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.
Ocean temperatures are off the charts | Los Angeles Times
Underlying everything is human-caused climate change, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. But atop that are a handful of other potential factors, including the early arrival of El Niño; the recent eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano; new regulations around sulfur aerosol emissions or even a dearth of Saharan dust. “The North Atlantic is record-shatteringly warm right now,” Swain said during a briefing Monday. (Swain was also quoted by the New York Times and interviewed by KCRW-FM – approx. :30 mark.)
‘Alarming’ death rates in U.S. | The Conversation
(Commentary by UCLA’s Patrick Heuveline) People in the U.S. are dying at higher rates than in other similar high-income countries, and that difference is only growing. That’s the key finding of a new study that I published in the journal PLOS One. In 2021, more than 892,000 of the 3,456,000 deaths the U.S. experienced, or about 1 in 4, were “excess deaths.” In 2019, that number was 483,000 deaths, or nearly 1 in 6. That represents an 84.9% increase in excess deaths in the U.S. between 2019 and 2021.
For birds, wildfires pose a hazard — but also opportunity | Ottawa Citizen
“When I see pictures like the ones out of New York, I think ‘This is going to make a lot of people sick. And it’s going to make a lot of animals sick,” said Olivia Sanderfoot, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies the effect of wildfire smoke on birds and other animals. “Pet birds, wild birds and poultry are all highly vulnerable to air pollution and that’s because they all share a common respiratory system,” Sanderfoot said in an interview after air quality began to plummet in Ottawa and on the east coast of the United States in early June due to wildfires burning in Quebec and Ontario.
Wildfires are five times bigger than they used to be | Bloomberg News
Glen MacDonald, a climate scientist and distinguished professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who was not part of the study, said it is “another excellent paper that shows the relationship between anthropogenic climate change and drying the climate.” The link “is true in California, but it is true in the western United States in general and [is] increasing fires,” he said.
First ChatGPT defamation lawsuit to test AI’s legal liability | Bloomberg Law
A defamation lawsuit filed against the artificial intelligence company OpenAI LLC will provide the first foray into the largely untested legal waters surrounding the popular program ChatGPT. … “In principle, I think libel lawsuits against OpenAI might be viable,” said Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment law professor at UCLA. “In practice, I think this lawsuit is unlikely to succeed.”
Helping former foster students succeed | Inside Higher Ed
According to a recent report by the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools, holistic wraparound services that provide financial and emotional support, consistent and sufficient counseling, and social programming are key to helping students formerly in foster care succeed.
