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.
Wadada Leo Smith moves the UCLA Medal into the avant-garde | Los Angeles Times Commentary
“Creative improvisation has the capacity to change the world,” [Wadada Leo Smith] said, typically thinking big, upon receiving the UCLA Medal. In a morning workshop Tuesday, he told UCLA music students that “making art is as serious as your life.”
Students demand presidential candidates ‘make Alzheimer’s the nation’s top health priority’ | Forbes
[Nihal] Satyadev started The Youth Movement Against Alzheimer’s while he was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)…. Satyadev and his team of volunteers have already started practicing what they preach. The group developed a caregiving model of respite care at UCLA and donated some 6,500 hours of assistance to family caregivers who wouldn’t otherwise get any breaks. Dubbed “TimeOut @ UCLA,” the program pairs student volunteers with patients at OPICA’s Adult Day Program and Caregiver Support Center in Los Angeles.
Neutrinos lead to unexpected discovery in basic math | Quanta magazine
The formula “looked too good to be true,” said [Terence] Tao, who is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, a Fields medalist, and one of the world’s leading mathematicians. “Something this short and simple — it should have been in textbooks already,” he said. “So my first thought was, no, this can’t be true.” Then he thought about it some more.
UCLA scientist awarded $3.5 million NIH grant to study pain-relieving effects of cannabis | News-Medical
Ziva Cooper, research director of the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative, has been awarded a $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a five-year study assessing the pain-relieving effects of cannabis and cannabinoids, the chemicals in the cannabis plant. The grant will fund the first clinical study for the Cannabis Research Initiative, which was founded in 2017 as part of the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. Cooper joined the initiative as its first research director in January.
Hundreds of journalists anonymously reveal their salaries on viral spreadsheet, challenging workplace taboo | Washington Post
Ricardo Perez-Truglia, an economics professor at UCLA who has studied pay transparency for years, found that at a societal level, the practice can widen the gap in perceived well-being between richer and poorer workers. “If they learn that they are poorer than they thought, it can lower their self-esteem. If their social contacts learn how poor they are, it can reduce their social-esteem, he wrote in a 2015 study. “In contrast, richer individuals often benefit from this game.”
What can California do about its extremely high gas prices? Here are a few ideas | Sacramento Bee
“I’m not sure California should be much concerned with high gas prices,” said UCLA’s Jim Newton. “Pricing is an important tool in the development and spread of alternative, clean technologies. That’s why a carbon tax is so appealing — even if it remains a hard sell politically.”
The Disney Plus launch ratchets up talk of streaming competition. But the same creators work for all of them | Washington Post
“The little secret is that streamers don’t really want long-term relationships, either, because they’re not really thinking long-term,” said Jonathan Kuntz, a lecturer at the University of California at Los Angeles’s School of Theater, Film and Television and an expert on the business history of Hollywood. “They want to throw on a few seasons of a show and get the maximum amount of buzz so they can attract people to their service. That’s a very different goal than the traditional studios had.” “This isn’t about a relationship,” he added. “It’s about building up subscribers for the next quarter.”
Uganda charges 67 people after raid of LGBTQ-friendly bar | NBC News
Uganda has a notoriously poor track record on LGBTQ rights that dates back to British colonial times, and under the country’s penal code, sex acts “against the order of nature” are punished with life in prison. In a new report released by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, the East African nation was ranked 113 out of 174 countries on LGBTQ acceptance.
What we can (and should) do to address climate change in the next 30 years | Bloomberg Opinion
(Commentary written by UCLA’s Bradford Cornell) To address the world’s climate crisis, we must embrace equal parts realism and optimism. The realism kicks in when you accept the reality that despite increasingly severe weather, rising oceans, and environmental disasters, it will be impossible to transition to a fully renewable energy portfolio in the next few decades. Renewables simply haven’t progressed enough, and the world’s population continues to show massive reluctance to do things like drive less, curtail flying, or eat vegetarian most of the time. But the optimism comes from the knowledge that there is still time to act—if we move quickly and smartly.
LGBTQ acceptance grew globally over past four decades — but not everywhere | NBC News
The “most accepting” LGBTQ countries are becoming “more accepting,” while “the least accepting” are becoming “less accepting,” according to a recent report from The Williams Institute, a think tank at the UCLA School of Law… “One of the biggest misconceptions, even among people in the U.S., which has seen a notable amount of progress in LGBT acceptance, is the notion that attitudes have not changed or haven’t improved, but this report disputes that idea by showing us the opposite: Acceptance of LGBT people continues to grow globally,” Andrew Flores, a visiting scholar at the Williams Institute and the study’s lead author, told NBC News.
A media race discrimination case with wider implications | Marketplace
Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences and director of African-American studies at UCLA, said that what’s at stake in the case is minority content-producers’ access to the huge audiences that conglomerates like Comcast control. “We’re talking about whether or not they’re going to carry networks that are owned by people of color and contain content that’s different from what you typically get on more mainstream networks,” said Hunt.
Is kindness a competitive advantage at work? Here’s why the answer is yes | Inc.
Want another reason to show a little kindness to your colleagues? People magazine quotes Daniel Fessler, an anthropology professor at UCLA: “The spread of positive behavior is contagious. And science shows that practicing kindness and compassion has direct emotional, psychological and medical effects.”
The mental stresses DACA recipients may endure | KCRW’s “Greater LA”
“I’d say it’s one of the most stressful things that can happen, when you do not have a minimal level of predictability, and in some cases, a sense of control over the future,” said UCLA’s Emanuel Maidenberg.
‘Always on the lookout.’ Random violent attacks by homeless people on the rise | NBC4-TV
These alarming statistics coincide with a new report citing the prevalence of untreated mental illness and drug addiction among the nation’s homeless population. The UCLA California Policy Lab found that 78% of unsheltered people are experiencing mental health conditions, while 75% are suffering from substance abuse conditions.
Cancer drugs could be packed into tiny bubbles and driven directly to tumors using sound waves, scientists claim | Daily Mail (U.K.)
Researchers from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) said they had successfully tested the technique on tubes inserted into pig flesh…. “In conventional drug delivery, tissue is examined [outside of the body] under the microscope, or radioactive materials are used to trace drugs [on the inside],” said the author of the research, Dr Xuejun Qian. “We propose a new way to image and move the drug precisely inside the human body by combining the new plane wave imaging method with a focused ultrasound transducer.”
UCLA launches new institute to study kindness | KCRW’s “Greater LA”
“If you look at the whole history of our species — which is 300,000 years old — in the big picture, things are good and they have just been getting better for a long time. Less violence around the world, more tolerance and so on,” said UCLA’s Daniel Fessler.
$27 million grant will strengthen effort to increase biomedical workforce diversity | Patch
“This is a landmark national project and the largest of its kind to develop evidence-based practices for institutions to increase diversity and promote excellence in the next generation of biomedical and biobehavioral researchers,” said Dr. Keith Norris, a professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Norris is one of the project’s three principal investigators. The others are Dr. Teresa Seeman, a professor of medicine in the Geffen School of Medicine division of geriatrics, and of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health; and Steven Wallace, a professor of community health sciences at the Fielding School.
Spinal injuries: A new technology of electrostimulation for a more effective approach | Medical Xpress
The solution developed by the international team led by Giuliano Taccola of SISSA with the collaboration of the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Leeds, contains significant elements of innovation, which could increase the efficiency of neurorehabilitation, extending the possibilities of treatment to a higher number of individuals.
