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.
Their beaks changed during the pandemic. Is it rapid evolution? | CNN
However, as UCLA researchers looked over data on the birds that have resided on their campus in recent years, they noticed something odd: Juncos that hatched in 2021 and 2022, after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, had longer beaks similar to those seen on the mountain birds. But as pandemic restrictions eased at UCLA and students returned to classes, the city bird traits returned, and the beaks of the birds hatched in 2023 and 2024 were shortened once more, researchers Pamela Yeh and Eleanor Diamant reported in December in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Yeh and Diamant were quoted.)
Protests intensify in Iran | KCRW 89.9-FM’s “Press Play”
Hundreds of people have been killed over the past several days as protests rock Iran. UCLA professor of law and global studies Benjamin Radd is an expert on Iran and American foreign policy, and says economic woes initially sparked the demonstrations. But they’ve expanded to become a broader criticism of the theocracy that rules the Islamic Republic. (Radd was interviewed; also by KNBC-TV and KCAL-TV – approx. 1:30 mark).
As treatments for diseases advance, so does one problem | Washington Post
Donald Kohn, a pediatric bone marrow transplant physician at the University of California, Los Angeles, has successfully rebuilt children’s immune systems with gene therapy in the clinic for over a decade, but it has not yet become a medicine. “There are several dozen rare diseases in a similar situation, where there is a therapy that looks good in academic clinical trials. But getting to the end zone of an approved drug is very challenging,” Kohn said.
The risky drugs doctors are prescribing anyway | Washington Post
These are “not trivial drugs,” said Dr. John Mafi, an internist and associate professor of medicine at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. Some “actually have an FDA black box warning because they almost double the risk of death in patients with dementia who take it.”
SCOTUS set to weigh in on transgender athletes | San Francisco Chronicle
“The court has the potential to rule here that anatomical sex at birth is a permissible or even exclusive way of understanding ‘sex’” on issues of discrimination, said Elana Redfield, a UCLA law professor. That wouldn’t directly overturn laws like California’s, she said, but it might “empower the federal government to deny educational funding to states that allow trans athletes to compete.”
Prominent eviction lawyer faces disciplinary charges from state bar | LAist
Legal ethics experts said the new charges against Block are serious. “The worst thing a lawyer can do is steal a client’s money,” said Scott Cummings, a law professor at UCLA. “This is effectively what the bar is saying Mr. Block has done here in roughly half a dozen cases.”
