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.
Teacher led preschoolers in anti-Biden chant | Los Angeles Times
Tyrone Howard, a professor of education at UCLA, said the California Department of Education does set some standards for preschool education, but private schools often operate by a “slightly different set of guidelines,” which can include setting their own curriculum and standards. Yet even state guidelines for preschools might not cover such an incident, he said, noting that they tend to govern topics such as student-teacher ratios and don’t often delve into teacher conduct.
Rapid rise in omicron BA.2 subvariant cases | Los Angeles Times
Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, epidemiologist and infectious diseases expert at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said he expects to see either coronavirus cases flatten or a modest increase in cases, but nothing close to resembling the most recent Omicron winter surge. Kim-Farley said he suspected that California won’t get hit hard by BA.2 simply because so many people now have a reasonable degree of immunity, either through vaccination or having survived an infection of the subvariants that were dominant earlier, BA.1 or its descendant, BA.1.1.
L.A. seeing more omicron BA.2 subvariant cases | KTLA-TV
“Remember that the pandemic — while we’re in a lull right now — is not over,” UCLA Professor of Epidemiology Dr. Anne Rimoin told KTLA. Rimoin said more variants will emerge, and some will be more serious than others. “What we’re seeing in the U.K. is a significant increase in cases,” Rimoin said. “We’re not seeing an increase in severity, which is great news.”
How dangerous is BA.2, the new COVID variant? | Medical Xpress
As COVID-19 case numbers climb in East Asia and now Europe — a surge largely attributed to the BA.2 subvariant of omicron — it makes sense that concern would rise in the U.S … But Shangxin Yang, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, advises against an overreaction. “This is normal and we shouldn’t be too concerned about it,” Yang said.
Mental health crisis among U.S. children | New York Times Magazine
This is especially important for emerging conditions in order to reduce misdiagnoses. For the tics many adolescent girls are having, for example, “we would want to treat looking at anxiety and depression,” says John Piacentini, an expert in tic disorders and director of the Child Anxiety Resilience Education Support Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Health worker vaccine mandate remains in place | Bloomberg Law
Even as case numbers drop, Covid-19 transmission “will continue to be a patient safety risk for quite a long while to come and vulnerable patients and nursing home residents will still need the protection that the vaccination requirement provides,” said Lindsay Wiley, professor of law at UCLA School of Law.
Inhaled tanning sprays: Are they safe? | NBC’s “Today”
The idea is that ramping up the activity of this hormone “drives the increase in our melanocytes both in number and in their ability to produce pigment,” Dr. Teo Soleymani, dermatologist and skin cancer surgeon with UCLA Health, told TODAY. But experts have serious concerns about these products. “This is not FDA approved and has not been approved in any country, either over-the-counter or as a drug or anything like that,” Soleymani said.
Pfizer CEO pushes yearly COVID shots | Salon
“Given how safe the vaccines are and how effective they are, I think it probably does make sense for people to get a booster, and the most convenient would be once a year,” said Dr. Otto Yang, an infectious disease specialist at UCLA. If covid turns out to be seasonal, peaking in winter months, vaccination in the fall would provide decent protection, he said.
Latina actress and flap over Oscars invite | NBC News
“How did the #Oscars producers also not think what an iconic moment it would have been to have these 3 Latinas present an award together? This is a HUGE missed opportunity,” Dr. Ana-Christina Ramón, director of research and civic engagement at UCLA’s division of social science, said in a tweet Sunday.
A year after Echo Park eviction, few in stable housing | Guardian
LA’s failure to get permanent housing for the vast majority of unhoused people forced out of the park is documented in a new report by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles who obtained housing data and shared their findings with the Guardian. Their analysis, co-authored by former park residents, concluded that although some displaced residents were eager to get indoors, the temporary shelters they initially landed in had strict regulations that stripped people of basic freedoms and caused many to leave or be kicked out. (UCLA’s Ananya Roy and Annie Powers are quoted.)
What’s behind Texas’ unusual wildfires | Popular Science
A study done last year by atmospheric scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that as average temperatures increased since 1980, so did the chances of fire weather across the western US. The driver is the “vapor pressure deficit” on vegetation: Hotter air holds more moisture and can act like a vacuum, sucking water out of plants and leaving them crisp and flammable. Although the analysis didn’t include Texas, it found that changing climate conditions dried out the adjoining plains of New Mexico far more than could be explained by annual weather variations.
Switching neurons on and off to probe autism circuits | Spectrum
“The problem is that there’s very few people working on circuits right now in autism,” says Carlos Portera-Cailliau, professor of neurology and neurobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There’s a huge emphasis on molecular studies and genetic studies,” sometimes to the neglect of more systems-level investigations, he says, where a full account of autism is likely to lie.
With heat wave, Bay Area shatters temperature record | SFGate
UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain referred to the warm-up as a “significant early season heat wave.” Swain wrote on Twitter that the heat will “further accelerate vegetation drying and mountain snow melt.”
Pandemic likely exacerbated Latino college gap | Axios
A higher percentage of Latino and Black students planned to cancel their college plans in Fall 2021 than their white counterparts, a study found … The study by the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative found more than 10% of Latinos planned to cancel college enrollment in Fall 2021, compared to 5.4% of white students. (UCLA’s Rodrigo Domínguez-Villegas is quoted.)
Best N95 and other high-filtration masks | Popular Science
KF94 masks are usually made in South Korea — the “KF” stands for “Korean filter,” while the “94” denotes 94 percent filtration of the same type of tiny particle. Like KN95s, the masks are used mostly by the general public and have ear loops. Though KF94s technically filter out 1 percent less particles than KN95s, they’re “really pretty close to a KN95,” says Nina Shapiro, a pediatric ear, nose, and throat doctor at UCLA Health.
New bill could end daylight saving adjustments | Newsy
The time zone list [UCLA’s] Paul Eggert runs is how your phone knows what time it is even if you fly cross country or around the world. It’s how chat invitations from a different time zone know your time. “Basically if any government says the time zone is x or the daylight saving rules are y, we write them down so that your phone or your computer can automatically translate universal time, GMT, into the appropriate time for you,” Eggert says.
Concerns over Russian cyberattacks against U.S. | KABC-TV
“After the defenses, you still have to have resilience. Let’s say we have two power plants and one goes down — can the other one take the load of this one, and what does it need to do?” said UCLA’s Rajit Gadh (approx. 0:30 mark).
