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 professor named 2021 MacArthur Fellow | City News Service

Four Southland residents — two filmmakers, a film scholar/archivist and a digital media scholar — were among 25 MacArthur Fellows announced Tuesday, Sept. 28 … [they include] Safiya Noble, an internet studies and digital media scholar at UCLA, whose work highlights ways “digital technologies and internet architectures magnify racism, sexism and harmful stereotypes.” (Also: Los Angeles Times, Inside Higher Ed, Diverse Issues in Higher Education and Forbes.)

How Delta cooled California’s economic outlook | Los Angeles Times

But the Delta variant of the coronavirus has upended the calculations of forecasters — not just at UCLA Anderson’s widely cited group, but among academic, government and corporate economists nationwide. The outlook has gone from “sizzling to ho-hum,” the UCLA quarterly forecast, released Wednesday, reported. “Back in the spring, the economic optimism was palpable,” senior economist Leo Feler wrote. “The U.S. was vaccinating an average of 2 to 3 million people per day. The economy was reopening. Hiring was accelerating. It looked like COVID was finally behind us.” (UCLA’s Jerry Nickelsburg is also quoted. Also: Fresno Bee.)

How Florida fell so far behind in battling COVID | Los Angeles Times

Higher vaccination rates and mask use indoors “have helped to blunt this fourth surge in California as compared to Florida,” said Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, medical epidemiologist and infectious diseases expert at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “We are seeing better application of public health measures in California compared to Florida.”

Hollywood’s storytelling on climate change | Washington Post

“Most climate-change films fall into the didacticism-or-disaster trap,” said environmental-culture expert and UCLA professor Ursula Heise, who teaches at the school’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and chairs its English department. She said viewers either feel lectured to, as with a documentary, or anesthetized, as with a big-budget action film such as “The Day After Tomorrow.”

Climate change’s impact on wildfire risk | KABC-TV

“There’s some evidence that perhaps in the West, climate change is accelerating over the past 20 years,” said Karen McKinnon, and assistant professor of statistics and the environment at UCLA. “The extreme heat warning, the red flag warnings, all of these things really change the way we actually behave and interact with the weather … There’s been enough climate change that these extremes are popping up frequently enough, that it’s becoming very obvious. It’s quite hard to ignore.”

Wildfires increase dangerous air in California | KPCC-FM

“The fuel alone is much greater in Northern California because of the type of vegetation they have … “So when those large trees start to burn, they put out more emissions. And although we do get very severe wildfires in Southern California, the fuel alone, if you think about it on a per-acre basis, is much less. Often times it’s less than a tenth of what you would see if you’re up in a very large forest with a lot of conifers,” said UCLA’s Michael Jerrett (approx. 2:40 mark).

Pregnancy, vaccines and COVID | HealthDay News

“There is no data at all that the vaccine causes any detrimental effect on the pregnancy,” said Dr. Christina Han, an associate clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology and division director of maternal-fetal medicine at UCLA Health in Los Angeles.

Black women on R. Kelly’s conviction | New York Times

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a professor at Columbia Law School and U.C.L.A. School of Law who has studied the subject, said she hopes the current moment changes the narrative, in which Black women’s accusations are equated to “not being loyal to Black men and opening them up to abuse and unfairness.”

Why most diets don’t work and what to try instead | Popular Science

What is clear, however, is that dieting isn’t just a matter of willpower, says A. Janet Tomiyama, director of the UCLA Dieting, Stress, and Health Laboratory. “Something society doesn’t quite grasp yet is that weight is really, really hard to control,” she says. “When somebody gains weight or their diet fails, they blame themselves rather than the thousands of forces that are conspiring to keep that weight on and to make you gain more weight.”

Older women, younger men struggle more with blood pressure | U.S. News & World Report

Dr. Gregg Fonarow, director of the Ahmanson-University of California Los Angeles Cardiomyopathy Center, said the differences may reflect a variety of complex factors. Those, he said, include access to care, clinical decision-making, differences in lifestyle choices, socio-economic background, and health and medication history. Whatever the explanation, “the key message should be that there are major opportunities to improve control of blood pressure of men and women of all ages,” said Fonarow, who was not involved in the study.

Severe viral infections may be linked to autism risk | Insider

A study released this month offers evidence that severe infections in childhood might make a future diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder more likely in men who are genetically predisposed to the condition. Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles performed the study on mice, so it’s too early to say what its implications are for humans … “These parallels are so striking that they’re highly unlikely to be unrelated,” Alcino Silva, director of UCLA’s Integrative Center for Learning and Memory, said of the mouse and human data.

Korean church site designated historic landmark | KPCC-FM

The Los Angeles City Council has designated the former site of the Los Angeles Korean United Methodist Church as a historic cultural monument … “It was a place where students and others would come to for connecting with other Koreans, finding jobs, looking for housing, trying to figure out how to navigate American life,” said UCLA’s David Yoo.

UCLA lineman inspired by dad’s health battles | Los Angeles Times

His blood type might make getting a transplant more difficult in California; the wait for someone who’s B or O averages eight to 10 years for a deceased donor kidney, said Dr. Jeffrey Veale, director of the kidney transplantation exchange program at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. Ethnicity, however, is not a factor. “Sometimes the better matches are actually people from different nationalities and religions and political parties,” Veale said, “and it’s kind of beautiful that we exchange kidneys and it’s helping someone else get off dialysis.”