Uncertainty, seismic risks and nuclear regulation

This is a copy of a blog post I wrote today at spot.us to update supporters about my work on a story exploring the seismic dangers that could face the Columbia Generating Station near Richland, Washington. Click here to read more about that story and how you can help make it happen. In more than a week of uncertainty following Japan's largest recorded earthquake, its ensuing tsunami and the still unfathomable specter of a radiological nightmare, the only thing the world has to be certain about is uncertainty itself. We still don't know the fate of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. We still don't know how many people perished in the original disaster and how many still cling to life. We still don't know how much of the Japanese landscape was contaminated with radioactive material, and we still don't have a clear sense of the sort of recovery Japan faces.

We just don't know.

So, here in the U.S., why are so many officials so quick to express such certainty, and why are journalists so quick to accept government officials' and nuclear industry spokespeople's assurances that yes, we swear, you're really safe here in the U.S.? How can we be assured there really is little chance we will face disasters similar to that Japan now suffers through?.

I'm not referring to concerns about the immediate impacts of a radiation plume. The risk from this specific incident to U.S. citizens seems minimal. Nevertheless, I think we're asking the wrong questions if journalists exploring dangers in the U.S. only consider immediate impacts in our country from the Fukushima Daiichi plant and don't ask how what occurs in Japan to the Japanese people could be instructive for what may happen here. Meanwhile, there's also problematic framing of the discussion.

This morning, for example, NPR's Morning Edition led an interview by Renee Montagne with Georgetown psychologist Robert Dupont,who studies fear. Introducing the piece, Steve Inskeep almost jokingly said "As of now, the death toll from Japan's nuclear emergency stands at zero." Whether there may not have been immediate death, nor lethal doses, it misses the point to only look at the immediate aftermath and not the current risk. Dupont said other than Chernobyl we "don't have bodies piling up." But this isn't just about bodies piling up. It's also about bodies bombarded with radiation, bodies detoriorating over time.

Valerie Brown heartbreakingly reminded us of so much Monday in her  "Pawning the Chernobyl Necklace" on The Phoenix Sun, fusing exquisite prose and detailed research and scientific knowledge to explain exactly how long lasting these impacts can be for an individual, what fear really feels like, and how blind assurances of safety serve no one.

I'm looking at the seismic risks facing the Columbia Generating Station because I just haven't seen people telling the full story. Even if that full story reinforces claims that we are safe, it must be told credibly. I worry a bit that other outlets are exploring this topic, that they'll get to it faster, dispatching salaried, staff reporters to tell it before I can, but then I realize two things: It's a story that can't be told too many times, that must be told in as nuanced a manner as possible; it's also a story that deserves to be told in detail, in depth, and in as explanatory a manner as possible.

Our responsibility as journalists

That question has been rolling around in my brain since I first woke to news last week that officials from Energy Northwest - the company that runs the Columbia Generating Station, the only commercial nuclear plant in the Northwest, had assured the public that the plant is safe from Earthquakes. Officials certainly have to be cautious about panicking the public (especially when an American run on potassium iodide pills could threaten availability for the Japanese most immediately at risk).

So maybe the pressure is on journalists: we need to do a better job - without fear mongering - of asking just what evidence officials are using to justify their claims. How up to date are the seismic studies? What historic data they use? How thoroughly have geologists studied the Columbia Plateau's potential, and how have those studies been integrated into designs at the Columbia Generating Station and the regulations that govern it? It's our job to ask these questions and not to accept "we're safe" as a satisfactory answer, especially when a simple google search - much like the one I performed the day I heard that story - reveals that historic quakes 90 miles away from the plant ahve exceeded its designs in magnitude and that dangers exist.

Simple Google searches, of course, are not enough. That's why I've been poring through significant accident mitigation assessments, emergency management plans, and seismic profiles as I try to identify who I should call first. I always struggle with that when I start working on a story, and I should get over my uncertainty. What I'm finding so far, though, only prompted more questions. For example, the geologic area the plant sits on is one notorious for "bad data" about its seismicity. Again. Uncertainty.

Meanwhile, I also need to bring myself up to speed on current geology and seismology (why, for example, is horizontal ground shaking a better indicator of a quake's strength than the ricter scale?), nuclear policy (if you thought the alphabet soup of federal agency names was bad, just read a report from the NRC - and hope you have a pot of coffee brewed) and just who would be at risk from a radiological release.

Thank you for your continued support

But I'm ready for the challenge.

We (read journalists) need to do a better job of asking people one simple question "how do you know what you know?" or "how do you justify the claims that you make?" So, if we want to know the risks earthquakes pose to nuclear facilities or any other sensitive area, shouldn't we start with those who have spent their professional lives studying them?

Meanwhile I'm trying to strategize when I'll go to the Tri-Cities to explore the community affected by this. I don't want to do that until I have a better grasp of the issues involved so I can ask better questions, but I want to make sure I spend enough time actually getting to better know the area I'll be reporting on.

It's encouraging to see, however, that even before my first blog post dozens of you indicated you want these kinds of questions to be asked. Thank you so much for making this story a possibility and showing me that I'm asking the kinds of questions you want asked.

However, don't be shy about telling me what more you want to know. What questions about this topic am I missing? what am I being too lazy about? What am I overlooking?

Extreme Measures

Geomicrobiologists look to harsh environments for organisms “disobeying” traditional chemistry teaching.
(This story was originally written and reported in October, 2008 at the University of Southern California).

Petri dishes might not be replacing AA batteries at Radio Shack any time soon, but a growing body of research shows it may soon be possible to create fuel cells made up of bacteria cultured to digest sewage or other substances.

Such wastewater remediation is but one application of the field of geomicrobiology, which has evolved rapidly since 1966. That year, Tom Brock first shook the field with the discovery of organisms thriving in the cauldron of Yellowstone National Park's geothermal geysers. Before then, general wisdom held nothing could survive in such high temperatures.

“There's nothing more fun than finding something that disobeyed what your chemistry teacher told you 35 years ago,” says Ken Nealson, a geobiologist at the University of Southern California and a teacher of Orianna Bretschger and Yuri Gorby, two microbiologists working at San Diego's J. Craig Venter Institute on projects connected to wastewater remediation and biological fuel cells. Nealson is a Venter Institute board member.

After Brock's discovery, organisms were found all over in environments scientists had insisted life couldn't exist. Life was being discovered in places with high temperatures (more than 60 degrees celsius) or very low ones (zero degrees celsius), extremely acidic or highly alkaline soil, and even in areas devoid of oxygen; all areas lacking nutrients scientists thought organisms needed to survive.

These findings had far-reaching implications. Astrobiologists realized that if life could exist in so many different environments here on Earth, they may have been too narrow-minded in their search for extraterrestrial life.

But it didn't just mean E.T. might not look how we expect. Many microbiologists just thought it was outright wacky to imagine life could exist in such forbidding environments.

One way to understand life's adaptability to different environments is to think about how life is powered.

Think of a NiCad battery. Electrons flow from a positively charged nickel cathode to a negatively charged cadmium anode. That movement creates electricity. Placed in a circuit and switched on, the electrons move from the cathode to the anode, creating electric energy.

In humans, sugars take nickel's place and oxygen replaces cadmium. Oxygen speeds up the process of metabolism in which the sugars are broken down and cells are powered. Every organism has a similar process, but the cathode doesn't have to be sugar, and the anode doesn't need to be oxygen. As long as there's an atom supplying electrons and another receiving them, the process can occur.

Nealson spends much of his time in a strange landscape north of the San Francisco Bay area characterized by deposits of soil with high pH levels. That means the soil is similar to lye, a substance that destroys many chemical bonds and keeps oxygen away. But Nealson found a lifeform thriving there using excess hydrogen in the soil as an energy source.

“You know, if someone would have told you ten years ago that they had a bug that grew at pH 12, you'd just laugh at them and say 'yeah, you're just crazy. You've got something wrong with your experiments.” Nealson says. “And yet, we see plenty of bugs growing in these samples and we've now got some in culture here [at USC].”

It turned out the organisms used iron to receive electrons from the hydrogen.

“This is my microbiologist fun,” Nealson says. “These bugs disobey all the rules.”

As more and more research about organisms which broke the rules emerged, resistance in the scientific community began to to fade. In the 1980s Japanese scientist Koki Horikoshi discovered how microorganisms could be used to speed up digestion used in industrial processes. Researchers working with Nealson built on that research to study how organisms in a California lake were metabolizing iron and manganese without oxygen. The Air Force took note.

“It's almost the first thing I've ever done that has any application,” Nealson says.

Nealson's team had isolated the genes of the organism responsible for electricity production in that metabolism, and the air force realized it could build on ongoing research into the reactions to design a fuel cell. This is where Bretschger's work at the Venter institute on wastewater remediation comes in.

Already, wastewater treatment facilities use microorganisms which don't need oxygen to digest organic materials in sewage. In these oxygen-free environments bacteria dine on feces and other waste. The bacteria produce methane as a byproduct. That methane is used to power the sewage plants, but the bacteria produce so much there is often excess to burn off. Bretschger says it may be possible to skip that last step.

Lifeforms, whether bacterial or not, digest their energy sources because they've evolved to survive on the resources available in their environment. Bretschger says while she can get the reaction she wants to occur in a cup of water in a lab, it's still too difficult to scale up to an industrially useful process. She and her colleagues need to understand how to make those reactions happen quickly, and they have to happen consistently. For that to occur, they also need to learn how different organisms might react, compete in and adapt to environments changing constantly in terms of what substances, nutrients, and conditions are present in waste streams.

The bacteria she is studying, called shewanella oneidensis, or MR-1, interacts electronically with solid surfaces. It contains a collection of proteins necessary for electrons to move to those surfaces. If a gene controlling that movement is removed the transfer could be stopped. J. Craig Venter, Bretschger's employer's namesake, was the first person to sequence the human genome. His institute is now working on the world's first synthetic organism. The genetic tools developed at the institute might make it possible to engineer a catalyst for a microbial fuel cell or to identify other organisms with similar electrochemical processes.

Bretschger sees other impacts beyond Air Force fuel cells if this process can be properly honed.

“If we can understand the biological reactions well enough to both accelerate the degradation of organic waste and engineer a system that can efficiently harvest the energy released from this degradation, we could provide clean water to areas of the globe that presently have no energy infrastructure to employ conventional water treatment,” she says.

Nealson, meanwhile, cautions against thinking microorganisms can do anything and live absolutely anywhere.

It's one thing to take an organism and imagine how it might be able to live in seemingly harsh environments. You don't violate any scientific laws if, say, you rearrange the basic building blocks of life to withstand extremes, much as one might build different models with the same set of Lego blocks. But those blocks and the bonds holding them together must still be able to withstand the physical forces which govern our universe.

Right now the only known building blocks are proteins formed by carbon-to-carbon bonds. Those bonds can't withstand forces such as extremely high temperatures or very strong kinetic forces (think earthquakes and other geological forces), while there's a possibility life could be based on other substances besides carbon, such as silica, those bonds couldn't be supported in any environment that could support life as we know it.

Still, that doesn't mean there isn't vast opportunity for life on this planet and elsewhere.

“Chemistry is chemistry and physics is physics and you can't violate those laws, but within that range of not violating those laws you can do a whole lot of stuff we didn't think was possible,” Nealson says.

Blurring the lines: Virtual human research promises real-world impacts

Halfway through my interview with Louis-Philippe Morency I suddenly felt incredibly self-conscious Every nod, every movement of pen to paper, every glance in his eyes made me wonder what I might have been saying without saying anything. Would he catch my eyes straying to his bookshelves or the traffic on the street below and notice my (rare) moments of boredom and feel insulted? Would he detect a hurried, enthusiastic nod and hammer a point home to me? Would he latch onto my fascination to try to spin me?

Nonverbal cues drive human conversation. They signal a speaker to come to a point with an expectant glance or urge a listener to grasp the significance of a message with a well-timed raise of the eyebrows. Beneath the surface of our words we steep our conversations in texture and fill our discussions with broader meaning when we move our hands to the rhythm of our voices, shift our weight nervously, affix our gaze on listeners and alter the pitch of our voice with excitement or trepidation. These “backchannels” direct the flow of social interactions, but they aren't universal.

Morency completed his Ph. D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined a team at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies studying how virtual humans — artificially created but independent characters residing in a computer environment and meant to look, move, behave and communicate like real humans — can be taught to interact more plausibly with real humans and even each other using both vocal language and these nonverbal backchannels. Since coming on board at ICT Morency — along with colleagues at ICT — has won a series of awards and other recognition for research in how computers make sense of the visual data they collect.

Backchannels evolve through time, and they are differentiated by culture. They frame our words. But while these backchannels come to us almost as easily as breathing and are as much a product of thousands of years of history as art and music and religion, they're foreign to computers. Scientists could program the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary and countless combinations of “heuristics” — or problem solving formulas — for proper grammar and machines would still have trouble learning this natural language.

The notion that virtual humans might have unscripted conversations with humans and one another may seem like science fiction. Real humans themselves often struggle to communicate with one another; whether we're participating in complex international negotiations or wooing a mate we weave a quilt of words and body language meant to express our needs and desires. Computers communicate in strings of ones and zeros, a vocabulary of closed and open circuits determining how they “decide” to run programs. They have no other culture, no thousands of years of history to determine their identity.

Dialogue is like a dance

As I sit in Morency's sixth-floor office overlooking Marina Del Ray picking his brain about the challenges of giving computers an identity and a language, his speech speeds up, describing how sustained eye gazes and lowered voices might shape a conversation. Some head nods suggest encouragement, others affirmation. Some even suggest boredom. Morency's own eyes widen as he explains this. He speaks excitedly and I imagine him bouncing about, but he's not.

“It's not like you talking and me talking and you talking,” Morency said. “We are in this conversation together, and so it's kind of a dance. Dialogue is like a dance.”

His voices raises in waves as he explains how computers measure the length of time a gaze is focused on a particular spot, the number of decibels a voice lowers and for how long, and the position and angle of a head cocked in confusion. If I nod as Morency speaks, it might suggest to him I want to hear more. If I nod when he stops and he hasn't asked me a yes or no question, though, it might suggest I'm not paying attention. Replace me with a virtual human nodding at the wrong time and it might mean the system hasn't been programmed to understand when a gesture makes sense.

“This is not magic,” Morency says. “I say head nod, but you can do the same thing with an 'uh huh.' You could do the same thing with a smile.”

Some of ICT's other virtual human team members, like Paul Debevec, are focused on creating better graphical representations of nonverbal behaviors. Others, like Jonathan Gratch, the virtual human team's leader, are exploring models for emotional responses.

Having graphics specialists like Debevec on hand to improve how realistically these virtual humans move isn't meant just to wow outsiders, but to create more believable nonverbal behaviors. Graphics technologies have to be so intricately developed that everything from bone structures to skin textures move in a lifelike manner. Skin on an attentive face must look taut; muscles along a relaxed posture must loosen.

Researchers also need to reach out to such fields as social psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and even economics to help explain how a wink or a handshake or other gestures might carry different meanings in different places. Morency calls the synthesis of the disparate fields he has studied “computational psychology.”

“These five areas together — sociology, psychology, linguistics, machine learning and computer vision — are kinda the core for me,”he says, “but if you want to study nonverbal behavior you need to have all of them together.”

Since the dawn of diplomacy, political leaders have found value in understanding how to bridge cultural gaps. In the 21st century, as the world becomes increasingly globalized, institutions are ramping up investment in tools that can improve understanding of foreign cultures. A negotiation might take place sitting down over tea in one culture; another might value terse, to-the-point, discourse ended with handshakes. Where eye contact shows respect one place, it might stir discomfort in another. A raised middle finger might be an insult in one country; A jettisoned shoe might be a more powerful statement somewhere else.

The Army gets an "agent"

One institution trying desperately to bridge the cultural chasms it encounters is the U.S. Army, a primary sponsor of the ICT. Virtual humans that can be taught to speak and act like citizens from any given culture can be used to prepare soldiers for foreign entanglements. As the Army slogs through its seventh year in Iraq and the American presence in Afghanistan deepens, military officials are beginning to recognize that communicating their intentions and that of their troops requires more than Arabic, Pashto and Dari translators

This fall, Patrick Kenny, an ICT computer scientist, showed visitors an example of how the institute's virtual human research uses computer simulations programmed to look, talk, and move just as an Iraqi might to help the army train soldiers. In front of an audience of USC undergraduates, military representatives and even the principal of a local catholic school, Kenny donned a headset microphone and gripped a wireless trackball in his hand as he prepared for a conversation with two “live” Iraqis in a virtual training simulation in development at ICT. As the audience soon saw and Kenny had warned, kinks were still being worked out of the demonstration, such as characters unable to find words to express the “needs” and “goals” the computer programs wanted them to insist upon; but, even the glitches offered a chance to glimpse under the hood, or perhaps the “skull”, of the virtual humans

As the main lights went down in the cozy virtual reality theater at ICT a screen wrapping around nearly half the room filled with the image of a café setting in Baghdad. Two men, represented with graphics not quite up to par with the latest video games, appeared on the screen facing the audience. One, a young Iraqi doctor, stood in scrubs, while the other, a tribal elder, was dressed in traditional garb. Kenny assumed the role of a U.S. Army captain whose goal was to negotiate with the two Iraqis about moving a clinic from outside the café to a safer setting downtown.

Each character represented a visual manifestation of a unique nonhuman “agent,” a complex computer model embodying a set of goals, communication capabilities and behavioral standards defined by a programmer. Kenny played a soldier tasked with trying to learn how to communicate with them. While he knows what goals the virtual humans were programmed with, a soldier training with the system wouldn't. He or she would need to negotiate with the virtual Iraqis to learn how they behave differently than an American might in a similar situation.

If the virtual humans can be taught to act and communicate as real Iraqis would in a similar situation, then soldiers training with them before deployment might be better prepared negotiations with actual Iraqis. Soldiers deployed to other places, such as Afghanistan, wouldn't train with the same virtual characters; they'd train with virtual characters programmed to act properly for that country.

These different situations require different areas of expertise. In addition to cultural specialists, or “domain experts,” ICT needs creative minds from the film and video game industries to devise the scenarios soldiers — or anyone interacting with virtual characters — might encounter.

At first glance, the involvement of Hollywood seems cosmetic. On the first floor of ICT's squat office building a small conference room sits just behind the glass wall of the tiny reception area. A gray replica of a transporter from the Star Trek: The Next Generation television series hangs from the room's ceiling, making the wait for an appointment seem more like a line at a theme park than anticipating an appointment. The show's set designer, Herman Zimmerman, designed most of the ICT's interior.

Film industry visionaries and leaders in video game design develop scenarios for virtual human simulations, contribute to complex graphics and physics simulations shaping the worlds these characters inhabit, and share ideas about how trainees interact with the characters.

“One of the things we've really tried to do, and I think we've been really successful at, is integrate together a lot of different threads of research,” says Bill Swartout, ICT's director of technology and its first employee. “If you think about it, that's kinda the opposite of the way science usually works.”

Swartout says scientists normally take big problems and isolate them into smaller and smaller problems. As they solve the smaller ones, they move on incrementally to larger challenges.

"Sometimes there are synergies between the different areas that actually allow us to solve problems that were more difficult if we attack them by themselves,” he says.

Even though it may seem like ICT's virtual human team is trying to completely recreate the human mind in computers in one dramatic effort, Swartout says the characters aren't quite as independent as they may seem at first glance. They can't make decisions without being programmed with goals such as a specific combination of words recognized at a specific moment in a conversation, or motions such as firmly crossed arms or a slumping posture recognized at certain times by attached cameras. But it's a massively time-consuming and resource-intensive process to program all the words and physical behaviors from all the world's cultures. For virtual humans to be useful but still realistic as training tools, they are embedded into unique stories and scenarios. The virtual humans in Kenny's café scene don't need to be taught how to answer a question about how the Dodgers fared in a recent game or what they thought of the most recent episode of The Simpsons because those aren't questions likely to arise in a negotiation between American soldiers and Iraqi citizens.

Sometimes nobody can mask the virtual humans' limitations, though.

At the ICT's virtual human demonstration set in the Baghdad cafe, the Iraqi doctor had certain goals related to his profession; the tribal elder placed more stock in tradition and culture. Kenny, as a soldier trying to convince them to move a clinic to downtown Baghdad had to satisfy these goals, but even when he tried, the virtual characters sometimes had trouble developing responses on the fly.

“I cannot express what I want to say,” the doctor character told Kenny. The “agent” — or computer model — guiding the doctor character knew what it wanted to accomplish, it calculated an appropriate response based on Kenny's questions, but it didn't have the proper “surface text.” That is, it lacked the sufficient vocabulary to communicate its message. It didn't know how to tell Kenny it needed an assurance its patients would be safe if the clinic were moved.

Kenny had the advantage of knowing the constraints programmed into each virtual character. Without explaining what he changed in detail, Kenny paused the simulation and moved graphical sliders representing each character's goals on the screen and restarted the demonstration. This time he was able to convince each character to agree to moving the clinic, but they began negotiating independently with one another.

“We should move the clinic downtown,” the doctor told the elder.

“I think we should move the clinic downtown,” the elder then told the doctor. The characters ignored Kenny and tried to get each other to agree to move the clinic; even though they had the same goal, they weren't programmed to be able to negotiate independent of him. Instead they just repeated statements like “We should move the clinic downtown,” and “I think it would be a good idea to move the clinic downtown,” and responding “I cannot understand you” or “I do not have the words to express what I want to say.” They looped around their agreement but couldn't understand one another. The situation became so absurd the doctor even spontaneously switched tongues and told the elder “No comprende.”

Even though there are glitches, outside observers admit the ICT is coming closer to creating virtual characters who look and act like real humans. Jeremy Bailenson, who directs Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, studies how humans interact through avatars — digital versions of themselves — in immersive virtual environments. These avatars can be characters in complex online video games or just their voices as heard through cellular phones.

Gratch, ICT's virtual human team leader, says Bailenson's research is crucial because understanding human behavior is necessary for building virtual humans. Bailenson described how individuals have been shown to be more receptive to avatars that resemble themselves. What implications does that have for advertising? For politics?

“For the first time as a species things that look human and seem human and sound human are not necessarily human anymore,” Bailenson says.

Beyond the battlefield

Despite the blurring lines, ICT's virtual human experts are beginning to visualize applications for their research beyond the battlefield. Morency dreams of “companion” robots, or virtual characters that could help people throughout life, interacting with individuals based on evolving understanding of their personalities. The Museum of Science in Boston announced late last year it plans to use virtual human technology from ICT to develop “digital docents” who tailor their tours to each museum visitor.

Every ICT researcher I spoke with buzzes with excitement about budding work on “virtual patients” spearheaded by Kenny. Medical schools now use actors to portray individuals suffering from various afflictions in order to train students. Actors, however, have their limits. Children aren't well enough trained to act out serious conditions like autism and it's not easy for actors to emulate conditions like facial muscles paralyzed by stroke.

ICT's advanced graphics modeling techniques and its understanding of the nonverbal aspects of communication could be used to create virtual humans able to supplement actors in medical training and illustrate the effects of disease.

Despite the frustration with current technical limitations, Kenny says critics of ICT's virtual human research probably don't understand it.

"There is so much stuff going on inside the brain that we don't understand. Trying to model that onto computers is very complex,” Kenny says. “It's like making a 747.”

As he speaks, sunlight pours into his office and over action figures from popular cartoons and comic books scattered on shelves and desks, leaving little hint of the stiff military bureaucracy one might expect from an Army-funded research institute. Video game cases sit on bookshelves containing volumes about games, robotics, psychology and a number of other widely varied subjects, echoing the playful but diverse atmosphere surrounding the ICT. Kenny shrugs off the glitches at his earlier demonstration, lean backs in his chair sand stares wistfully out the window.

"Some day I'd like to put on a play with a cast of virtual humans,” he says.

Mt. Wilson Observed

"Two firefighters die." Each thick black letter blazes through the scratchy grime of the plexiglass newspaper rack. They ignite my attention. They singe my mind even after I pass, as I board a 754 Rapid at Wilshire and Vermont and as I disembark in Los Feliz. They smolder as I walk to the library, where I'll fret and worry over personal concerns. As I wonder about my future, as my life goes on, as I deconstruct my own life and construct meaningless little tragedies out of what I find, a real tragedy sinks in.

It began as something of a triviality. Its faint scent that first day offered an occasion for a weak joke about smog, that easy target in Los Angeles.

The week moved on. The smoke rose over the horizon. The chatter rose. First slight concern on Twitter, then brief updates on hourly radio news updates, until the full force of the conflagration took shape in 16 thick, charred letters across the top of the Los Angeles Times.

My watery eyes. The orange shadows on the building across the courtyard from my apartment. The mountains of pyrocumulus clouds I've seen from the shores of Venice to the seats of a Blue Line train as it headed south toward Long Beach and every inch in between. The dry, inescapable heat. Layers of reality settled upon my skin alongside the caked, salty remnants of my sweat.

By today, the Station Fire in the San Gabriel Mountains has become nationwide news, as have a number of other blazes. Among the news: the fire's march on Mt. Wilson, where flames threatened broadcast transmitters and a historic observatory, a complex essential to the history of modern science. The observatory holds special meaning for me. In late April I visited the observatory as I closed out my time at USC's Annenberg School for Communications. K.C. Cole took my fellow science writing students and me to the observatory. We marvelled at the spot where Edwin Hubble learned our Milky Way was not the universe's only galaxy and discovered crucial evidence of the Big Bang. We wondered where Albert Einstein may have set foot during a visit. We fantasized about joining one of the viewing parties often hosted at the observatory. We thrilled that, a century later, the observatory still contributes to our unfolding understanding of the universe we inhabit.

That day, I took a few pictures of the observatory, a few of which accompany this post. It's not particularly stunning photography, but I've thought of the site often throughout the past few days and thought I'd share some selections of what I saw during my visit. Featuring Hubble's locker, old equipment that seems like it came from a 60's sci-fi show and the massive structure housing the 100-inch Hooker telescope — just one of the observatory's telescopes — the pictures evoke my memories of that visit and my awe at both the human drive for knowledge and our industrious nature.

That visit meant something else to me too. I recall stepping out of a friend's car after parking outside one of the telescopes. The air was chilly and crisp, even though it was nearly May, and I smiled when I saw a patch of snow, the first snow I had seen in person in more than two years. The scent of pine needles danced around me, intoxicated me, lured my mind to the great outdoors. It was a scent I missed, a familiar scent that reminded me of home, even though home, in a literal sense, sat on a suburban street in Ventura devoid of pine trees. It was a reminder of the Earth, this unimaginable, expansive place we wander through every second.

And this landscape had special meaning. Four years earlier — minus a month or so — I joined friends for a camping trip in these same mountains to celebrate a friend's 25th birthday. It was one of those memorable trips where the lines between friends and family blur, a trip that offered another sense of home. That trip to the observatory was my first time back to that wilderness. This week, when I saw the smoke, even before I learned the observatory was threatened, I thought of the camp site my friends had found. Of the creek we hiked upon and the rope swing from which some of them launched into a frigid creek. Of the children in our group playing among pine cones. Of acoustic music around the campfire. Of comfortable smiles. Of the contentment of nature.

As important as the landscape and the history is, I know two families have been shattered by the loss of the firefighters who perished, and I realize there are at least dozens more whose lives have been permanently changed by the loss of their homes. I'll treasure those men's sacrifice fighting to save this place that, in just two short slivers of time, meant so much to me.

For the moment, whatever the observatory's fate, however the fire progresses, I'll remember that small speck of wondrous land high above the undulating ribbons of concrete and plaster and electric light expanding outward from this corner of the universe we call home.