In light of the trending Artemis II mission, Vox republished an article from September 2025 featuring Haig Aintablian, director of the UCLA Space Medicine Program, and other leading clinicians and investigators in the field. The piece explores not only the viability of human life on Mars, but also space medicine technologies that may have beneficial applications here on Earth. “I do believe that with the amount of emphasis being placed on radiation protection, we’re going to figure out ways to actually protect against significant amounts of radiation for the general public for multiple uses,” said Aintablian. Read more about UCLA in today’s Vanity Fair, USA Today and others. 

More highlights from UCLA in the News: April 8, 2026

The latest on the conflict in Iran | KNBC-TV

“We now have two somewhat conflicting statements issued by the Islamic Republic. You have the statement from the foreign minister Araghchi indicating there’s a ceasefire that’s been implemented. Then we saw a statement come out from the Supreme National Security Council, which basically said the United States is agreeing in principle to these ten points,” said UCLA’s Benjamin Radd (Radd was also interviewed by KCAL-TV and KTTV-TV.)

Los Angeles mayoral election looms. New poll shows something ‘unusual’ | USA Today

Many Los Angelenos are undecided in the city’s mayoral election, something one expert called “unusual” considering voters will cast their ballots in less than two months. A poll from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs found that 40% of voters are undecided in a race that’ll determine who leads one of the nation’s most populous cities in the coming years … “It is unusual for 40% of likely voters to be unsure of their choice just two months before an LA mayoralty election,” Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said in a statement.

House Democrats join experts to defend voting systems | Los Angeles Times

Sonni Waknin, senior staff attorney at the UCLA Voting Rights Project, said that “democracy is under attack” across the nation, and that the photo ID requirement Trump and other Republicans are pushing would disenfranchise a million eligible voters in California alone.

Candidates for governor are playing it safe. Gen Z voters can’t afford that | CalMatters

(Commentary co-written by UCLA student Andrea Escobar) Gen Z voters are looking for candidates who have a plan of action. For our entire lives, we were sold the California Dream — affordable housing, quality education and access to good-paying jobs. Yet today those promises feel increasingly distant, as students take on massive debt and multiple degrees just to stay afloat economically. 

How the 1970 Clean Air Act affected car emissions and smog | Live Science

(Commentary by UCLA’s Ann Carlson) Cars on the road today are 99% cleaner than they were in 1970. Air quality in the United States is much, much better as a result. In Los Angeles, where I live, lead levels in the air were 50 times higher in the 1970s than today, and the amount of lead in kids’ blood has plummeted. What made that drop possible is arguably the most important environmental technology ever invented: the catalytic converter.

Awards season is over. Strike season has just begun | Vanity Fair

“Just go back four months and look how much AI has changed things,” says UCLA film historian Jonathan Kuntz. “It’s hard to imagine that we’re going to be able to predict four years out.”

An Eddie Murphy comedy shaped insider trading law | Marketplace

The setup is pure Hollywood, but the idea that you could get away with a scheme like this was accurate, said Andrew Verstein, a law professor and co-director of the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy at UCLA. “For most of American history, if you came to have some information that gave you a really strong sense of what was going to happen in commodity prices, you could trade commodity futures and options and make money with that information, and there wouldn’t be any possible legal consequence to you,” he said.  

Owners of vacant San Diego homes could soon be taxed | Los Angeles Times

“This is a policy, essentially, to bring luxury housing back onto the market,” said Shane Phillips, a housing initiative project manager with UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. “It does help, but most of the homes that are used as vacation or second homes are not affordable.”

Fan’s recordings of 10,000 concerts turned into online archive | Associated Press

David Nimmer, a longtime copyright attorney who also teaches at UCLA, said that under anti-bootlegging laws, the artists technically own the original compositions and live recordings. But since neither Jacobs nor the archive are profiting from the endeavor, lawsuits seem unlikely.