UCLA in the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription. See more UCLA in the News.
New UCLA scholarship to help students avoid loans | Los Angeles Times
As rising college costs impede access to higher education, UCLA announced Wednesday a $15-million gift to seed a new scholarship initiative to help students afford a Bruin education without loans. The gift by California real-estate investor Peter Merlone will enable UCLA to grant individual scholarships totaling about $20,000 over four years to some 700 students beginning in 2024. It is part of a new UCLA Affordability Initiative designed to eliminate the burden of student loans. (UCLA Chancellor Gene Block and UCLA’s Rhea Turteltaub and Gary Clark were quoted.)
Rethinking free speech environment in law schools | LAist 89.3 FM’s ‘AirTalk’
“I haven’t had any of my talks disrupted or lectures disrupted. I’ve certainly been at an event that was disrupted. This was a talk by somebody whom I helped invite, who was a prominent athlete in her day when she was young, and is now a prominent scholar of sports law,” said UCLA’s Eugene Volokh (approx. 7:25 mark).
JWST captures an unprecedented ‘prequel’ to a galaxy | Popular Science
“It is amazing the science we can now dream of doing, now that we have Webb,” co-author and University of California, Los Angeles astronomer Tommaso Treu said in a statement. “With this small protocluster of seven galaxies, at this great distance, we had a one hundred percent spectroscopic confirmation rate, demonstrating the future potential for mapping dark matter and filling in the timeline of the universe’s early development.” (Also: Science Daily.)
A new AI-powered tsunami warning is coming | USA Today
According to a new study published Tuesday in the journal Physics of Fluids, an early warning system is being developed that combines “state-of-the-art acoustic technology with AI to immediately classify earthquakes and determine potential tsunami risk,” the study said. … “Tectonic events with a strong vertical slip element are more likely to raise or lower the water column compared to horizontal slip elements,” said co-author Bernabe Gomez of the University of California, Los Angeles. “Thus, knowing the slip type at the early stages of the assessment can reduce false alarms and enhance the reliability of the warning systems,” Gomez added.
Small acts of kindness are frequent and universal | KCAL-TV
A group of researchers at UCLA recently found that people are more than willing to take on small acts of kindness. According to the study, people ask for help from each other around every two minutes. Those asked for help offer a lending hand 80% of the time. The research revealed that our willingness to help is universal. The overall message, the researchers say the study shows, is that being kind and helpful when it doesn’t cost much is part of our human nature.
High temperatures to melt record amounts of snow | ABC News
In the San Joaquin Valley, heavy thawing is expected to start Wednesday and will rapidly increase over the next seven to 10 days, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Monday during the “office hours” session he streams on YouTube. (Swain was also quoted by the Washington Post.)
How the climate crisis is challenging our water supply | LAist
But all of those chances are going up as the climate crisis changes the global water cycle. A recent UCLA study found chances of a megaflood have doubled due to the changing climate.
Joe Biden isn’t popular. That might not matter in 2024. | The Atlantic
Even Democratic-leaning voters who say they don’t want Biden to run again, [UCLA’s Lynn Vavreck] predicted, are highly likely to line up behind him once the alternative is a Republican nominee whose values clash with their own. … “We are fighting at the margins again,” Vavreck told me. “The 2020 election was nearly a replica of 2016, and I think that largely this 2024 election is going to be a repeat of 2020 and 2016.”
Housing-market bottom raises hopes of avoiding recession | Bloomberg
That supply-demand dynamic is also why Ed Leamer — the University of California, Los Angeles economist whose influential 2007 paper, “Housing IS the Business Cycle,” laid out the importance of residential investment to the economy — thinks last year’s sharp contraction in the housing market won’t weigh as heavily as it has in past cycles. “Recessions historically have been about two fundamental job losses, which are construction and manufacturing. Those two things are not going to be so serious this time,” Leamer said. “There wasn’t really any over-building, so we don’t need to have significant under-building to get back to a normal level in housing.”
Councilmembers backpedal on bike lanes in Culver City | Los Angeles Times
That desire to have it both ways remains “a common theme in American city planning,” said Michael Manville, an associate professor of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “Because we don’t want to address congestion at its root, we often end up in strange zero-sum battles, that we hope will stop it from getting worse,” he said.
American road deaths show an alarming racial gap | New York Times
In Los Angeles, for instance, a 2020 analysis by [UCLA] researchers found that although Black residents made up 8.6 percent of the city’s population, they represented more than 18 percent of all pedestrians killed and around 15 percent of all cyclists.
Discrimination against white Latinos in Hollywood? | El País
Luna terms the state of diversity in the industry as “devastating.” Her pessimism is evidenced by the most recent University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) report on the subject. The document affirms that despite Hollywood showing signs of an openness to minorities over the past two years, the pandemic has led the studios to take a cautious approach once again. (UCLA’s Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramón were quoted.)
Young Hispanic women seeing rise in uterine cancer | USA Today
In 2018, Hispanic women had the highest uterine cancer rate among young reproductive-aged women between ages 35 and 39 — a rate 50% higher than white women, according to the study of more than 840,000 uterine cancer patients, published in the journal Gynecologic Oncology. … Over the next five years, Hispanic women in the western U.S. could see a uterine cancer rate triple that of white women, said study co-author Dr. Cortney Eakin, an obstetrician-gynecologist and research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles.
