As investigators continue working to determine the cause of a warehouse fire in Boyle Heights, KABC-TV reported that UCLA researchers are collecting environmental samples to better understand what hazardous chemicals may have been released during the incident. Amid ongoing cleanup efforts, researchers and professors from UCLA have been gathering ash, dust and water samples near the warehouse site. "There's a lot of rotten food, so the smell is very strong," UCLA researcher Jing Li said. Read more about UCLA in the Los Angeles Times, NBC News and others.

More highlights from UCLA in the News: June 29, 2026

Water from Boyle Heights fire lands in L.A. River | Los Angeles Times

All the water unleashed onto the warehouse fire in Boyle Heights — some of it 480 gallons at a time by helicopter — had to end up somewhere. That somewhere is the Los Angeles River. Now organizers from East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice are teaming up with scientists from UCLA and Columbia University to find out more about what’s in the runoff. 

SpaceX IPO sparks race for luxury housing | Los Angeles Times

It could take several months for the housing market to feel the full effect of SpaceX’s IPO millions, said Paul Habibi, a UCLA lecturer and real estate expert witness at Grayslake Advisors. The most significant buying boom is likely to take place early next year, he predicted, after the standard lockup on stock sales ends in December.

Shingles vaccine may offer protection against dementia | NBC News

When the shingles virus is reactivated, it may trigger the accumulation of amyloid and tau in the brain, “those bad proteins related to Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Timothy Chang, an assistant professor of neurology at the Mary S. Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Research and Care at UCLA.

AI job tracker finds no early evidence of unemployment | CBS News

California now has the nation's first dashboard to publicly track AI-related job trends, ones created and ones lost. Early findings show no evidence of rising statewide unemployment from jobs exposed to AI. Till von Wachter, a faculty director of the California Policy Lab at UCLA, joins “The Takeout” to discuss.

Workers live in Boyle Heights fire advisory zone | Southern California News Group

It is a reality underscored by a UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute study published on June 24, which found that tens of thousands of residents and workers live in the smoke advisory zone established after the nearly 500,000-square-foot cold storage facility in Boyle Heights erupted in flames on June 17.

Supreme Court accedes to Trump's restrictive immigration agenda | Reuters

Ahilan Arulanantham, an immigration law expert at UCLA and lawyer for the Syrian plaintiffs in the TPS dispute, said, “The Supreme Court has consistently ruled against the rights of immigrant communities in important cases in the ‌last several years, and this case fits that pattern.”

Weather complicates firefighting efforts in Utah wildfire | NPR

Severe fires, like the one burning in Utah, cause massive tree deaths. “The loss of these forests isn’t just, ‘I can’t take a pretty picture,’” said Mitchell Hung, an earth-systems researcher who led the study as a graduate student at UCLA, in a statement. “There are profound socioeconomic impacts. Real dollars are being lost each year due to high severity forest fire.”

Promising new treatments for pancreatic cancer | Science Friday

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly forms of cancer, but clinical trials of daraxonrasib have provided hope after finding the drug doubled the survival time of patients with advanced pancreatic cancer. “So this is a big moment for us because this is a drug that targets the dominant oncogene in cancer, but especially dominant in pancreatic cancer, and that’s called KRAS,” said UCLA’s Dr. Zev Weinberg. “And this trial has gone through several studies over the last, I’d say, four or five years in a fairly accelerated timeline, initially showing that even in advanced, very advanced pancreatic cancer, for which the usual treatments are very short lived, this drug was producing response rates. It was shrinking tumors. It was making people live longer than we ever could have expected.”

UN calls for investigations of deaths in US immigration custody | The Guardian

A report by UCLA Law’s Behind Bars data project found such deaths have reached the highest levels since 2004, when 32 people died in the DHS’ custody, a figure matching other reports about last year.