The Los Angeles Times reported on new data from UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute showing that more Altadena homeowners are beginning the rebuilding process after last year’s wildfire, though major gaps remain. Gabriella Carmona, a senior research analyst at the institute and lead author of the report, said recovery is still “very deeply uncertain for most households,” with financial barriers slowing progress from permits to construction. The study found that while more than half of affected homeowners have taken some step toward recovery, only about 30% have started building. Read more about UCLA in today’s New York Times and CNN.
More highlights from UCLA in the News: April 9, 2026
Moonbug Entertainment partners with UCLA Center | Animation Magazine
Moonbug Entertainment [behind “CoComelon” and “Blippi”] today announced a partnership with the Center for Scholars and Storytellers at UCLA, a nonprofit research center that connects academic research with media creators to support the well-being and development of young audiences, to integrate child development research into the creation of preschool programming. (UCLA’s Yalda Uhls was quoted.)
Fireball season brings surge in meteor sightings | Spectrum News 1
"This is the first meteorite I ever found," said Peng Ni, a professor of earth, planetary and space sciences at UCLA, while holding up a small box displaying the fragment. He said meteorites fall to Earth daily but most go unnoticed. "We're talking about tens or even hundreds of thousands of meteorites coming to earth every year, but most of the time they fall into the ocean and nobody sees them," Ni said.
Immigration arrests of people without criminal convictions have increased | NBC News
Graeme Blair, co-director of the Deportation Data Project and professor of political science at UCLA, said in a statement that the analysis showed that arrests did not surge only in Democratic cities where the administration launched immigration enforcement operations, such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis. “In fact, even at the peak of the Minneapolis surge, those arrests accounted for only 15% of nationwide street arrests,” Blair said. “The expansion is truly national.”
Three ways the Supreme Court could upend the midterm elections | MS Now
(Commentary by UCLA’s Richard Hasen) Pending before the Supreme Court are three disparate cases, each with the potential to remake rules on district boundaries, campaign finance and the eligibility of certain mail-in ballots. These rulings, issued in the middle of the election season, could potentially confound voters, scramble overworked and threatened election administrators, and alter campaign strategies in the middle of heated election contests.
Medi-Cal immigrant enrollment is dropping | KFF Health News
But two researchers, Leonardo Cuello at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families and Susan Babey at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, pointed out that California and most other states had fully resumed eligibility checks by mid-2024. In other words, that wouldn’t explain why enrollment has fallen precipitously in the last 12 months or so.
Trump calls investigation into LA schools’ gender disclosure policies | New York Times
Nationwide, 3.3 percent of children aged 13 to 17 identify as transgender, according to the Williams Institute, a research center on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.
U.S. fertility rates drop to another record low | New York Times
Martha Bailey, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that while the decline in the rate may look significant, it could reverse course. In the 1970s, the fertility rate had also dipped sharply, to below replacement levels. But by the time that cohort of women had reached their mid-40s, they had an average of 1.9 children, and the subsequent cohorts had an average of two. “They weren’t opting out of motherhood, they were delaying it,” she said. (Also: UCLA’s Dr. Alison Gemmill was quoted by CNN.)
Unions play key role in keeping direct care workers in the workforce | Medical Xpress
Unionization and working for a public employer are associated with significantly lower turnover among direct care workers (DCW), a group that provides daily care for older adults and those who are disabled and unable to care for themselves, UCLA-led research suggests. The findings on the role of DCW unionization, published in the peer-reviewed JAMA Network Open, apply to both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, suggesting that unionization can play a significant role in keeping DCWs in the workforce — and save the health care system $1.5 billion a year in turnover costs. (UCLA’s Dr. Geoffrey Gusoff was quoted. Also: Scienmag.)
City animals act in the same brazen ways around the world | The Conversation
(Commentary by UCLA’s Daniel Blumstein) Studies show that animals living in urban environments around the world exhibit common sets of behaviors. At the same time, these urban animals are losing traits they would need in the wild. This process of urban animals’ behavior becoming more similar is known as “behavioral homogenization,” and it accompanies the loss of species diversity with urbanization.
It’s illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey. But why? | Popular Science
While pumping gas is an act that most people (New Jerseyans excluded) do without thinking, there are health hazards associated with it. “Basically, gasoline vapors include benzene,” a colorless, sweet-smelling chemical that’s highly flammable, says [UCLA’s Michael] Jerrett, “as well as other volatile organic compounds,” which are carbon-based chemicals that evaporate into the air at room temperature.
