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.
U.S. travel alert for Mexico over fake drugs | Los Angeles Times
The U.S. State Department issued a warning Friday for Americans to “exercise caution” when buying medications from drugstores in Mexico … “The State Department warning is a good and necessary step,” said Chelsea Shover, a UCLA researcher whose team documented the problem this year. “But there’s still a lot we don’t know about the scope of this issue, and I think finding that will be critical to issuing more precise warnings and taking action.” (Also: Associated Press.)
What a new 2nd Amendment could look like | Washington Post
“There’s a revolution happening in the courts right now,” Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor and author of “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” told me. “The lower courts are striking down gun laws left and right.” This isn’t to say the gun rights forces are winning every last case … But the gun rights movement is winning a lot more these days, and as Winkler says, “The gun laws that are being struck down are really surprising.”
UCLA’s Match Day for medical students | KCAL-TV
Take a look as [medical students] stepped up and picked up some “match day” envelopes that say where they’ve been accepted into residency programs at hospitals across the country … We had a chance to talk with one young man whose father fled Vietnam as a teenager during the war. Now he’s living out the American Dream. “This is something that’s not just for myself — it’s obviously for my family, for the community I grew up in, and it’s a big, big deal for all of us,” said UCLA medical student Michael Minh Le.
Snowpack is driving fears of flooding | Washington Post
“The risk is really coming from the fact that those dams now have to essentially release all of the water that flows into them,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, said in an online presentation on Friday. “Rather than buffering flows, they’ve reached their safety maximum.” (Swain was also quoted by USA Today, BBC News and The Hill and was featured by KCRW-FM.)
California and COVID three years later | New York Times
The virus itself remains very much around, unlikely to burn out altogether, experts say. Though California thankfully didn’t have a giant surge this winter, roughly 3,000 people in the state are still testing positive for the coronavirus each day, a level of spread that Dr. Timothy Brewer, an epidemiologist at UCLA, said was akin to a “very bad flu season.”
Where did all your Zoom friends go? | New York Times
A similar survey in the United States in May 2020 by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, looked at which types of digital connections were most beneficial. That study found that people of all ages were generally most satisfied with video calls, as opposed to texts or phone calls, and that increased satisfaction with those communications was associated with less loneliness. “It was really the satisfying connections that were alleviating these forms of psychological distress,” said Jaana Juvonen, a developmental psychologist and the study’s lead author.
Reconsidering the idea of foggy ‘mommy brain’ | Salon
“We know from the animal literature and from some human studies that actually there are a lot of cognitive benefits to pregnancy,” Bridget Callaghan, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-author of the paper, told Salon. “If you look at the animal literature, there are lots of studies showing that moms become much better predators, much better protectors of their young, they’re able to catch food in multiple locations and remember where the food was stored, and all of those abilities get massively enhanced during pregnancy and the postpartum period.”
Tapping Medicaid to pay rent for homeless | Kaiser Health News
In a precursor to the state’s current initiative, California experimented with a mix of housing assistance programs and social services through its “Whole Person Care” pilot program. Nadereh Pourat, of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, evaluated the program for the state, concluding that local trials reduced emergency visits and hospitalizations, saving an average of $383 per Medi-Cal beneficiary per year — a meager amount compared with the program’s cost. Over five years, the state spent $3.6 billion serving about 250,000 patients enrolled in local experiments, Pourat said.
Saturn’s moon may fling microbes into space | Forbes
Saturn’s sixth-largest moon Enceladus has a secret. About 12 miles underneath the icy crust of this “veiny eyeball” moon is a warm, dark saltwater ocean thought to have the same kinds of hydrothermal vents found in Earth’s oceans — and where microbes thrive … tiny icy silica particles from the seafloor are eventually sprayed into space from fractures in the ice known as ‘‘tiger stripes” near Enceladus’ warmer south pole … “Our research shows that these flows are strong enough to pick up materials from the seafloor and bring them to the ice shell that separates the ocean from the vacuum of space,” said Ashley Schoenfeld, group leader and a UCLA doctoral student in planetary science, in a statement.
Rates of youth drug abuse on the rise | San Diego Union-Tribune
Research conducted by UCLA shows that the rate of overdose deaths among teenagers in the United States nearly doubled in 2020, the first year of the COVID pandemic, and increased by an additional 20 percent in the first half of 2021 compared to the 10 years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic.
Maryland bill seeks gender-affirming care under Medicaid | HuffPost
According to data from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, 24,000 Maryland residents are transgender, and 6,000 are enrolled in Medicaid. In 2022, 98 transgender Maryland residents got gender-affirming care through Medicaid.
How Mister Rogers would fare in today’s world | USA Today
And according to researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law, since September 2020, more than 200 local, state and federal entities have introduced more than 600 “anti-Critical Race Theory bills, resolutions, executive orders, opinion letters, statements, and other measures.”
