When Erika Flores applied for an internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2014, she wasn’t quite sure if her undergraduate work in environmental science fit at a place known for work much farther afield.

“I wanted to fix our planet,” Flores said recently. “I didn’t really imagine myself studying outer space.”

Not only did she land the internship at the La Cañada Flintridge institution’s Origins and Habitability Laboratory, but her contribution there also launched an ongoing partnership between the civil engineering department at Cal State Los Angeles and a lab dedicated to understanding how life begins.

“I did not see myself in an astrobiology lab,” Flores said from her office at the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, where she has worked since 2023 as an engineering associate.

But as it turns out, understanding how microorganisms came to be in Earth’s water is valuable knowledge to those tasked with cleansing that supply today, her mentor at JPL said.

“There’s a lot of overlap between wastewater and astrobiology,” said Laurie Barge, a JPL scientist who co-leads the Origins and Habitability Laboratory with research scientist Jessica Weber. “Sounds weird, but it’s true.”

Laurie Barge, a JPL scientist, speaks to interns inside the Origins and Habitability Laboratory at JPL.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

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This symmetry between the biology of our home planet and more distant worlds has led to a partnership between Barge and Weber’s lab and that of Flores’ former advisor Arezoo Khodayari, an associate professor of civil engineering at Cal State L.A.

After nearly a decade of collaboration, Barge and Khodayari recently received a grant from NASA that will cover up to six internships in the lab for Khodayari’s students over the next two years.

The award is one of 11 that NASA’s Science Mission Directorate made to universities that have not traditionally been part of the pipeline that brings new scientists to the space agency.

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1. Cal State L.A. students Julia Chavez, left, and Cathy Trejo conduct an experiment that simulates oceans on early Earth and possibly other planets. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

“We are intentionally increasing equitable access to NASA for the best and brightest talents in our nation,” said Shahra Lambert, NASA senior advisor for engagement, in a statement.

The two scientists connected through Flores who, with Barge’s encouragement, decided to go for a master’s degree at Cal State L.A. during her Origins and Habitability Laboratory internship.

While Khodayari’s research in Cal State L.A.’s Environmental Sustainability and Pollution Control lab focuses on managing contaminants here on Earth, she and Barge immediately saw parallels with the Origins and Habitability lab’s exploration of the conditions that could give rise to life across the universe.

“The fate of these chemicals in an aqueous environment is relevant for both fields,” Khodayari said. “All of these different projects have chemistry in common.”

After the success of Flores’ internship, the two scientists started looking for ways to introduce planetary science to students who might not have considered it as part of their training, and lacked access to the tools necessary for sophisticated research.

Arezoo Khodayari of Cal State L.A. has collaborated with JPL for years to bring interns to the Southern California NASA center.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

Eduardo Martinez was studying for a master’s in civil engineering in 2018 when Khodayari called him into her office and asked if he’d be interested in working for JPL.

“I was kind of taken aback a little bit,” recalled Martinez, who was born in Mexico and grew up in Los Angeles. “I was like — ‘JPL? Like, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory?’ ”

He was hooked immediately. As a civil engineering student, Martinez had been interested in how phosphorus and nitrogen affect water quality, leading to algal blooms and low oxygen levels when discharged in high quantities into freshwater. During the internship, he was a lead author on a research paper with Barge, Khodayari and others on how nitrates react with iron compounds in aqueous environments.

His work at the Origins and Habitability lab showed him that the same elements also play a crucial role in forming and sustaining life, and thus are a key point of interest for NASA astrobiologists. “I had not made that link before, and it was just fascinating to see,” Martinez said.

The experience inspired him to pursue a doctorate in geoscience at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research there focuses on how certain isotope compositions in clay minerals could indicate past life in samples brought back from Mars.

Julia Chavez and Cathy Trejo high-five at JPL. They are two of several students from Cal State L.A. who are interning at JPL’s Origins and Habitability Laboratory.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

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Since Flores’ initial crossover from environmental science to space, five Cal State L.A. students have done internships at the JPL lab. The NASA grant will speed up that pipeline, introducing more students to research opportunities that may not otherwise have crossed their paths.

This summer, interns Julia Chavez and Cathy Trejo donned goggles and white lab coats to inject fluids into an iron chloride solution. The experiment replicates the reaction between seawater and the stuff that comes up through hydrothermal vents — an energy source for life on Earth, and a possible mechanism by which organisms first developed here.

“Five or six years ago, I didn’t really envision myself in research,” said Chavez, who completed her master’s degree this year. “Being here, I couldn’t imagine a different path.”

In the early days of the COVID lockdown, Hiroyuki Egami was desperate to get his hands on a Nintendo Switch.

He already had one of the handheld game devices, but he also had two sons who were old enough to fight over it. The only way to maintain the peace in his family’s Tokyo home was to acquire a second unit.

So many parents had the same idea that stores in Japan quickly sold out. When the gaming consoles were back in stock, retailers held lotteries to ensure that everyone who wanted to buy one had an equal chance to do so.

Egami, an economist at Nihon University in Tokyo, quickly recognized that the lottery system could double as a natural experiment and shed light on a question that had been on his mind for years: Are video games actually detrimental to players’ mental health?

“People usually say that video games are harmful and you should decrease the time your children are playing,” he said. “As a father, I’ve been wondering whether it’s true.”

And as a researcher, he said, he felt “a kind of responsibility” to examine the evidence.

Not long before, the World Health Organization stirred up controversy by adding a condition called gaming disorder to the International Classification of Diseases. The ailment describes people who are so consumed by video games that they’re unable to control their playing behavior — even when it puts their health, their relationships with family and friends, and their livelihoods in jeopardy.

The WHO’s action reinforced longstanding views that video games are dangerous. Yet market researchers estimate that more than 3 billion people around the world play video games, a figure that’s been growing steadily for years.

And while titles like “Grand Theft Auto” and “Call of Duty” regularly make the bestseller list, so do family-friendly ones like “Minecraft,” “Animal Crossing,” “Madden NFL” and “Mario Kart 8.”

“Parents should know” whether gaming is truly hazardous, Egami said. “Parents shouldn’t feel too much pressure which is not rational.”

Studies linking gaming to aggression, addiction, cognitive function and general well-being have produced inconclusive results. One reason is that it’s hard to tell, for instance, whether game play itself makes people feel isolated, or whether people who are isolated tend to gravitate toward video games.

The way to tease out cause and effect is to take a group of people and randomly assign some of them to play video games while keeping others game-free to serve as controls. If differences emerge between the otherwise similar cohorts, they may be attributed to the games.

But experiments like these don’t reflect the way people play video games in real life, Egami said. They typically ask college students to play a video game in a laboratory at an appointed time — a study design that, while practical, limits the value of the findings.

That’s why Egami seized upon the video game lotteries. By randomly selecting some would-be gamers to purchase consoles while leaving others empty-handed, retailers unwittingly had set up the equivalent of a clinical trial.

Egami swung into action. He designed a questionnaire and got it into the field as quickly as possible, worried that the shortages would be resolved before he could collect the necessary data.

“Luckily, I could gather my research team and start working on it,” he said.

Between 2020 and 2022, nearly 100,000 people completed Egami’s survey, including 8,192 who took part in a video game lottery. More than a third of the lottery participants were considered “hardcore gamers” who played for at least 90 minutes each day. In addition to game-playing habits, the survey gauged people’s psychological well-being and distress. It also asked about a host of socioeconomic factors, including age, sex, job and family structure.

After crunching all the numbers, the researchers found that purchasing either a Nintendo Switch or a Sony PlayStation 5 through a lottery led to measurable reductions in the recipient’s psychological distress, and that possessing and playing with either device improved the owner’s mental health.

In addition, being selected to buy a PS5 through a lottery boosted gamers’ sense of life satisfaction. So did owning the console and using it to play games, the researchers found. (The team did not have the data to determine whether the same was true for the Nintendo Switch.)

While the improvements in well-being were statistically significant, they weren’t necessarily large enough to be noticed by gamers, Egami said.

The magnitudes of the changes were calculated in terms of standard deviations, which are used in statistics to convey how tightly a group of data points is clustered together. Medical studies suggest that changes are perceptible if they exceed 0.5 standard deviations. By that measure, only the mental health boosts from possessing or playing with a Switch were large enough for gamers to notice.

The data also indicated that after three hours of gaming in a single day, devoting any additional time to playing video games resulted in diminished returns. But there was no amount of time beyond which gaming became “detrimental to mental well-being,” Egami said.

The findings were published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

While it’s difficult to interpret the exact size of the effects, they “seem large enough to be perceptible to the players themselves,” said Matti Vuorre, a psychological scientist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands who studies video games and other virtual environments. That “indicates a meaningfully large effect in my books,” and makes it more difficult to argue “that gaming is an overall risk” for the average player, he said.

Nick Ballou, a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute who studies how gaming affects mental health, said he suspects the improvements in well-being “would be minor but perceptible for people.” Anything much larger would be implausible, he said, since “games are only a small part of what contributes to a thriving life.”

Neither Vuorre nor Ballou was involved in Egami’s research, but they collaborated on a 2021 study that documented a dramatic increase in gaming during the pandemic. That was particularly true for multiplayer games, which suggests they were not just a source of entertainment but an outlet for social connection.

“We have lots of evidence that people turned to games as a lifeline in the early part of the pandemic,” said Ballou, who conducted one such study in May 2020. He said he wouldn’t necessarily expect the upside to be as strong in a more typical situation.

Egami agreed that some of the mental health benefits his team documented were likely due to the unique circumstances of the pandemic. But he doesn’t think they’ve disappeared altogether now that regular life has resumed.

“I hope this will bring peace to the general public that enjoys video games,” Egami said.

In the middle of summer, most Southern Californians would be surprised to see more than a handful of clouds in the sky (unless you count clouds of wildfire smoke). But on July 14 in Twentynine Palms, a rapidly developed thunderstorm dropped about 1.88 inches of rain in a couple hours — an overwhelming amount by historical standards for a town that typically gets less than 4 inches in an entire year.

The water rushed along streets and highways, picking up cars and driving debris to damage homes and businesses. Then, while residents were still taking stock of the destruction, nine days later the area was under a flash flood warning again as another thunderstorm moved through.

So why does the Mojave Desert — obviously an extremely arid place — receive all this summer rain while Los Angeles, less than 150 miles away, gets none?

Late summer is the driest time of year for much of California; on average, Los Angeles International Airport receives no rain at all during the month of August. But if you go east over the mountains into San Bernardino County, the pattern suddenly switches — in Twentynine Palms, August is the wettest month. Keep going into Arizona and New Mexico and the late summer precipitation gets even more intense: In Santa Fe, almost half of the year’s rain falls between July and September.

This changeover is the result of a phenomenon called the North American monsoon, which was responsible for the deluge in Twentynine Palms. While it is less well-known than its South Asian counterpart, the North American monsoon plays an important role in the climate of the Four Corners states, bringing crucial moisture to areas that would otherwise be bone dry, but also at times leading to damaging flooding.

All monsoons are driven by the same source: a difference in temperature between land and ocean. During the hot months of late summer, the sun can deliver as much as 1,000 watts per square meter in the subtropics — in terms of power, that’s similar to running a space heater every four feet. Some of this power is reflected into space, but on average more than two-thirds of it is absorbed, either by the land surface or by the ocean.

The essential difference between the two is that the ocean is constantly mixing, which distributes the heat throughout approximately the top 60 feet of ocean water — something that is impossible on land. As a result, the top few inches of soil or rock heat up rapidly over the course of a day, and in turn warm the overlying air.

Monsoon flood waters buckled and damaged the roadway at Kelbaker Road and Mojave Road inside the Mojave National Preserve in August 2022.

(NPS)

Since hot air is less dense than cold air, the air over the land tends to rise, typically in the late afternoon after a full day of baking in the sun. As the air rises from the land, it pulls in moist air from the water — for the North American monsoon, this is the Gulf of California — to replace it. When this moist air reaches mountainous terrain like that of northern Mexico and the American Southwest, it is pushed up and drops its moisture, often in sudden, intense thunderstorms.

There are many places near the coast that don’t have monsoons — Los Angeles, for instance. One important factor is topography: Research suggests that a major reason why the South Asian monsoon is so powerful and consistent is the presence of the Himalayas, which act as a wall that prevents air from the dry Tibetan plateau from making it to the Indian subcontinent.

Another major consideration is something called the “subtropical ridge,” which is a series of persistent high-pressure systems that all occur around 30 degrees north (and south) of the equator.

The reason that the North American monsoon does not reach coastal California is the presence of the North Pacific High, which is a part of the subtropical ridge that typically sits northeast of Hawaii. The North Pacific High strengthens and expands during the summer, creating the hot, dry conditions that are typical for Los Angeles and crowding out the monsoon. In winter, however, the North Pacific High tends to weaken and shift south, allowing atmospheric rivers to reach the state.

For the Southwest, the North American monsoon can be both a blessing and a curse.

It brings much-needed rain to the region, but that precipitation typically falls in torrential downpours that the dry, hard-packed soil is unable to absorb. This leads to dangerous flash floods that can destroy roads and buildings and potentially claim the lives of those caught in their path. The rain and cool conditions delivered by the monsoon can be useful in extinguishing wildfires, but the lightning from the storms is also a major trigger for wildfires in the region.

As with many weather phenomena, climate change is expected to have some effect on monsoon rainfall, but the magnitude and direction of that effect depends on specific local factors.

For some parts of the globe, like South and East Asia, monsoons are predicted to become more intense because of climate change. It is thought that changes in aerosol pollution as China and India (hopefully) shift away from coal power will play a very important role.

In the southern hemisphere, models suggest a possible small increase in summer monsoon rainfall. Of the major monsoon systems, only the North American monsoon is expected to have substantial decreases in total precipitation, with the most likely outcome being a 1%-6% reduction in summer rainfall. The reasons for this predicted decrease are not entirely understood but warming sea surface temperatures off the coast of Baja California have been suggested as a possible explanation.

If the North American monsoon does weaken over the coming decades, it will put further stress on the dwindling Colorado River, which has a watershed that includes almost all of Arizona and large swathes of Colorado and Utah. Perhaps more significantly, it will represent a serious threat to ecosystems that are already fragile because of rising temperatures and outbreaks of the mountain pine beetle.

The future of monsoon systems across the globe is not certain or easily predictable but given the potential perils in either direction — more intense flooding or deepening drought — it is important that we prepare for both scenarios and act quickly to limit these changes including by rapidly cutting emissions.

Ned Kleiner is a scientist and catastrophe modeler at Verisk. He has a doctorate in atmospheric science from Harvard.