans. Most people with avian influenza have been infected through exposure to sick dairy cows or poultry. Cows with bird flu shed large amounts of the H5N1 virus in their milk, although pasteurization has been confirmed to kill the virus, leaving the commercial milk supply safe to drink. (Raw milk is not safe.) Poultry workers have been infected mainly through culling operations. The source of a few human infections remains difficult to pin down.

Poultry Cases

Bird flu continues to spread among commercial and backyard poultry. As of January 23, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that there were 98 infected flocks within the past 30 days, with more than 15 million birds affected. Avian influenza is so contagious and deadly in poultry that the entire flock is culled as soon as the presence of the virus is confirmed. Since the bird flu outbreak began in February 2022, more than 140 million birds have been infected or proactively culled.

Recent infections among poultry include two large commercial chicken farms in Georgia, which is a key source of so-called broilers raised for meat. Maryland and Virginia have also reported recent cases at broiler facilities, while Missouri has confirmed bird flu infections at an egg farm. And health officials in New York State announced a massive outbreak at a duck farm on Long Island. With bird flu cases increasing, egg prices are rising fast. Fortunately, although eggs can carry a host of infections and should never be eaten raw, people are unlikely to catch bird flu from commercial chicken eggs.

Cat Cases

There has also been a spate of recent bird flu detections in domestic cats. Positive samples were gathered in January in California, Kansas, Louisiana, and Iowa, and several more cases from last December were also confirmed this month. Less information is typically available in these cases, and there are several ways cats can catch bird flu: Those on dairy farms have been particularly vulnerable; such cats likely become infected by drinking milk from sick cows. But outdoor cats can also catch avian influenza from wild birds. And indoor cats can be exposed to the virus through raw milk and raw food. Recognizing this last threat, on January 17 the Food and Drug Administration ordered manufacturers of raw pet food to update their food safety plans to include H5N1.

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As soon as I quit my job — a decision I made unexpectedly when my son was 8 weeks old — I began to encounter headlines that attempted to quantify my new role. “If SAHMs were paid, their salary would be $184K/year,” went a typical one. My son will be 4 on his next birthday, and in my travels across the Internet, I still come across that number at least monthly. It’s a sum that far exceeds any salary I made, but it seemed especially irrelevant once I was doing what felt like both the most relentless and high stakes work of my life. What was the point in knowing my worth in theory, when it was accompanied by nothing material?

That fantasy six-figures appears, too, early on in The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids — And Come Back Stronger Than Ever by Neha Ruch, founder of the website (and popular Instagram account) Mother Untitled. When she invokes the number, it is to point out that, in her words, “Our work inside the home is critically important and valuable, yet few mothers I’ve met feel like a revered six-figure-earner during their career pauses.” Ruch’s mission is to change that. The Stanford MBA and former brand strategist’s current project, launched after leaving her corporate career following the birth of her kids, is to rebrand stay-at-home motherhood.

It is, perhaps, a role that could use some sprucing up. A perusal of any relevant online comment section, as well as plenty of IRL conversations, will tell you that opinion is split on whether the 21st century SAHM is a pitiable or a privileged figure (neither is a positive assessment). Ruch situates herself in the Lean In, girlboss era, but the stay-at-home mother faced disdain and condescension long before Sheryl Sandberg. It doesn’t help that the role as we conceive of it is largely mythological: In the history that Ruch starts the book off with, she shows how the postwar stay-at-home mother of the popular imagination was a historical aberration that became cemented in our minds thanks to the concurrent invention of television. When people picture the kind of mom who stays home, they’re picturing June Cleaver. When her work is done, Ruch hopes we might instead imagine a striving, multi-hyphenate woman whose years at home don’t condemn her to stagnant invisibility but take her somewhere even better — someone a bit like herself.

Ruch is threading a difficult needle at a time when tradwives dominate media attention and real political energy is aimed at reducing the choices women have gained over the last century. To distance herself from such currents, Ruch identifies her project as a feminist one and repeats the phrase “modern and ambitious” like an incantation against all that. She also sidesteps the mommy wars entirely: “Staying home with your kids isn’t a virtue, and neither is working,” she writes, and notes that “research shows that a parent’s career status has no bearing on the happiness levels of their children.” Instead, her focus is on what a career pause — her reimagining of the dreaded “employment gap” — might mean to the person taking it.

It’s a somewhat surprising book: self-help for people in a stage of life in which selfhood may feel secondary, a professional development manual for those out of a profession.

Midway through the book, Ruch recounts a remark by her husband. though it’s something anyone parenting full time has probably heard before, about how he could never do what she does. This is a comment she has come to understand, she writes, “as a ‘polite’ way of saying, ‘I’m just too complex for at-home parenthood. I need the challenge of work to stay fulfilled.’” Her resistance to this extremely common characterization evades its usual forms — unsubstantiated claims about the negative impacts of day care, lists of a million supermom accomplishments, or conservative talking points — and instead rests on a conceit I haven’t seen articulated elsewhere so clearly. It’s the idea that full-time caregiving can offer an immersive period of personal growth and that this alone might be reason enough to embark on it, if you can swing it.

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Plastics floating in a massive “garbage patch” in the Pacific Ocean are home to strange new mixes of coastal and marine species that might increase the odds of biological invasions wreaking havoc on nearby ecosystems.

Scientists have long known that critters such as worms, crustaceans and mollusks could make their home on plastic debris. Animals have even crossed the Pacific Ocean on these makeshift rafts after a devastating tsunami struck Japan in 2011. But new research published on April 17 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution adds two details that could be concerning for existing ecosystems. First, it finds that plastic is providing a home for coastal species to thrive in the open ocean thousands of miles from shore. Second, some of these species are reproducing despite the alien environment.

“It’s probably one of the least-known environments, the sea surface,” says Martin Thiel, a marine biologist at Catholic University of the North in Chile, who was not involved in the new research. “It’s a very, very particular community that we are disturbing now at a massive scale.”

For the new study, researchers identified species living on just more than 100 pieces of plastic that were fished out of the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a region in the northern Pacific Ocean where currents converge to deposit an estimated 79,000 metric tons of plastic debris. The scientists identified 484 invertebrates from a surprising range of species on the plastic. Many of these animals were species that are more commonly found near coastlines of the western Pacific. These coastal species included “moss animals” or bryozoans, jellyfish, sponges, worms, and other organisms.

“I just remember the first time [study co-author] Jim [Carlton of Williams

College and Mystic Seaport Museum] and I pulled out a piece of plastic and saw the level of coastal species present, we were just blown away,” says Linsey Haram, lead author of the study. Haram, who was a research associate with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center during the study, specializes in marine ecology.

Nearly all the debris hosted pelagic, or open-ocean, species—which makes sense considering that weathering on much of the plastic suggested it had spent several years at sea. But all told, about 70 percent of the debris the researchers analyzed carried at least one species usually found in coastal waters—a much higher tally than Haram and her colleagues expected going into the work, she says.

And as they looked closer, the scientists found that some two thirds of the debris pieces were home to coastal and open-ocean species living side by side. Plastic isn’t just carrying coastal species out to sea; it’s also creating unnatural neighborhoods that the researchers call “neopelagic communities.”

“What’s new, the ‘neo’ part of that, is that we now—likely because of plastics—are seeing coastal species and these native pelagic species together, interacting quite frequently on debris,” Haram says. “We’re essentially creating new communities in the open ocean.”

And these unnatural communities may come at a cost for traditional open-ocean residents that are used to living on natural debris, she adds, because coastal creatures could be competing for space and food or could even be eating their neighbors.

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