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.
Gun sales go up when gun control is in the news | Futurity
“The public health impact of firearm-related physical injury has dramatically increased over recent years and is now a leading cause of death,” says coauthor James A. Macinko, a professor of health policy and management and community health sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Our study suggests the need for dialogue around how mass shooting events are discussed by the press, in order to find ways to mitigate unintended consequences.”
Jared Diamond: Here are four ways America is ruining itself right now | Salon
Diamond is currently a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His new book “Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis” examines how nations successfully adapt to change — or do not, and then fall into a spiral of failure and rapid decline…. “I’m not concerned just about the elites. I’m concerned about the whole spectrum of the United States, the polarization within the electorate as well as geographic polarization, income polarization, political polarization, and the polarization of our legislators.”
Across L.A., ‘fancy scooters’ are a thing. But in parts of the San Fernando Valley, not so much | Los Angeles Daily News
Juan Matute, a professor at the UCLA Department of Urban Planning, said the reason companies have so far dropped off so few scooters in the Valley is likely because there isn’t much rider demand in many parts of the region. The Valley’s long distances, high-speed thoroughfares and lack of bike lanes may discourage many Valley residents from trying out the scooters, Matute said. “If these companies are responsive to the market, that will impact the number of scooters they deploy in the Valley,” he said.
10 years later, America’s booming economy still bears scars of the Great Recession | CNN
A study published this year by economists at Stanford and the University of California-Los Angeles found that people entering the labor market during recessions have lower lifetime earnings, especially if they have only a high school education. They also have higher death rates in mid life.
How a trip on magic mushrooms helped decriminalize psychedelic plants in a California city | Los Angeles Times
Charles Grob, a UCLA psychiatrist who has studied psychedelics for a quarter century, said he doesn’t want to see hasty decriminalization measures derail psychedelic research. “People should not be taking these compounds and be wandering around the busy streets of the city” or driving, Grob said. “They should be in a quiet, contained space, ideally being monitored by someone who is not in an altered state of consciousness.”
Effort to document women’s tech contributions gets started in Colorado | Colorado Sun
She learned of Jane Margolis and Joanna Goode, two researchers at the University of California Los Angeles, who studied how computer science was being taught at three Los Angeles high schools. They found that incomes divided schools into ones that taught foundational computing skills versus simple courses, like typing. Course offerings and teacher assumptions also influenced whether African American and Latino students took an interest in computer science. The research became the book “Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race and Computing.”
Sea otter problems predate the fur trade | Cosmos magazine
To better assess the implications of the species recovery since protections were put in place, by gaining a more thorough understanding of its evolutionary past, researchers led by Annabel Beichman of the University of California, Los Angeles analyzed the genome of a subspecies, the southern sea otter. The results were surprising. By comparing the genome to that of a related species, the freshwater giant otter, the researchers were able to identify helpful mutations that resulted in limbs well adapted to ocean life, and the thick coat.
Some animals synchronize their brain activity during social interaction | Earth.com
Dr. Weizhe Hong, the senior author of the mouse study, is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and the Department of Neurobiology at UCLA. “If you think of the brain like a black box that receives input and gives some kind of output in response, studying social interactions is like trying to understand how the output of one box provides input to another, and how those two boxes work together and create a loop,” said Dr. Hong. “Our research in mice allows us to peer inside these black boxes and get a better look at the internal machinery.”
Chasing the L.G.B.T.Q. millennial American dream | New York Times
The Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, which conducts independent research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy, has done a Generations study, examining identity and experience among three generations of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. It found that, among its “midrange” contingent (ages 34 to 41 in 2016, when the study began), 37 percent were legally married to a same-sex partner, as opposed to 48 percent in the age group above (52 to 59).
UCLA receives $20 million gift to propel diversity and ethics in entertainment | Variety
The gift was conceived by the late philanthropist Patricia W. Mitchell to honor the legacy of her husband, television industry leader John H. Mitchell, who died in 1988. The UCLA funding will support annual archive programming for television, such as workshops, lectures, screenings, symposiums, as well as greatly needed television preservation opportunities. The television collection will be named The John H. Mitchell Television Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Revenue grows at LiveXLive | Los Angeles Business Journal
Gigi Johnson, a music business professor at UCLA, has suggested that livestreaming outfits like LiveXLive may tread water until virtual reality technology matures to capture the concert-going experience. LiveXLive is not currently offering a VR streaming experience but is exploring partnerships with VR companies.
New York City limits on transporting guns eased in effort to get Supreme Court challenge dismissed | USA Today
But Adam Winkler, a UCLA School of Law professor and author of a book on the gun rights battle, said the challengers only sought an injunction to stop New York’s rules from being enforced. If repealed, he said, “the case should be moot, because the challengers will have effectively won.”
Trump makes three false claims about Hispanics in Telemundo interview | CNN
Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions and a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the recent data suggests “Trump has NOT made any inroads with Latinos.”
Engineering enzymes to turn plant waste into sustainable products | Phys.org
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was led by Professor Jen Dubois at Montana State University, Dr. Gregg Beckham at the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Professor Ken Houk at the University of California, Los Angeles together with Professor John McGeehan's team at the University of Portsmouth.
The right gut bacteria may give athletes an edge | HealthDay
Dr. Emeran Mayer is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine and author of the book “The Mind-Gut Connection.” He was impressed by the study’s combination of human and lab data. “These findings are pretty convincing,” said Mayer, who wasn’t involved with the study. But they do not prove that athletes can gain anything from probiotic supplements of Veillonella — which, Mayer noted, do not exist, to his knowledge.
Sex abuse charges against La Luz del Mundo leader are the ‘tip of the iceberg,’ prosecutors say | Los Angeles Times
But Peter Johnson, a criminal law professor at UCLA, said that the idea that someone is popular enough to raise money should not play a central role in setting bail. Factors such as an individual’s flight risk or their threat to the community are what should be considered, he said.
Visitors’ crude photo-ops raise overtourism concerns on Easter Island, expert claims | Fox News
In a new interview, archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg, the director both the Easter Island Statue Project and the Rock Art Archive at UCLA, claimed that some visitors to Rapa Nui National Park are taking crude photo-ops as of late — “picking” the noses of the statues, known as moai.
Depression, inflammation and women’s mental health | Psychology Today
“The study is the first to show that there are sex differences in neural sensitivity to reward in response to inflammation, which has important implications,” said senior author Naomi Eisenberger, Ph.D., from the University of California, Los Angeles in a press statement. ”This may suggest one reason women experience depression at a far greater rate than men, particularly for the kinds of depression that may be inflammatory in nature.”
How to break bad investment habits | AARP
Many workers planning their future Social Security strategy also peg round numbers, according to researchers with the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. Associate professor Stephen Spiller and his colleagues found in one study that many workers, when asked at what age they intended to start taking Social Security, picked the age when that benefit, stated annually, would clear the nice round number of $20,000. Yet when that same benefit was expressed not as an annual figure but in terms of a monthly payment — in this case, an ungainly $1,692 — workers would often choose a different age for beginning withdrawals.