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.

UCLA students study the Japanese tea ceremony | KCAL-TV

“I even ended up spending one year in a traditional training program in Kyoto, Japan, at the world’s only professional college of tea,” said UCLA’s Michelle Liu Carriger. “Tea just became something that I really use to help me unwind and balance out the other difficult, complicated and stressful things in my life.” (UCLA’s Aldo Schwartz, Kaoru Kuribayashi Stanislaus and June Tsay were also interviewed.)

At the center of LA’s transformation: a man named Zev.  | Los Angeles Times

(Book review by UCLA’s Jim Newton] Happily, a new memoir by one of modern Los Angeles’ most significant and recognizable figures arrives just in time. “Zev’s Los Angeles: From Boyle Heights to the Halls of Power,” the autobiography of, well, Zev, revisits the period in which Los Angeles became what we know today: big and complex, multiracial, exciting, divided and far deeper than what meets the eye. Zev Yaroslavsky [director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs] left a lasting mark on L.A. over decades on the City Council and the Board of Supervisors, and his thoughtful reflections earn his memoir an honored place in the history he helped make and now helps to understand.

Crowdsourcing the search for extraterrestrials | ABC Radio (Australia)

Are we alone in the universe? The UCLA SETI group has launched a citizen-science project to find out. The public is being asked to sort through data from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. …”So we’ve been able to measure the moment of inertia of Venus, which is an indication of the distribution of mass inside the body. It’s the first time this measurement has been made. And we were able to do that using ground based planetary radar,” said UCLA’s Jean-Luc Margot.

Getting to know your adolescent’s brain | NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’

Adriana Galvan, a professor of psychology at UCLA, says adolescent brains give larger dopamine rewards than adult brains. That means a bigger payoff from any positive experience. “And so, it’s a feedback loop because then you start thinking, well, that was pretty good. I’m going to seek out and motivate and do behaviors that get that to happen again. And so that may be a piece of chocolate. It may be hanging out with friends. It may be doing things that adults find risky.” [said Galvan.]

A guide to meditation for people who think they can’t meditate | Vox

A common meditation misconception, according to Marvin G. Belzer, an associate professor of psychiatry at UCLA, is that you must totally clear your mind to reap the benefits of the practice. “The mind, at times, will be racing,” says Belzer, who is also the associate director of the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center. “If we try to fight the thoughts to make them stop, that’s a losing battle.” Instead of squashing a wandering mind, Belzer says to focus thoughts elsewhere: on the breath, the body, ambient sounds.

Patients can face agonizing waits for hospital transfers | Los Angeles Times

The process “is in no way systematically thought out,” and bias can creep in when clear standards are lacking, said Dr. Evan Shannon, an assistant professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He and Mueller found in one study that Black patients were less likely to be transferred out of hospitals than white patients, as measured among Medicare inpatients with medical conditions that typically benefit from transfer.

Gains in HIV prevention uneven across groups | NPR’s ‘Weekend Edition’

Nina Harawa is a professor of medicine and epidemiology at UCLA, and she points out that prevention efforts can’t only focus on gay and bisexual men. About one-fifth of new cases of HIV affect women. There’s also more outreach that can be done for people who inject drugs and are at risk. And Harawa believes that improving access to PrEP, while still very important, can’t be the only solution here.

The invisible LGBTQ+ people on the 2020 census | NPR’s ‘Weekend Edition’

“A lot is tied to Census Bureau data,” says Kerith Conron, research director of the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. “Being invisible in those systems or only sort of partially counted is, I think, problematic. … At this point, less than 20% of LGBT people live in same-sex couple households,” Conron explains, based on the institute’s estimates. “That means we don’t know a lot about the 80% or more of LGBT people who have different-sex partners or aren’t living in a household with a partner. And that’s significant.”

Is polarization a problem? | Los Angeles Times

“The people who advocated violence had no significant successes,” Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, told me. “When there were violent protests or riots like the Watts riots in Los Angeles, it empowered things like the rise of Reagan. It empowered an intense white reaction that went to support the conservative side.”

For local teens learning about wage theft, the personal is political | LAist

Victor Narro, a professor of Labor Studies at the UCLA Labor Center, says garment workers experience some of the worst rates of wage theft in the U.S. He points to the 200-year-plus systemic practice of the industry’s piece-rate system. “We have the law in our books now [SB 62],” Narro said. “Now we have to work with the Labor Commissioner’s office, Department of Labor Standards Enforcement and other agencies to try and eradicate the egregious wage theft step in the dominant industry.”

Freeways might not always be free | Los Angeles Times

The aim is to change commuter behavior with the charges while providing transit alternatives. “There is no other way to reduce congestion. So you can do something like this or basically you can just live with congestion,” said Michael Manville, an associate professor of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs who has studied congestion pricing.

Antarctic sea ice is at record lows. Is it an alarming shift? | Wired

But that’s not the only global effect the loss of sea ice will have: When seawater freezes into ice, the denser brine that’s left over sinks to the seafloor, creating deep currents that rush away from Antarctica. The less sea ice, the weaker those currents. “This will affect the efficiency with which the oceans will distribute energy, and ultimately affect the global climate,” says geographer Marilyn Raphael at UCLA, who studies the region. “What happens in Antarctica doesn’t stay in Antarctica.” 

Don’t pitch jets against pets | Bloomberg

As we take stock of the climate crisis, we need to look at everything — and the impact of pets is significant. Gregory Okin, a UCLA professor who wrote a 2017 paper on the environmental impact of pet food, told me that if American cats and dogs were their own country, it would be the fifth-largest meat consumer in the world. But there are ways to reduce these impacts. “The same things that apply to human diets apply to pet diets,” says Okin.

Feeding the American dream with their Asian heritage | Washington Post

In the past century, Asian American and Pacific Islanders have transformed the American palate. Yet many of these businesses face steeper financial hardships due to the pandemic, economic uncertainty and rising anti-Asian hate. “They suffered tremendously,” said Min Zhou, director of the Asia Pacific Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Most LA landlords have lawyers and most renters don’t | LAist

Eviction attorneys say filings have likely grown since the start of April, when the county’s COVID-19 protections went away. “Courts are going to get backlogged,” said UCLA postdoctoral fellow Kyle Nelson, who studies L.A. eviction trends. “Usually when this happens, tenants are the ones that really don’t come out ahead.”