This is the science podcast from March 28, 2025.

I'm Sarah Crespi.

First up this week, researchers converge on Los Angeles to study the impact of the urban fires from January this year.

Contributing correspondent Warren Cornwall is here to talk about his visit to the

Aldadena neighborhood, where researchers are collecting pollution and health data. Next on the show,

researcher Ming Zicheng talks about changing up the physics of computing in order to make

drones and robots less power-hungry.

In January of this year, wildfires swept into densely populated areas of Los Angeles,

burning thousands of buildings and killing at least 29 people.

After the fires comes the cleanup, the rebuilding, and the research.

Contributing correspondent Warren Cornwall

visited Altadena, California, where researchers are exploring pollution from fires. Hi, Warren.

Welcome back to the podcast. Hi, Sarah. Great to be here. I'm really glad to have you back.

This is a super interesting story. What was your visit like to Los Angeles? Like, you were there

in, you know, a month or two after the fires?

Yeah, that's right. I was there a little bit more than a month after the fires. And, you know, where I was

staying, you wouldn't have even known that there had been a fire if you hadn't been following the news.

It's not like the air across L.A. was still smelling like smoke. But as you drive into the

Altadena neighborhood, you start to see signs of it, which means that you start to see an occasional

building that has been burned. And then the closer that you get to the San Gabriel Mountains,

which the Altadena neighborhood runs up against, you start to see larger and larger sections of entire blocks that have just been devastated. There's really nothing left except the burned out hulks of cars and chimneys.

Yeah, I think you said in your story, 16,000 structures burned. Yeah, I mean, that's not just in Altadena. The two major fires are in Altadena and the Palisades area. And so

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