LAist reported on Mayor Karen Bass’ support for fare-free Metro as the agency weighs the costs and potential consequences of eliminating fares. According to Brian Taylor, a research professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA, there’s a good economic case for transit systems to go fareless when a large share of its riders are low-income and fares cover less than roughly 10% of operating costs. Los Angeles Metro meets both conditions, he said. Read more about UCLA in today’s New York Times, Washington Post and other outlets.

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More highlights from UCLA in the News: August 13, 2026

Has Anthropic’s watermarking feature opened up an AI can of worms? | The National

“Some people see this as a first step towards future detection tools – which, going by track record, don’t work reliably,” said Tina Austin, director of AI education and learning systems at UCLA. “Because a mark only proves Claude touched the content [not that it wrote all of it]. And no mark doesn’t prove human authorship either, since heavy editing or format conversion can strip it out.”

The GI condition to know about if you’ve had food poisoning | Washington Post

There’s also evidence that a stomach bug may cause the gut lining to become more permeable, allowing substances in the gut such as bile acid, nutrients and by-products of microbes to slip into the bloodstream, said Dr. Lin Chang, a gastroenterologist and director of the Walter and Shirley Wang Center for Integrative Digestive Health at UCLA Health.

Why are there so many earthquakes happening? | HuffPost

Improved monitoring and instant news and social media coverage may also make earthquake activity feel more frequent, said Lingsen Meng, a professor of geophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There’s no convincing evidence that earthquakes are becoming more frequent globally, though,” he said. 

Proposed changes to the midterms | The New Republic’s “The Daily Blast”

“And what the SAVE America Act, as it’s now called in its most recent iteration, would do, among other things, is require everybody to potentially re-register to vote, providing original copies of their birth certificates, maybe their marriage licenses, their naturalization certificates. It would be a hugely disenfranchising law if it passed,” said UCLA’s Rick Hasen (Hasen was interviewed.)

What’s happening in Kansas should alarm us all | New York Times

A recent report conducted by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law showed that almost half of the transgender Americans surveyed were considering leaving or had already left their state or the country. Most of them cited the “anti-trans climate” in their state.