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.
Answers to travelers’ questions about the coronavirus | New York Times
“You should also be double careful to do the things we say everyone should always do like hand washing with soap and water, especially after touching surfaces or coming in contact with someone who has been coughing,” said David Eisenman, director of University of California, Los Angeles’s Center for Public Health and Disasters, and professor of community health sciences at the university’s Fielding School of Public Health. “You should be avoiding close contact with others if you’re sick and you should have your flu shot.”
Mysterious ‘ghost’ populations had multiple trysts with human ancestors | Science magazine
Others, though, say Rogers’s bold claim needs testing. One challenge is reconciling it with new results from other researchers that show modern human ancestors mixed with super-archaic groups more recently, in Africa. Just last week, for example, population geneticist Sriram Sankararaman and his student Arun Durvasula at the University of California (UC), Los Angeles, identified signs of a separate, more recent episode of mixing. The researchers analyzed the genomes of 405 people from four subpopulations in West Africa that were included in the 1000 Genomes Project, a catalog of genomes from around the world. They found numerous gene variants not seen in Neanderthals or Denisovans and concluded that the best explanation was that the variants came from an archaic, extinct human. (Also: Reuters)
California students sued because they were such poor readers. They just won $53 million to help them | Los Angeles Times
“We know that literacy is the foundation for all learning, and it’s an essential part of participating in democracy. People who can’t read and write are often uninformed, are more easily manipulated and less likely to vote,” said Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at UCLA. This settlement is “just a step, and I think we shouldn’t exaggerate how big a step.” … “You don’t want to just pour money into failing schools that don’t have capacity to use it,” Noguera said. Results will vary at schools. Some may see fast growth in state standardized test results, Noguera said, although that kind of improvement typically takes time, he said.
Could a ‘miracle’ March make up for California’s bone-dry February? What history tells us | Sacramento Bee
In a March 2018 story by the San Francisco Chronicle, the headline for which flat-out rejected the “miracle” moniker, climate experts including UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain noted that because atmospheric river systems are accompanied by warm air, that month’s storms actually served to melt snow, waning some of the snowpack in the southern Sierra.
What history tells us about killer viruses | Korea Times
“Killer viruses have had enormous historical consequences,” Jared Diamond, a professor in the Department of Geography at University of California, Los Angeles, said in an email interview with The Korea Times. “One of the biggest was the role of smallpox, measles and other European-introduced diseases in facilitating the European conquest of Native Americans 500 years ago.” He said infectious diseases are a decisive shaper of history. Diamond, a historian, geographer, anthropologist and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” and several other books, said smallbox, for example, played a key role behind the Spanish conquest of the Americas by killing more Native Americans than the Spanish troops did.
Beshear becomes first governor to speak at statewide LGBTQ rally in Frankfort | Lexington Herald-Leader
The Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles found that about 700,000 LGBTQ adults have undergone conversion therapy, including around 350,000 who received it when they were adolescents. The American Psychiatric Association has denounced the practice since 1998.
Why controlling your anger may help you live longer | The Healthy
Brain imaging at the University of California–Los Angeles and elsewhere has shown that if you name your feelings, you can actually calm the activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain that triggers the release of adrenaline and cortisol.
Here’s what happens to the body after contracting the coronavirus | Healthline
Dr. James Cherry, a research professor of pediatrics in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, says the kidney damage may be due to other changes that happen during coronavirus infection. “When you have pneumonia, you have less oxygen circulating,” he said, “and that can damage the kidneys.” … Cherry says children also have a less severe illness than adults during other kinds of infections, including measles and pneumococcal infections. He says this may be because children have a “straightforward immune response,” whereas older people can sometimes have an “over-response.” It’s this excess immune response that causes some of the damage during infections.
Cardiologists reveal the ‘silent’ heart attack symptoms you should never ignore | Prevention
The same risk factors for a typical heart attack also apply to a silent heart attack, according to Olujimi Ajijola, M.D., Ph.D., a cardiologist at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, smoking, high stress levels, illicit substance use, and strong family history of heart attacks all make you more likely to have this kind of attack, he says. “Diabetic patients may be at particularly high risk for silent heart attack because chronic diabetes causes degeneration of the heart’s autonomic nerves, which typically alert one to a heart attack,” adds Dr. Ajijola. “Also, women may have a higher risk of not recognizing the signs of a problem because they tend to have atypical symptoms for heart attacks, like abdominal pain, jaw discomfort, or just feeling generally unwell.”
UCLA American Jewish Festival is March 1 | Broadway World
The Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music proudly presents the first-ever UCLA American Jewish Music Festival. In line with the festival's theme “Music Crossing Boundaries,” the diverse lineup of artists explores a breadth of musical styles, all of which reflect the American Jewish experience: from classical to klezmer, tango to Middle Eastern, and bluegrass to Broadway.
Remembering civil rights activist Bayard Rustin | KCRW-FM’s “Press Play”
“Bayard Rustin must’ve been born a civil rights activist or a human rights activist,” said UCLA’s Brenda Stevenson. “From a very early age, he was very, very involved and invested in human rights and anything that he saw or felt or experienced that was not fair. And so growing up in a home where his grandparents who raised him were both very active in the local NAACP, he was exposed to some of the brightest activist minds of the time.” (Approx. 1:10 mark)
Why workplace schmoozing is bad for women, according to new research | Money
“Women face a disadvantage when climbing the corporate ladder,” says Ricardo Perez-Truglia, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and the study’s co-author. Male managers sometimes “become emotionally attached” to male employees, he says, which leads to more quality one-on-one time that can boost careers. For women, it’s not that easy.
More good news about Mediterranean, plant-based diets and your gut health | Healthline
Dr. Emeran Mayer, author of “The Mind-Gut Connection” and co-director of CURE: Digestive Diseases Research Center at the University of California Los Angeles, says diet can make a big difference when it comes to the onset of frailty and cardiac health. “The diet is one of the most important parts of treating or preventing these problems. I’m a big supporter of a largely plant-based diet… There is, in my mind, no question whatsoever that this is the healthiest diet,” Mayer told Healthline.
You might have to pay to park on Sundays and evenings in SF | Curbed San Francisco
Both of these ideas echo the proposals of UCLA professor of urban planning Donald Shoup, whose 2005 book, “The High Cost of Free Parking,” has helped push cities to charge more to park and to use the cost as a tool for directing driver behavior. Breed paraphrased Shoup’s oft-repeated idea of the “Goldilocks principle” of pricing parking neither too low nor too high, noting, “If the rate is set too high, spots will be empty. If the rate is too low, they will all be full.” Shoup told Curbed SF in 2016 that it costs the city $38,000 to create a single parking space, arguing that it’s bad planning and bad math not to charge more.
Car bans: Your city could be next | Mashable
“We are in a period of awakening over safety, quality of life, and the nature of our physical environment,” said Martin Wachs, a transportation historian at the University of California at Los Angeles’ (UCLA) Department of Urban Planning.
Fentanyl linked to deaths of several college students | KCAL-TV
“We have this concentration of deaths among students at USC. So, the best way to understand this is ‘we’re in trouble.’ … A few grains of fentanyl are going to be enough to take you out,” said UCLA’s Steven Shoptaw. (Approx. 1:15 mark)
Researchers find new method for measuring treatment of rare liver disease in children | Medical Xpress
“Our study sheds light on some of the mechanisms by which IV fish oil helps treat this disease. It also suggests that measuring levels of the molecule might someday be used to diagnose and monitor this and other liver diseases without the need for biopsies,” said Dr. Kara L. Calkins, first author of a study published in the Journal of Nutrition…. “Liver disease is a major health problem that can result in liver failure, the need for a liver transplant or even death,” said Dr. Sherin Devaskar, lead author of the study and physician-in-chief of UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital and professor of pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine. Because laboratory tests are not always accurate in predicting or diagnosing the disease, liver biopsy is the current standard treatment.
Unexpected insights into the dynamic structure of mitochondria | Science Daily
Researchers at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), supported also by the Center for Advanced Imaging (CAi) of HHU, and have now discovered that the inner membranes of mitochondria are by no means static, but rather constantly change their structure every few seconds in living cells. This dynamic adaptation process further increases the performance of our cellular power plants.
