Science
A truce appears in the ‘Hands Off Our Yards’ wildfire landscaping wars
Sacramento officials came to Southern California this week for the first public meeting since they issued new proposed rules on how people in fire-prone neighborhoods will be allowed to landscape their yards.
In contrast to prior proposals from the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, many who attended were … OK with this one.
“It is a reasonable compromise,” Beth Burnam, who holds leadership positions in multiple local environmental and fire safety organizations, told the board. “Do I like everything? No. Can I live with it? Yes.”
Under the proposal, residents would not be allowed to plant anything within a 1-foot “Safety Zone” around the home, including beneath roof overhangs; two feet from windows, vents and doors and five feet from decks. Elsewhere within a 5-foot buffer around the home, known as “Zone Zero,” grass and dispersed plants up to 18 inches tall would be permissible.
Trees would also be allowed, but would need to be trimmed away from walls and roofs, and residents could install only noncombustible fencing against the house. Any sheds in the zone would need a noncombustible exterior.
The response has been a far cry from the blue “HANDS OFF OUR YARDS!” signs that multiplied across Los Angeles foothill neighborhoods last year as the board began developing the rules in earnest.
Zone Zero is just one layer in a home’s fire defenses. In fire-prone areas, Cal Fire and local fire departments already enforce defensible space rules, and building codes require home hardening like covering vents with mesh to prevent embers from entering the house. The more measures residents stack together, the safer the home.
Once the state finalizes the Zone Zero rules, they could take effect as early as July 7. Residents will have up to five years to comply with the stricter Safety Zone requirements and bigger lifts, like updating sheds. They will have three years to comply with the plant spacing requirements for the rest of Zone Zero. New construction will have to comply immediately.
The fiercest subject of debate has been around whether to allow plants if they are well-watered. Many fire officials have argued that residents should have to remove all plants, because anything that can burn, will burn. Some ecologists argue that residents should be able to keep green plants they say do not pose a major fire threat and bring a plethora of benefits, including bolstering the urban ecosystem.
This proposal was a compromise. It provides extra fire protection via strict plant prohibitions nearest the house, yet flexibility for landscaping elsewhere in Zone Zero.
Those still not in love with the state’s proposal have found solace in a section that allows local governments to create their own version of Zone Zero, as long as it’s at least as protective against fire as state rules.
James Gillespie, Newport Beach fire marshal and president of the fire marshal section of the California Fire Chiefs Assn., said he hoped that local variations would embolden cities to adopt a stricter and more protective 5-foot buffer devoid of vegetation — which Berkeley has already done.
The city of Los Angeles is in the process of creating its own Zone Zero regulations. Some Angelenos, like David Lefkowith, president of the Mandeville Canyon Assn., hope it will be more accepting of fire-resistant native species and emphasize less expensive home hardening measures.
Yet, some concerns remain. After months of residents asking the board to provide estimated costs to homeowners, it finally did. Officials insist some requirements won’t cost anything. The combined requirements, with shed upgrades and significant landscaping, they said, could cost north of $4,500 for some homeowners.
These estimates — which one attendee described as “cute” — prompted audible scoffs in the room.
One online commenter said he’s been quoted around $13,000 to comply with Berkeley’s stricter version of Zone Zero.
Lefkowith encouraged the board to do a deeper analysis of the costs, based on real-world data from early adopters. For others, seeing the estimate for the first time raised questions about how the state will help homeowners comply.
Tony Andersen, the board’s executive officer, said the board will do “everything we can to make this affordable” and work with state agencies and fire safety organizations during the five-year adoption period to develop a “one-stop shop” for folks to find financial support and local organizations that can help them navigate the rules and complete the work.
In the end, it may not be these rules that govern many Californians’ decisions in fire-prone areas, because insurance companies set their own requirements. They can require property owners to remove significantly more plants and other flammable material to qualify for lower rates or any insurance at all. Insurance professionals at the meeting in Calabasas said as much.
“This is about insurability,” Laura Blaul, a senior wildfire fellow for the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, told the board. Blaul pointed to fire survivors in L.A. County who are already choosing the stricter buffer: “Homeowners are not just rebuilding to be safer; they are rebuilding to remain insurable.”
new video loaded: Scientists Solve ‘Golden Orb’ Mystery
transcript
transcript
Scientists Solve ‘Golden Orb’ Mystery
After more than two years of investigation, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have identified an unknown creature dubbed the “golden orb.” The orb perplexed researchers and enthusiasts of the deep sea around the world after it was found in 2023 near Alaska.
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“I don’t know what to make of that.” “Yeah, let’s give it a little tickle.” “Ooh — soft.”
By Alisa Shodiyev Kaff
April 24, 2026
NASA follows international guidelines called the Planetary Protection protocol, aimed at making sure Earth’s biology doesn’t taint celestial bodies, and vice versa. The agency also has a dedicated team, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s biotechnology and planetary protection group, or B.P.P.G., that oversees efforts to avoid cross-contamination on missions.
Several scientists behind the new research, including the study’s leader, Kasthuri Venkateswaran, a former senior scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, have worked in the protection group, so they knew firsthand that hardy microbes existed. Still, Dr. Venkateswaran called the fungal strain’s survival “remarkable.”
Previous studies have identified various bacteria and fungi on NASA facility surfaces, including the ultrafiltered clean rooms, where spacecraft are constructed and tested. There, employees involved in assembly wear full-body coveralls and masks, but decontamination techniques are currently focused on eliminating bacteria, not fungi.
In the study, researchers examined 27 fungal strains they had acquired from the floors of NASA clean rooms used in the Mars 2020 mission, which landed the Perseverance rover on Mars, plus two control microbes known to tolerate radiation well. Most of the samples that survived a preliminary ultraviolet screening and underwent more intense treatments died quickly, but the A. calidoustus, which had been taken from a Florida assembly facility, endured.
The scientists subjected the A. calidoustus spores to six months of chronic neutron radiation — mimicking space travel — and almost half of them survived. They heated them with 125 degree Celsius dry heat, typically used to sterilize spacecraft components, and the spores outlasted even Bacillus pumilus, a species that NASA often uses as a benchmark. And they treated the spores with harsh conditions that mirrored the experience on Mars itself: 24 hours of extreme UV radiation, plus low atmospheric pressure and the average annual Mars surface temperature of negative 60 degrees Celsius.
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved a gene therapy that can cure a rare, inherited form of deafness. The treatment is the first to restore normal hearing in children who were born deaf.
The maker of the therapy, Regeneron, plans to provide it free to any child who needs it. “We wanted to make a statement,” Dr. George Yancopoulos, Regeneron’s chief scientific officer said on Thursday morning.
He explained that the company wants to be sure its treatment “would be able to reach its full potential and help as many people as possible.”
Some gene therapies for other diseases, priced in the millions of dollars, have had dismal sales.
The therapy called Otarmeni, is intended for children with otoferlin deafness, a rare form of hearing loss caused by a mutation in a single gene. The mutation destroys a protein in the inner ear that is needed to transmit sound to the brain.
Although otoferlin deafness accounts for just 2 percent to 8 percent of congenital hearing loss, the new treatment “is groundbreaking,” Dr. Dylan Chan, a pediatric otolaryngologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said.
He added, “This is the first time in history that there has been a medical therapy that has enabled deaf children to hear.”
Dr. Chan has been a paid adviser to Regeneron and to Eli Lilly, which is also developing a gene therapy for otoferlin deafness. He is also a principal investigator for Lilly’s clinical trial of the treatment.
Dr. Daniel Lee, the director of pediatric otology and neurotology at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, said he also viewed the therapy as groundbreaking. “We have now entered the era of biological treatment for inner ear hearing loss,” he said.
Dr. Lee is on the advisory board of a small biotech company, Skylark Bio, that is developing gene therapy for a different form of inherited deafness.
Until now, the only treatment for otoferlin deafness was a cochlear implant, an electronic device placed in the inner ear. The implants can restore sound but not normal hearing. And the sounds come through as robotic or tinny.
People with cochlear implants have difficulty in noisy environments. They do not hear high frequencies. And at night they have to recharge the batteries, leaving them deaf until the morning.
In addition to Regeneron and Lilly, two other companies, in China and in France, are also developing gene therapies for otoferlin deafness.
Dr. Eliot Shearer, a pediatric surgeon who specializes in hearing loss at Boston Children’s Hospital, said the otoferlin gene therapy is only the beginning of treatments for deafness. “There are over 150 known genetic causes of hearing loss, and thousands of mutations in those genes,” Dr. Shearer said. “Now that it is known that it’s possible to correct genetic hearing loss, new possibilities open up.”
Dr. Shearer is a principal investigator of both the Regeneron and Lilly otoferlin clinical trials.
To treat deafness with gene therapy, researchers had to solve a problem: getting the genes to the cochlea, a spiral shaped cavity almost at the center of the skull. The cochlea is filled with fluid and lined with 3,500 inner hair cells, each tuned to a specific pitch.
Sound vibrations ripple through the fluid, bending the microscopic hairs. When a hair cell bends, it fires. An electric signal travels along the auditory nerve to the brain, and the person hears the sound.
Researchers chose to focus on otoferlin deafness because its cause was straightforward. The otoferlin gene is expressed only in the hair cells of the inner ear. The inner ear structures, including the hair cells, are intact. So to allow patients to hear, doctors simply needed to deliver a working copy of the otoferlin gene.
Otolaryngologists had long thought that injecting a medicine into the inner ear would inevitably damage the delicate cells and membranes of the cochlea.
But children with otoferlin deafness are already unable to hear. Even if an attempt at gene therapy damaged their inner ears, they could still receive cochlear implants.
“It was the perfect target,” Dr. Chan said.
Kerri M., whose baby, Miles, had otoferlin deafness, said gene therapy “completely changed our lives.” She spoke on condition of anonymity because she wanted to protect her son’s diagnosis from appearing on the internet.
Dr. Shearer said Miles’s hearing loss was so profound that he could not hear a jet engine if it were next to him.
Miles was given the Regeneron therapy on May 19, 2025, when he was 13 months old. At his last visit, his hearing was normal.
“We are so fortunate,” his mother said. “Our baby was born deaf, and now he can hear.”
Most children who received the gene therapy have had hearing restored, but not all have been as fortunate as Miles. So far, Dr. Chan said, about 80 percent of the patients who have been treated successfully in clinical trials were able to hear well without needing cochlear implants.
Most still needed a hearing aid, but about 30 percent of those who could hear after the treatment were like Miles — their hearing was in the normal range.
The next target for the scientists working on gene therapies to correct deafness is mutations in the GJB2 gene. It causes the most common form of congenital hearing loss in children and accounts for about 20 percent of cases.
Dr. Lee explained that the biology of GJB2 deafness is more complex than that of otoferlin, because cells in the cochlea are damaged. Otoferlin’s gene therapy, in contrast, is like fixing a broken wire — the cells are normal, they just can’t transmit a signal.
Dr. Lee said Skylark Bio hopes to start a gene therapy clinical trial this year for GJB2-related deafness in children 9 months old to 7 years old in the United States.
Dr. John Germiller, a pediatric otology surgeon at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, predicted that the next frontier will be people with genes that cause progressive hearing loss, not necessarily babies.
Hearing loss and the loss of hair cells in the cochlea tend to occur together, he said. The goal will be to use gene therapy to save the hair cells that are remaining.
Dr. Germiller is a principal investigator for the Lilly otoferlin trial and treated the first patient in the United States two years ago.
Dr. Chan offered an even more ambitious hope for the future — the end of most forms of deafness.
“A lot of people are working on how to reprogram cells of the inner ear to rebuild themselves,” Dr. Chan said. The hope is to recreate the cochlea.
“That,” Dr. Chan added, is “the ultimate holy grail.”
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