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 death of the sidewalk | Washington Post
“I see this conflict more as an outcome of bad decisions and bad design,” said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, co-author of “Sidewalks” and an urban planning professor at the scooter-saturated campus of the University of California at Los Angeles. “Cities kept widening the streets and narrowing the sidewalks, and downgrading activities to accommodate only walking…. I don’t mean to say sometimes scooter drivers are not obnoxious. But I’d say it’s a less obnoxious use than cars.”
Mexico hailstorm was uncommon and enormous, but not something new | Washington Post Analysis
Rather than dumping six feet of hail in one place, “these enormous #hail drifts are almost certainly the result of an urban flash flood during hail-producing thunderstorm, which washed huge volumes of hail ice from around city into culverts & low-lying areas,” tweeted Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles. (Also: Forbes)
Glenn Langer, the cardiologist who helped disadvantaged students attend college, dies at 91 | Los Angeles Times
When Glenn Langer retired as head of the UCLA’s cardiovascular research lab in 1997, he dipped into his retirement savings to buy books, calculators and tickets to museums and theaters. Not for himself, but for disadvantaged students at Lennox Middle School…. Dr. James Weiss, UCLA’s chief of cardiology, once said that Lager “was an inspirational mentor and teacher whose self-described mantra was ‘I get paid for my hobby,’” he said. “Many of his trainees went on to become leaders in academic medicine and cardiovascular science.”
How do you read ancient scrolls too brittle to unfurl? An American scientist may have an answer | Washington Post
The scanning took place at the UCLA dental lab. The work, funded by the Mellon Foundation, took three days and yielded what Diozzi jokingly called “a huge amount of data with no meaning at all,” until it is analyzed.
The 2020 race is officially on: Why both sides are capable of losing | Los Angeles Times
“The most challenging thing in a presidential election is to be the party out of power when there’s a strong economy,” noted Lynn Vavreck, a UCLA scholar who co-authored one of the best of the 2016 postmortem studies, “Identity Crisis.” Democrats “need to find an issue to focus on that voters will consider more important than the economy,” she told me. But it can’t just be opposition to Trump. “That was one of the lessons of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.”
‘Gayborhoods’ used to be LGBT safe havens. Now, many LGBT people have been priced out | USA Today
A study published in 2018 by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that lesbian, gay and bisexual people are more likely to be living in poverty than their straight peers. Lesbian and bisexual women, however, are worse off compared with gay and bisexual men. Making matters worse, transgender people face higher rates of poverty than the rest of the LGBT population.
Elizabeth Holmes Theranos trial to start next year. The story so far | KQED
While wire fraud is a go-to allegation in most white collar indictments, [UCLA’s Peter] Johnson said, it’s not just the transmission of a lie or misrepresentation that will secure a conviction. The government also needs to prove intent, a harder lift. “An indictment is not evidence,” Johnson said. “I think sometimes we lose that; the evidence comes out at trial.”
Video hearings in immigration court are harming immigrants’ cases | Pacific Standard
In an exhaustive review of court data, published in the Northwestern Law Review in 2015, University of California–Los Angeles law professor Ingrid Eagly concluded that “televideo should instead be understood as an intentional design element of a rapidly evolving detention-to deportation pipeline.”
School busing and race tore L.A. apart in the 1970s. Now, Kamala Harris is reviving debate | Los Angeles Times
Across the nation, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling proved to be more a crack in the door than a flinging open of opportunity. Over time it had an effect, though ever so gradually, according to a May report from the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project. “The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as well as a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s and early 1970s produced momentum towards increased desegregation for black students that lasted until the late 1980s, as districts across much of the country worked to achieve the promise of Brown — integrated schools for all children,” the report noted. (Also: Politico)
The legacy of Chicano journalist and activist Raul Ruiz | KCET-TV’s “Artbound”
“Raul produced some of the most iconic images in the presence of tragedy,” says Chon Noriega, Director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA where the digitized archive of La Raza is currently housed. “The image of the killing of Ruben Salazar in particular was seen around the world. It became iconic.”
How private prisons affect sentencing | NPR’s “Hidden Brain”
“When a private prison opens in a state, then the average length of a sentence increases by 23 days. The presence of a private prison does not make it more likely that you go to prison,” said UCLA’s Christian Dippel.
Democrats feel power in diverse field of candidates | San Francisco Chronicle
Matt Barreto, a UCLA professor and co-founder of Latino Decisions, a research and polling firm, noted that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders moved away from February comments he made to Vermont Public Radio that Americans “have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age.”
A surprising idea about the risks of extinction | The Atlantic
The wolves of Isle Royale inspired Chris Kyriazis and his colleagues at UCLA to simulate animal populations over hundreds of generations. Their findings were counterintuitive: What doomed the wolves is not just the small number that have lived on the island in modern times, but perhaps also the large number of wolves that lived thousands of years ago. Kyriazis presented his study at the Evolution 2019 conference, and the team posted a preprint of the article, which has not been peer reviewed yet, on bioRxiv.
Creator of HBO’s ‘Euphoria’ says it tries to be ‘empathic’ | Associated Press
Yalda T. Uhls, a former movie executive who studies how media affects the behavior of adolescents, has mixed feelings about the show. She has watched episodes with her 19-year-old daughter and says it prompted important conversations that would never have occurred without “Euphoria.” Yet neither mom nor daughter recognized the extreme world represented onscreen. “I applaud any show that encourages understanding and empathy, or that shows teens and adolescents as they really are,” said Uhls, who heads the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA. “I’m just not sure this represents all high school experiences.”
Strict voter ID laws threaten the franchise of trans Americans | Pacific Standard
Largely overlooked in the public debate and court hearings on Voter ID laws is their effect on another demographic: the transgender community. North Carolina’s new laws could put barriers in the path of trans people trying to vote. The Williams Institute at the University of California–Los Angeles School of Law estimated in 2018 that strict voter ID laws in eight states stood to disenfranchise upwards of 78,000 transgender people that year.
America has a health equity problem | U.S. News & World Report
Health in the United States has declined while overall health equity has shown no improvement over the course of 25 years, according to a new study. “This is despite years-long commitment — at least a verbal commitment, lip service — to health equity,” says Fred Zimmerman, a professor and health economics expert at the University of California–Los Angeles and lead author of the study, published Friday by JAMA Network Open. “Yet we’re not getting where we want to be, and we’re going backwards.”
Why ‘The Queen’ documentary is an essential queer time capsule | Rolling Stone
But among the gifts to be cherished from this renewed focus is Frank Simon’s 1968 film “The Queen.” It remains obscure to most, but now with a 4K restoration produced by Bret Wood of Kino Lorber — building on work done by UCLA Film & Television Archive, Outfest UCLA Legacy Project and the Harry Ransom Center — the film is being re-released on June 28th, so that it may be embraced by an entirely new generation.
This jaw-dropping book changed the Hollywood gossip game | New York Post
“It has had a long and lasting effect on the image of Hollywood as a hotbed of decadence and scandal,” UCLA film historian Jan-Christopher Horak told The Post…. And despite its “amalgamation of truth and rumor,” as Horak put it, “Babylon” has remained continuously in print, with its silver-screen gossip viewed as gospel. It is still the “Bible of Hollywood scandal.”
Health Dept. delays anti-LGBTQ ‘conscience rule’ amid lawsuits | The Advocate
“In the Obama administration, we were focused on expanding access to health care through the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the full and balanced enforcement of anti-discrimination and provider conscience laws,” Jocelyn Samuels, Executive Director of UCLA’s Williams Institute, a think tank on LGBTQ issues, said in a statement in May.
New tool can predict changes in the composition of the gut microbiome | Earth.com
In collaboration with researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, experts at UCLA have developed a tool to predict how the gut microbiome will change over time. The new computational modeling method uses snapshots of the microbial community found in an individual’s gut to identify the various types of microbes present, which are indicative of future transformation.
Noninvasive test improves detection of aggressive prostate cancer | Medical Xpress
A team of researchers from UCLA and the University of Toronto have identified a new biomarker found in urine that can help detect aggressive prostate cancer, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of men each year from undergoing unnecessary surgeries and radiotherapy treatments.
Is there any reason for CBD to be in your skin-care products? | Self
The “most robust” evidence we have for topical CBD is in the realm of pain control, Jeremy Davis, M.D., dermatologist at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, tells SELF. “But it’s being tried for just about everything else,” he says. And, as SELF explained previously, the evidence for CBD and pain relief isn’t all that convincing to begin with.
Climate change versus clean water: A battle over California funds | CALmatters
Some of those legal restrictions on fund use end in 2021, according to the Legislative Counsel’s opinion, when the cap-and-trade extension kicks in. At that point, “The handcuffs are off the Legislature in terms of how the Legislature can use these funds,” said Cara Horowitz, co-executive director of UCLA Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. “The Legislature may very well decide to continue prioritizing projects that reduce greenhouse gases and promote climate resilience after 2021, but it won’t be obligated to do so,” Horowitz said.
Did Kamala Harris really disagree with Obama’s deportation policy? | Politifact
Sameer Ashar, a UCLA law professor and former co-director of the UC Irvine Immigrant Rights Clinic, told us the record is mixed on Harris’ position. “My general sense is there was a lot of grassroots movement pressure on elected officials in California to direct local law enforcement not to cooperate with the federal government on immigration enforcement,” Ashar said. “And she responded to that pressure. She took some positive steps, but it was under great pressure.”
New California law restricts ammunition purchases | Marketplace
“This is going to make it harder for criminals and people who aren’t supposed to have guns to get ammunition, too,” said UCLA’s Adam Winkler.
Fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall riots | KPCC-FM’s “Take Two”
“Marsha P. Johnson was a longtime trans queer activist. She was a black woman, born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and raised in the lower Manhattan streets,” said UCLA’s Marcus Anthony Hunter. (Approx. 17:00 mark)
The most iconic Shakespeare film adaptations | KPCC-FM’s “FilmWeek”
“So, there are some [adaptations] that are very easy to get at. ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ with Kevin Kline, is charming. ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ which Kenneth Branagh did — very charming. But I think there are also more challenging versions that are rewarding,” said UCLA’s Robert Watson. (Approx. 1:00 mark)
