In a Los Angeles Times commentary, Jon Christensen, founder and director of The Laboratory for Environmental Strategies at UCLA — which provided data and analysis to support the park needs assessment for the city of Los Angeles — writes: “The city of Los Angeles is turning its back on parks and nature, even after investing in a yearlong, citywide park needs assessment. There’s no good time for a major city to do this, especially in an era of climate change, let alone in L.A.” Read more about UCLA in today’s Forbes, Associated Press and other outlets.  

More highlights from UCLA in the News: Feb. 18, 2026

UCLA doctor named to “Forbes 250: America’s Greatest Innovators” | Forbes

Dr. Dennis Slamon (No. 52) fought industry skepticism to develop the first targeted cancer drug.

Some GOP states seek to limit environmental regulations | Associated Press

Cara Horowitz, an environmental law professor and executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law, said the legislation would prevent state agencies from making “independent decisions about how much to protect public health from things like water pollution, air pollution, and toxics.”

Coffee producers across the world are facing more crop-damaging heat | CBC News

Lily Peck, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, compared the impact of heat on coffee plants to heat that forces humans to sweat. “That’s your body using more energy to try and cool you down than you would be doing in your optimum temperature,” said Peck, who studies how plants and animals respond to human-caused climate change. “So the plant kind of has to divert its resources away from general function to kind of prioritize surviving.” (Peck also wrote a commentary in The Conversation.)  

Jesse Jackson dies at 84 | KNBC-TV

“His arrival right after the insurrection, at the very end of it, meant that this was a person coming in whom people had a lot of confidence in, that he actually could explain to the various groups what was going on. He could explain it to the world. He could explain it to local and state and national governance as well. And he could help with, you know, getting past this hurt, getting past this sense of helplessness and hopelessness,” said UCLA’s Brenda Stevenson (approx. 1:10 mark).

Surging prediction markets face legal backlash in U.S. | The Guardian

Clinicians are also watching closely. Timothy Fong, an addiction psychiatrist and gambling researcher at UCLA, said more patients were using the platforms, and were often describing themselves as “investors” rather than “gamblers.” “Ideally, in my world, we would have these products regulated by the people who know how to handle gambling,” he said.