UCLA In the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription to view. See more UCLA In the News.
The Delta variant and the return to school | New York Times
“I think it’s going to be really important to consider what your risk is, what the risk of a child is,” said Dr. Anne Rimoin, an epidemiology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Part of that calculation, she said, is to weigh the benefits of school, both for learning and social development, against the health risks to children, most of whom are unvaccinated.
How COVID-19 variants develop | KTTV-TV
We wanted to know too … so we asked UCLA Emergency Medicine Professor Matt Waxman. He told us it’s like a copying machine. Think of those pieces of paper flying out of the machine’s tray as cells reproducing in our bodies. That is where variants develop; Waxman says they are essentially bad copies or errors. ”Most of these errors don’t result in severe disease. Some of these errors give an advantage to the virus and can make them stick to our cells easier as we’ve seen with some of these variants,” Waxman described.
When can I get a coronavirus booster shot? | Los Angeles Daily News
“This is being closely looked at and the guidance may change over time as new variants arise for which the vaccines may not be as effective — or if we notice a significant waning of immunity over time,” said Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, who studies the eradication of communicable diseases at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. [Kim-Farley is also interviewed by NBC Nightly News (approx. 1:25 mark) and KNBC-TV (approx. 1:25 mark.)]
Local emergency services’ attitudes toward vaccines | Santa Monica Daily Press
Dr. Timothy Brewer is a professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. He said lagging vaccine rates are dangerous in both the short and long term as unvaccinated people are at greater risk of contracting the disease and spreading it.
In California, drastically different responses to the drought | NPR’s “All Things Considered”
“You know, water conservation is not the only strategy here… When there is wastewater produced, we don’t separate out the gray water, which could be reused on the spot very easily,” said UCLA’s Alex Hall.
Fires searing rural towns | San Francisco Chronicle
“We’ve seen this trajectory, year after year. … We could see the plume day after day, getting bigger on the horizon,” said UCLA’s Glen MacDonald.
To fight wildfires, California turns to $8,000-an-hour helicopters | Bloomberg Businessweek
In the years since, as the population has grown, homes have been built deeper into exurban areas, endangering more lives. “You have this interface between flammable vegetation and people’s homes, and that means they’re inherently at pretty high risk,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment & Sustainability at [UCLA].
Northwest heat wave was a harsh wake-up call | Associated Press
“The really important and complex point is that places that are already hot — and are going to get hotter — are already adapted. They have air conditioning and they have homes built for wind to flow through,” said Alan Barreca, an associate professor at UCLA’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability. “Definitely the Pacific Northwest is not used to those temps,” he said, “and so they’re more vulnerable.”
California wildfire smoke can be seen from space | Fox News
More footage from satellites released by a UCLA environmental professor shows the actively burning fires and billowing smoke in alarming clarity. “NorCal fire situation escalated this PM to level many of us feared it would this season, given extreme drought & record-dry vegetation, with multiple towns impacted by fast-moving fire fronts in past several hours,” Daniel Swain, climate scientist with the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, wrote on Twitter.
Legal changes would protect street vendors | Los Angeles Times
(Commentary co-written by UCLA’s Scott Cummings) That street taco you have been craving was supposed to be legal by now. Instead, thousands of sidewalk food vendors in Los Angeles remain unpermitted, denied the dream of entrepreneurialism by laws that undercut food safety principles they claim to protect.
UCLA historian Gary Nash dies at 88 | Los Angeles Times
Although he retired from UCLA in 1994, he wrote more than 30 history books and textbooks focused on American history, race and class, and continued to publish articles, essays and op-eds long afterward. In an interview with the Economist about the recent politically driven outrage over the teachings of race in K-12 classrooms, Nash said the attempts to ban “uncomfortable” conversations will lead to less productive discussions. (UCLA’s Carla Pestana is quoted.)
Sleep debt in new mothers is associated with accelerated aging | Fast Company
A new study out of UCLA shows that from the first six months of motherhood, sleep-indebted women biologically age rapidly. … “We found that with every hour of additional sleep, the mother’s biological age was younger,” says co-author Judith Carroll, a psychobiologist at UCLA. “I, and many other sleep scientists, consider sleep health to be just as vital to overall health as diet and exercise.” (Also: The Science Times and Marketplace.)
Latino neighborhoods brace for census numbers | NBC News
With the expectation of increased Hispanic population, “we want to ensure, through data and advocacy, that Latino political power does not decrease in the 2021 redistricting cycle,” said Sonja Diaz, founding executive director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The lost canyon under Lake Powell | The New Yorker
Park Williams, a climate scientist at UCLA and the lead author of the Science study, told me that, to researchers, the droughts indicated in the tree-ring record “were almost like mythical beasts, lurking there.” Those droughts, it’s believed, were caused by shifts in the temperature of the eastern Pacific, which produced air-circulation patterns that blocked storms from reaching the western part of the continent.
Will the first Alzheimer’s drug make a difference? | Time
“Does the phrase ‘phones ringing off the hook’ mean anything to you?” says Dr. David Reuben, director of the Alzheimer’s and Dementia Care Program at University of California, Los Angeles about the initial response from patients in the days after the approval. “We spent several days when all we were doing was answering questions about aducanumab.”
How to avoid motion sickness | Business Insider España
“Motion sickness occurs when your brain can’t make sense of information sent from your eyes, ears, and body,” says physician and professor of medicine at UCLA Elizabeth Ko told Insider.
The extinct species within | The Scientist
Discovering when and where species of humans interbred with and interacted with each other will tell the hidden stories of our past and help us understand why H. sapiens is the only hominin species left alive today. And we’re just one case — “There are instances where these kinds of events are even more profound, even more dramatic, in other species,” says Sriram Sankararaman, a computational biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied ancient hybridizations in humans.
Using technology and nature to cut your air conditioning bill | CNN Business
Scientists have been researching the benefits of radiative cooling for years, including Goldstein’s co-founder and UCLA professor Aaswath Raman, who is a pioneer in the field. Several solutions and models to harness the process have been proposed in recent months.
Apple will scan users’ phones for child abuse imagery | KPCC-FM’s “AirTalk”
“This is a major shift for Apple. I think as Professor McDonald noted, they are touting their privacy record. You can’t go around Los Angeles without seeing an Apple billboard that says ‘privacy’ on it. So, Apple has taken a very strong stance against letting the government see encrypted personal information or communications,” said UCLA’s Alex Alben (approx. 7:40 mark).
