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Firefighters in southern California are battling the Palisades and Eaton Fires, which have killed at least 25 people, burning a cumulative 37,700 acres and at least 12,000 structures. The plumes of smoke are even visible from space.

Residents of many fire-prone areas—as well as those far downwind—have grown familiar with the orange, apocalyptic haze of wildfire smoke as these blazes have become more common because of climate change. Such smoke can contain an unpredictable cocktail of chemicals associated with heart and lung diseases and even cancer, which is the leading cause of death among firefighters. Here’s what makes wildfire smoke so dangerous.

No Ordinary Pollutant

When trees, shrubbery, and other organic matter burn, they release carbon dioxide, water, heat—and, depending on the available fuel, various volatile compounds, gaseous pollutants, and particulate matter. Those tiny particles, which become suspended in the air, can include soot (black carbon), metals, dust, and more. If they’re smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter, they can evade our body’s natural defenses when inhaled, penetrating deep into the lungs and triggering a wide variety of health problems.

Such fine particulate matter is a common pollutant; it’s also created by motor vehicles and industrial plants, for example. But the kind present in wildfire smoke might be even more dangerous. Researchers studying health outcomes in southern California concluded that exposure to particular matter smaller than 2.5 microns, called PM_2.5, from wildfires was up to 10 times more harmful to human health compared with exposure to PM_2.5 from other sources. The researchers estimated that wildfire-generated particulate matter was three to four times more toxic—but they don’t yet know why.

More Dangerous Fuel

As humans develop ever more land, we grow the number of points of contact between human settlements and increasingly flammable forests. This makes it more likely that an errant, human-caused spark will ignite a blaze—and that the resulting wildfire will consume homes, offices, cars, and other human-made infrastructure, expanding the types and amounts of toxic compounds going up in the smoke. Paints, sealants, insulations, metals, and more can release many kinds of volatile organic compounds, gaseous pollutants and particulate matter.

A 2023 study by researchers at the Environmental Protection Agency found that emission factors for some toxic compounds were more than 1,000 times higher in urban wildfires than in fires that burned in woodland areas.

Unpredictable Chemistry

It’s surprisingly hard to predict what compounds someone is exposed to when they inhale wildfire smoke. What’s in the smoke depends on a few factors: what was burned (a ponderosa pine, for example, or a car), the temperature at which it burned (was it flaming or smoldering?), and how far and for how long the smoke has traveled. As the smoke ages, it is exposed to sunlight. This radiation can hit nitrogen oxides (NO_x) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), setting off a complex set of reactions that usually results in another secondary pollutant: ozone, the main component of smog, which can damage the lungs.

And as smoke containing VOCs travels and settles over other cities, it can mix with even more local pollution in the form of NO_x—giving it the opportunity to form a larger amount of ozone. Research also suggests that VOCs and particulate matter—each of which can be toxic—can combine to make their respective health risks even worse.

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Archaeologists have excavated an intricately carved and painted tomb in northern Egypt, and they think the 4,100-year-old burial chamber belonged to a prominent, multi-talented royal doctor: a physician who served ancient Egyptian kings as an expert in medicinal plants, dentistry and venomous bites.

A team of French and Swiss researchers discovered the tomb in Saqqara, the necropolis of the ancient capital city of Memphis, according to a statement from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

“This incredible find adds to Saqqara’s rich legacy as one of Egypt’s most significant archaeological sites,” writes the ministry. “The tomb is adorned with stunning carvings and vibrant artwork, including a beautifully painted false door and scenes of funerary offerings.”

Inside the tomb, researchers found a stone sarcophagus bearing the name “Tetinebefou” in hieroglyphics. The inscriptions also indicate that he was the chief palace physician, priest, chief dentist, director of medicinal plants and conjurer of the goddess Serket—an Egyptian deity known for curing venomous snake and scorpion bites.

The doctor may have served under Pepi II, a pharaoh of ancient Egypt’s Old Kingdom around the 23rd century B.C.E. He was crowned as a child and retained the throne for 60 to 90 years. When he died, he too was buried in Saqqara, entombed in a pyramid.

The Saqqara necropolis has been extensively looted over the millennia, according to a translated blog post from the researchers. They found only small fragments of funerary materials, but the painted walls alone made the discovery “exceptional.” As Live Science’s Owen Jarus reports, the paintings actually depict objects that the doctor might have used, such as jars and vases.

The doctor’s title of “conjurer of the goddess Serket” means he was “a specialist in poisonous bites,” as research team leader Philippe Collombert, an Egyptologist at the University of Geneva, tells Live Science. The other titles on the sarcophagus are quite rare: “Director of medicinal plants” has only been found on one other ancient Egyptian artifact, and “chief dentist” is also very unusual, Collombert says.

“Evidence for ancient Egyptian ‘dentists’ is exceedingly scarce,” as Roger Forshaw, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester who wasn’t involved in the research, tells Live Science.

The ancient Egyptians are known for their advances in medical science, and they possessed extensive knowledge of human anatomy. Thousands of years ago, they were treating brain cancer via surgery, diagnosing the condition now known as diabetes, and building prosthetics.

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The tomb’s walls are painted and carved with images of objects the doctor might have used. Franco-Swiss Archaeological Mission of Saqqara

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Theoretical physicists have proposed the existence of a new type of particle that doesn’t fit into the conventional classifications of fermions and bosons. Their ‘paraparticle’, described in Nature on January 8, is not the first to be suggested, but the detailed mathematical model characterizing it could lead to experiments in which it is created using a quantum computer. The research also suggests that undiscovered elementary paraparticles might exist in nature.

In a separate development published late last year in Science, physicists experimentally demonstrated another kind of particle that is neither a boson nor a fermion — an ‘anyon’ — in a virtual one-dimensional universe for the first time. Anyons had previously been created only in 2D systems.

Because of their unusual behaviour, both paraparticles and anyons could one day play a part in making quantum computers less error-prone.

Particle properties

Around the time when physicists began to understand the structure of atoms, a century ago, Austrian-born theorist Wolfgang Pauli suggested that no two electrons can occupy the same state — and that if two electrons are pushed close to being in the same state, a repulsive force arises between them. This ‘Pauli exclusion principle’ is crucial to the way electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus arrange themselves in shells, instead of all falling to the lowest possible energy state.

Pauli and others soon realized that this empirical rule of exclusion applied not only to electrons but to a broader class of particles, including protons and neutrons, which they called fermions. Conversely, particles that do like to share the same state — which include the photons in a laser beam, for example — became known as bosons. (Pauli and his collaborators also worked out why being a fermion or a boson appeared to relate to a particle’s intrinsic angular momentum, or ‘spin’.)

Mathematically, the fundamental property of fermions is that when two of them switch positions, the ‘wavefunction’ that represents their collective quantum state changes sign, meaning that it gets multiplied by –1. For bosons, the wavefunction remains unaltered. Early quantum theorists knew that, in principle, there could be other kinds of particle whose wavefunctions changed in more complicated ways when they swapped positions. In the 1970s, researchers discovered anyons, which can exist only in universes of one or two dimensions.

Physicists Zhiyuan Wang, now at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and Kaden Hazzard at Rice University in Houston, Texas, have now constructed a model for paraparticles that can exist in any number of dimensions — and with properties that are different from those of either fermions or bosons. In particular, these paraparticles obey their own type of Pauli exclusion. “It’s not entirely surprising that it’s possible,” says Kasia Rejzner, a mathematical physicist at the University of York, UK. “But it’s still cool.”

Wang says he came up with the exotic swapping rules by chance in 2021 while doing his PhD. “It was the most exciting moment in my life,” he says. Wang adds that it should be possible — although challenging — to realize these paraparticle states on a quantum computer.

1D anyons

Paraparticles share a property with fermions: swapping two particles and then swapping them back restores them to their original state. Anyons generally have a different quantum state even after being restored to their original positions, so they are not classed as paraparticles.

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It was well before dawn when I set off on foot through Granada’s oldest neighborhood, El Albaicín, an intricate brocade of cobbled streets overhung with fragrant jasmine trees. The first glow of sunlight revealed the titanic walls and turrets of the palace-fortress complex called the Alhambra looming above me on a spectacular crag. Poets have rhapsodized about the structure’s fairytale beauty since the finest craftsmen of the Arab world built it nearly 800 years ago. For over two centuries in the Middle Ages, it was the crown jewel of the Emirate of Granada, which stretched across Spain’s Mediterranean coast from modern-day Gibraltar past the snowcapped Sierra Nevada.

After crossing a stone bridge over the River Darro, I took a little-known back route into the palace called Cuesta del Rey Chico, a steep foot trail squeezed into a leafy ravine where the only sound was the water cascading from antique terra-cotta pipes. By now, the morning sunlight was making the Alhambra live up to its original name, al-Qal’ah al-Hamra, “the red fort.” An ornate archway led into the complex itself, an array of palaces and gardens covering 35 acres. The most famous site is the Nasrid Palace, named after the ruling dynasty. On my first visit, I had hardly known where to rest my eyes as I wandered its gorgeous chambers adorned with latticework and geometric patterns, its elegantly proportioned courtyards with burbling fountains, and the surrounding rose and orange gardens. Its interior walls are covered floor to ceiling with carved script in classical Arabic, which scholars have translated as praise for Allah, snippets of poetry and celebrations of the Nasrid rulers.

But on this morning’s visit, I was heading for a more mysterious world: the Alhambra’s secret network of underground tunnels and chambers.

At least, that was my hope. The Alhambra is the most popular attraction in Spain, drawing over two million visitors annually. It’s also one of the most strictly controlled thanks to its status as an Islamic outpost seized by Christians, which still has political overtones more than five centuries later. Gaining permission to visit its off-limits subterranean sections had been challenging. After emailing palace officials for weeks without response, I had already arrived in Granada when they bluntly denied my request. But then, suddenly, they reversed track. I received an urgent phone call: I had been approved to visit at 9 the next morning.

After reporting at a special office to fill out a string of forms, I cooled my heels for a half-hour in the company of an affable security guard named Jaime, who was wearing an earpiece, aviator sunglasses, and a black blazer with a green “A” sewn onto his lapel. Finally, Ignacio Martín-Lagos, a conservation officer, arrived and declared that he would be my Virgil to the palace’s subterráneo, a dimension of the complex that he said holds a special fascination for him. “The artistic beauty of the Alhambra aboveground is undeniable,” Martín-Lagos said in Spanish as we hopped over a metal barrier and walked along the fortress’s defensive walls. “But the most surprising thing is what lies below. It was really two structures. Only if you explore its subterranean levels can you grasp the palace’s true dimensions and understand how its day-to-day life really functioned.”

After passing a 40-foot drop without guardrails, which was not for the vertiginous, we arrived at the Torre de las Gallinas, or Tower of the Hens, where Martín-Lagos fished from his pocket a thin, six-inch-long master key. “You’re going to pass through the entire palace, but underground,” he said. After shouldering open a portal, he used his smartphone flashlight to guide us down worn stone steps into a labyrinth of tunnels and chambers once used by guards and staff. They were chilly, claustrophobic, and, when Martín-Lagos turned off the light, sepulchral. But the underground was once teeming with activity, he said. “The Alhambra was a palace-city. As well as soldiers, it had about a thousand civilian inhabitants to serve the royal family—cooks, bakers, cleaners—who could go back and forth down here, without bothering the sultan. You need to have a double perspective: the ornamental world above versus the practical world below.”

I began to realize that the Alhambra most visitors see, like the Palace of Versailles and the great British manor houses, required an elaborate hidden support system. The upstairs palace offered exquisite luxury, where the sultan lounged on silk pillows and ate slices of oranges and honey cakes. Downstairs was penumbral darkness broken by flickering torches, where the staff toiled unseen to seamlessly maintain the opulence. The security purpose of the tunnels was also crucial, Martín-Lagos added, pointing up at the ceiling. We were under the room where the sultan held his audiences. “Squadrons of soldiers were lined up here, ready to rush upstairs at a moment’s notice.” Nearby was a stairway that had only been discovered after a 1907 landslide, with 200 steps descending to a door hidden in the fortress walls. We then ascended and opened a trapdoor to a bell-shaped chamber with walls of raw stone that had been converted from a grain silo to a dungeon. (Prisoners were lowered 20 feet from the surface by rope, so it was impossible to escape.)

The grand finale was Martín-Lagos’ favorite site. As travelers at an outdoor café in a palace courtyard snapped photographs, he unlocked two panels of a metal trapdoor in the ground and heaved them open, sending up clouds of dust. “Take care!” he said, now pointing a hefty light down a tight spiral staircase. “Take lots of care!” The electric beams cut through the darkness to reveal a vast cistern, including an ancient bucket suspended by a rope and encrusted with skeletal algae. “The major problem of the Alhambra was water,” Martín-Lagos whispered in awe. “Enormous cisterns were needed to supply the palace and its huge staff.” According to Martín-Lagos, the German traveler Hieronymus Münzer saw this cavern in 1494 and declared that it was bigger than the cathedral in his home city. “We all know that the finest engineers in history were the Romans,” he said. “That’s undeniable. But we must acknowledge the technical skill of the Spanish Muslims.”

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Agua Amarga (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

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