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.
See Long Beach’s signature bridge under construction | New York Times
John Wallace, a professor at UCLA who specializes in earthquake engineering, told me that back when the original bridge was built, there was really no way to design bridges for seismic safety. During the big earthquakes in the decades that followed, bridges failed. Today, things are different, he said: “It’s like night and day.” So when officials have the rare opportunity to spend a billion and a half dollars constructing what they say will be a signature bridge for Southern California, Professor Wallace said it’s also an unusual chance to gather real-time information outside a lab setting. “Projects like this — and really tall buildings — when we instrument them and monitor them in time, they’re unique opportunities to look at the response before earthquakes occur and measure afterward,” he said. “We get information that allows us to improve our knowledge and designs in the future.”
Trump has a gift for tearing us apart | New York Times Opinion
The book “Identity Crisis,” an analysis of the 2016 election by Sides, Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA, and Michael Tesler, a political scientist at the University of California-Irvine, documents President Barack Obama’s success in recruiting enough white voters to win twice, a group that proved highly problematic for Hillary Clinton. A 2011 pre-election survey that Vavreck and her co-authors cite shows that a third of white voters who backed Obama believed “illegal immigrants are mostly a drain on society,” while slightly higher percentages held unfavorable views of Muslims and endorsed making it harder to immigrate. In the 2008 election, the three authors found, whites who rated immigrants the most unfavorably voted for John McCain over Obama by 25 percentage points. In 2016, whites who held the same disparaging view of immigrants voted for Trump over Clinton by 65 points.
Johnston Marklee brings ‘decorum’ to Hayden Tract with UCLA’s graduate art studios | KCRW’s “Design and Architecture”
Now comes a building in the Hayden Tract with a very different character: The UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios…. A “basic refurbish” is an understated way of explaining an understated but alluring project that bears out a recent L.A. Times headline that describes Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee as “The L.A. architects who design buildings that make you say, ‘Huh?,’ then ‘Wow!’” The designers kept the studios raw and flexible, leaving structure and piping exposed. But they added surprising details like tilt-up concrete facades with a “pillowed” surface designed to allow a play of light and shadow across its surface.
Immigration quotas of 1920s failed to aid U.S.-born workers’ pay | Bloomberg
The conclusions come from a team of five economists: Ran Abramitzky of Stanford, Philipp Ager of the University of Southern Denmark, Leah Boustan of Princeton, Elior Cohen at the University of California at Los Angeles and Casper Hansen of the University of Copenhagen. The research follows an October working paper by authors including Abramitzky and Boustan showing children of U.S. immigrants out-earn their parents and have more upward mobility than their American-born peers. “Today, these sources of substitutability may be automation in the manufacturing sector or the off-shoring of high-skilled tasks like computer programming or legal services,” the researchers wrote in the new paper.
How some — but not all — dating apps are taking on the STD epidemic | Politico
Outreach and health promotion on dating sites can help control disease, but some companies “don’t want to associate their site with things like HIV or STIs,” says Jeffrey Klausner, a UCLA researcher who led STD prevention at San Francisco’s health department. “I think they’re concerned that the brand of their site would be somehow tarnished.”
How puppies can help inmates with behavioral health | Forbes
UCLA, a major researcher in the benefits of pet therapy, has found that Animal Assisted Therapy can help with a variety of mental health issues such as, among others: the simple act of petting animals releases an automatic relaxation response; lowers anxiety and helps people relax; provides comfort; reduces loneliness; increases mental stimulation; can provide an escape or happy distraction; and can act as catalysts in the therapy process.
Why humpback whales protect other species from killer whales | Reader’s Digest
Steve Cole, a genomics researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, reveals an intriguing insight into threat biology that might shed further light on why humpbacks willingly enter into dangerous altercations with killer whales. He explains that scientists used to think that the circuitry for detecting and responding physiologically to threatening circumstances was there to protect the survival of the individual. But that is no longer the case…. “This is why you get soldiers running into a hail of gunfire for the country they love,” says Cole. “These people are in adverse environments, but they’re acting as if they are in non-threatening environments simply because they are attached to some purpose or cause that’s greater than their own individual well-being.”
In California, medical care means big money — and big politics | CALmatters Commentary
Newsom’s moves drew praise in a study by UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research and UC Berkeley’s Labor Center. It projected that by 2022, the 2019 actions “would prevent 770,000 Californians from becoming uninsured and reduce premiums for 1.55 million, benefiting a total of 2.2 million of the state’s residents.”
California needs more housing, but 97% of cities and counties are failing to issue enough RHNA permits | Los Angeles Daily News
UCLA urban planning Professor Paavo Monkkonen agreed, arguing in a recent “issue brief” on RHNA the process bases numbers more on politics than need. “That’s why Beverly Hills … was famously determined to ‘need’ only three new units of income-restricted housing between 2013 and 2021, while other similarly sized cities and much more affordable cities were determined to ‘need’ hundreds of units,” Monkkonen’s brief says.
Study shows inhibition of gene helps overcome resistance to immunotherapy | Medical Xpress
Now, a new study from scientists at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center helps explain why some people with advanced cancer may not respond to one of the leading immunotherapies, PD-1 blockade, and how a new combination approach may help overcome resistance to the immunotherapy drug.… “One of the main reasons patients do not respond to PD-1 blockade is because the T cells never make it into the tumor to attack the cancer cells,” said lead author Gabriel Abril-Rodriguez, a doctoral candidate in the departments of pharmacology and medicine in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.