UCLA in the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription. See more UCLA in the News.
Start of fire season has moved up 6 weeks since 1990 | Los Angeles Times
You are not imagining it. Fire season in California is indeed starting earlier and lasting longer in virtually every region of California than it did two decades ago, researchers have found, thanks largely to human-caused climate change … “The main driver is the climate and meteorological conditions,” said Gavin Madakumbura, a UCLA postdoctoral researcher and the study’s lead author.
Astronomers gather more clues about interstellar comet | CNN
But big questions about 3I/ATLAS remain, some of which may be impossible to answer — including where exactly it came from. “No one knows where the comet came from. It’s like glimpsing a rifle bullet for a thousandth of a second. You can’t project that back with any accuracy to figure out where it started on its path,” said lead study author David Jewitt, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a statement. (Also: New Scientist, Scienmag and Phys.org.)
Mailing stool test kits could boost cancer screening | HealthDay News
Automatically mailing a stool test kit to people’s homes might be the best way to boost colon cancer screening among younger adults, a new study says … “Removing the need for patients to actively opt into screening can lead to better outcomes, particularly when trying to engage younger, generally healthy adults who may not yet perceive themselves at risk for cancer,” senior researcher Dr. Folasade May said in a news release. She’s a gastroenterologist and cancer prevention researcher at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The latest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict | KCAL-TV
“There’s domestic constraints and international constraints. On the domestic part, you now have a country that has to mobilize its forces, its reserves. They’re already exhausted, drained,” said UCLA’s Benjamin Radd.
A California judge opens the door to election deepfakes | Politico
“Congress’ judgment is if the consequences are that platforms will over-restrict porn in some measure, no big deal,” UCLA Law professor Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment specialist, told [Digital Future Daily]. Whereas when it comes to political speech, even AI-generated, he says: “We might be worried about the over-chilling of, say, election-related parody.”
Chatbots can go into a delusional spiral. Here’s how | New York Times
We asked Terence Tao, a mathematics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is regarded by many as the finest mathematician of his generation, if there was any merit to the ideas Brooks invented with Lawrence. Tao said a new way of thinking could unlock these cryptographic puzzles, but he was not swayed by Brooks’s formulas nor the computer programs that Lawrence generated to prove them.
Diseased sea lions show up on California coast | San Francisco Chronicle
Katherine Prager, a UCLA ecologist who studies the disease, stressed the difficulty of proving a clear connection between the Blob and the current outbreak. Observing patterns across long-term data sets could be increasingly difficult in light of ongoing cuts to federal funding, she added — making events like this year’s leptospirosis spike harder to explain.
Antidepressant use during pregnancy | LAist 89.3-FM’s “AirTalk”
“SSRI stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Basically, they work to keep serotonin floating around in the brain, in the synapsis, for longer than it otherwise would,” said UCLA’s Dr. Brittany Booth (approx. 1:40 mark).
Workout clothes are made of plastic. Now what? | New York Times Wirecutter
Changing swiftly is best practice for skin and gynecological health, as well, said Megan Bernstein, assistant clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, in an email interview. (She noted, though, that it won’t hurt to linger once in a while.)
