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.

Protected kelp forests more resilient to heat | Spectrum News 1

They’re often called the sequoias of the ocean: giant kelp forests up and down the coast of California that provide critical habitats for hundreds of marine species and help capture carbon. New research from UCLA shows how to better protect these critical ecosystems. Doctorate student Emelly Ortiz-Villa recently authored a study on kelp forests and how they fared during marine heat waves, published in the Journal of Applied Ecology. “Marine heat waves are consistent or persistent heat waves or warming of the ocean that happens along our coast,” Ortiz-Villa explained. (UCLA’s Kyle Cavanaugh was also quoted.)

The latest on the Israeli conflict | Spectrum News 1

“It’s hard to believe there wasn’t some degree of coordination, or at least advanced warning beyond what we’ve been told, between Israel, the United States and the government of Qatar. There’s too much at stake, too much to lose, and too much that could go wrong if there wasn’t some degree of coordination, even minimal,” said UCLA’s Benjamin Radd.

SCOTUS criticized for allowing these immigration stops | Los Angeles Times

UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham called it “shocking and appalling. I don’t know of any recent decision like this that authorized racial discrimination.” Arulanantham noted that Kavanaugh’s writings speak for the justice alone, and that the full court did not explain its ruling on a case that came through its emergency docket.  

National Parks flagged material ‘disparaging’ to U.S. | Associated Press

“The relationship between the United States and Indigenous nations has been fraught, violent, dispossessive and complex over the centuries, and the national parks are part of that story,” said Jessica Cattelino, American Indian studies professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “To cut off parts of those stories because they might make someone uncomfortable, that’s a disservice to the ecological and cultural value of these lands.”

New Mexico to become the first state to offer universal child care | NBC News

Neal Halfon, a professor of pediatrics, public health and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, lauded the expansion in a statement provided by Lujan Grisham’s office as “a model for the nation” — though such a program would be difficult to fund in many other states. “New Mexico is creating the conditions for better outcomes in health, learning and well-being,” he added. (Halfon was also quoted by The Guardian.)

California has a strict vaccine mandate. Will it last? | Los Angeles Times

“We should assume that every aspect of the administration, at least three justices of the Supreme Court, and a significant contingent in Congress are actively trying to implement changes to the law that would invalidate California’s ... approach to not allowing non-medical exemptions,” said Lindsay Wiley, a law professor at UCLA.

The challenge of cases against 2020 fake electors | Associated Press

Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said such arguments were part of the reason he viewed the fake elector cases as some of the “weaker” criminal ones filed after the 2020 election. But he said the combination of the failures of those prosecutions, coupled with Trump’s avoiding liability and his pardons of more than 1,500 people convicted of crimes in the cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, are a grim combination.  

New computer could make AI 100 times more efficient | Live Science

Because the [analog optical computer] doesn’t convert the analog signals to digital ones during the calculations, it saves energy and overcomes some of the speed limitations inherent in digital computing. This specialized computation method “makes it a special-purpose ‘steady-state finder’ for certain AI and optimization problems, not a general-purpose computer,” Aydogan Ozcan, an optical computing researcher at UCLA who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email.