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.
50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong? | Los Angeles Times Opinion
(Commentary written by UCLA’s Leonard Kleinrock) My UCLA computer lab was selected to be the first node of this network. Fifty years ago — on Oct. 29, 1969 — a simple “Lo” became the first internet message, from UCLA to Stanford Research Institute. We had typed the first two letters of “login” when the network crashed. This quiet little moment of transmission over that two-computer communication network is regarded as the founding moment of the internet.
Happy Birthday, dear internet: You’re 50 years old! | NBC’s “Today”
In the latest installment of “Mr. Smith Goes To…,” NBC’s Harry Smith joins TODAY with a special essay for a special occasion: the 50th anniversary of the internet. It’s come a long way since its humble origins at UCLA, when a network of primitive computers crashed before a simple message could be typed. The TODAY anchors talk about things the internet has made obsolete, like encyclopedias, phone books and beepers.
The internet is now 50 years old. The first online message? It was a typo | USA Today
The message sent by [UCLA’s Leonard] Kleinrock and Kline was intended to be “login.” Their system crashed, however, as soon as they typed the second letter. It took an hour to send the whole word, but by then, “lo” cemented its place in the internet's history. For Kleinrock, the message took on a completely different meaning, anyhow. “‘L’ and ‘O’ is ‘hello,’ and a more succinct, more powerful, more prophetic message we couldn’t have wished for,” he told OZY.
UCLA gets $10 million for scholarships for students from middle-income families | City News Service
UCLA today announced a $10 million gift from film and television producer and New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch to establish scholarships for undergraduate students, particularly those from middle-income families…. Youlonda Copeland-Morgan, UCLA’s vice provost for enrollment management, said the gift was much needed. “Scholars from every background imaginable want to come to UCLA. Middle-income families face unique challenges in that they do not often qualify for sufficient federal and state financial aid to make UCLA affordable. As a result, too often, these students miss out on one of the finest college educations in our nation,” Copeland-Morgan said.
Kincade and Getty fires are part of a vicious wildfire season straining resources of fire departments across the state | New York Times
While dry eyes and a scratchy throat may simply be a reaction to low humidity in fire-prone areas, a cough, shortness of breath or lightheadedness could also be a symptom of something more serious, said Dr. Kathryn Melamed, a pulmonologist at U.C.L.A.
In ‘membership economy,’ automatic renewals favor businesses more than consumers | Los Angeles Times Column
Sometimes opt-out systems work better for consumers than opt-ins, said Stephen Spiller, an associate professor of marketing and behavioral decision-making at UCLA. For example, employer-sponsored retirement programs, which may automatically enroll new hires. “Opt-out policies can be useful nudges to help people do what they want to do anyways,” which in this case is saving for their sunset years, Spiller said. “But if consumers have trouble remembering to cancel an ongoing service, or they fail to notice that they’re still paying for a service that they meant to discontinue, these sorts of policies can make it feel like the firm is taking advantage of a consumer’s innocent mistake,” he observed.
‘Very dangerous situation’ as California braces for 80-mph winds, major fire risk | Los Angeles Times
The area of highest risk includes the San Francisco Bay Area and points north, among them the northern Sierra Nevada and California’s North Coast region, including such cities as Eureka, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research…. “This is the kind of event that makes me personally nervous, as somebody who has friends and family living in the fire zones in the Bay Area, and I don’t say that about all the events,” Swain said.
From West Virginia to the Vatican: How a Catholic bishop secretly sent money from a church hospital to a cardinal in Rome | Washington Post
Under one federal law, hospitals that receive substantial federal benefits through programs such as Medicare are prohibited from directing money to any entity or person without proper authority or purpose. Under another, charity money may not be used to unduly benefit an individual. “Lining the pockets of private citizens, even when those private citizens are priests, is a violation of charities and tax law,” said Jill Horwitz, professor and vice dean of the University of California at Los Angeles law school.
The Justice Department’s criminal inquiry into Russia probe | NPR
“The difference is that someone has determined that there is — the term of art at the DOJ — reasonable indication that someone has committed a crime. That’s a pretty modest, low threshold. Nevertheless, it’s really puzzling here because everything about the beginning of this probe has been gone over with a fine-tooth comb repeatedly, right? … So for now to ripen into a criminal investigation, notwithstanding that the threshold for doing so is modest — it’s really head-scratching,” said UCLA’s Harry Litman.
We may not have to age so fast | Wall Street Journal
Dr. Sinclair, Dr. Belmonte and Steven Horvath at UCLA have started a company to develop medicines for eye diseases based on this science, and Dr. Sinclair has been involved in other such commercial ventures. But to be clear, there is a great distance between what can be done with mice in a lab and what can be done to help humans fight diseases and extend their healthy years. And the “healthy” part is vitally important: You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks it would be a good idea to lengthen human lives if we cannot substantially improve the part of life that is lived free of debilitating diseases.
Trump’s attack on California cap-and-trade program is amazingly hypocritical | Los Angeles Times Column
“They’re afraid of California’s leadership,” says Ann Carlson, professor of environmental law at UCLA. “If I had to guess, if you could uncover the conversations in the White House, the order has gone out to do anything to undermine California’s leadership.”
Trump Administration sues California for daring to address climate change | Gizmodo
In April 2017, a lower court ruled that it was, in fact, lawful, and the state Supreme Court refused to take the case up. Arguments about the constitutionality of the international carbon market have also arisen in the past, though UCLA law professor Jonathan Zasloff wrote in a 2010 overview in Legal Planet that he was “a little skeptical” that a court would buy into them.
The Earth has rapidly warmed over the past century. Can politics slow it? | PolitiFact
“Countries need to know that other countries are stepping up, and we have stepped down, making international and other countries’ commitments less likely to be effective and enduring,” said Sean Hecht, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California at Los Angeles. “(But) the on-the-ground impact of the Paris decision isn’t as significant, since the agreement wasn’t a policy.”
Some states with legal weed embrace vaping bans, warn of black market risks | NPR
“There is this risk when you ban something [legal] that people will be driven to the black market,” says Ziva Cooper, director of the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative. Cooper says the regulated cannabis market is already fraught with problems. People walk into a cannabis shop with neatly packaged products and believe everything has undergone rigorous safety testing, she says. “They think they can trust what’s on the labels,” says Cooper, “but the truth is the labels don’t necessarily accurately portray what’s actually in the products.”
Excelencia in Education celebrates its quinceañera at ALASS Institute | Diverse Issues in Higher Education
For UCLA assistant vice provost Alfred Herrera, the director of Center for Community College Partnerships, peer mentoring is “at the heart” of his program’s success. The goal of Herrera’s program is to increase transfer rates for Latino students from community colleges. Selected students participate in a summer program at UCLA and meet with a peer mentor repeatedly throughout the year. He emphasized that faculty are also an important part of building community for Latino students, especially in STEM fields.
Two exoplanets smashed together, pulverizing each other into fine dust | Digital Trends
After the two planets smashed together, they disintegrated into the dust cloud which now surrounds the stars. There is around 1 million times more dust in the BD +20 307 system than there is in orbit around our sun, and the dust is notably fine, being made up of tiny particles. “It’s as if Earth and Venus collided,” researcher Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, said to space.com when the dust was first discovered.
A special kind of hell: fires, smoke and heat turn LA into a deadly paradise | Guardian (U.K.)
“We’re expecting to see more and bigger wildfires if the climate continues in its current path,” said Yifang Zhu, environmental health sciences professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The climate crisis has created conditions across the American west more favorable for wildfires, including drier and warmer forests.
UCLA track to be named for Rafer Johnson and wife Betsy | City News Service
The track at UCLA’s Drake Stadium will be formally unveiled Friday as the Betsy and Rafer Johnson Track in honor of the 1960 Olympic decathlon gold medalist and his wife, a fellow alumnus. Johnson led UCLA to its first NCAA track & field championship in 1956, was its second African American student body president and a starting forward on its basketball team for the 1958-59 season, leading the team in shooting percentage, the first player in school history to shoot better than 50% for a season.
NASA announces new lunar rover that will scour the Moon’s south pole in search of water and ice by 2022 | Daily Mail (U.K.)
According to researchers from UCLA who recently published a paper in Nature Geoscience, water-ice may be locked deep within the lunar surface, and could even be large enough to support future human settlements.
