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.
Flu, RSV, COVID exacerbate hospital overcrowding | Los Angeles Times
More than three-quarters of patients in MLK’s emergency department rely on Medi-Cal — the California Medicaid program … Medicaid programs reimburse doctors at lower rates than private insurers, which can “reduce the number of providers that are willing to participate,” said Nadereh Pourat, associate director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research … Medi-Cal recipients were more likely … to say that they have no usual source of care or that a doctor would not accept their insurance, according to a report from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
Police respond to call of 4-year-old with gun | Washington Post
On Saturday, Beech Grove police arrested the child’s father, Shane Osborne, 45, on a charge of neglect of a dependent … the neglect charge that Osborne faces isn’t specifically related to firearms but applies more broadly to any household items that could endanger a child, said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. “We don’t have such laws for car keys, either,” Volokh said.
L.A. County and Gov. Newsom’s mental health plan | Los Angeles Times
By some estimates, close to 40% of people living on the streets are experiencing severe mental illness, a substance abuse disorder or both. More precisely, the California Policy Lab at UCLA determined that just over 4,500 people living on the streets of the county have a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia, and that number includes only those who have received outreach services.
The flu remains deadly, and vaccination is important | CNN
The most common symptoms of flu are fever, body ache and shaking chills. In some cases, it can cause lower respiratory tract infections known as pneumonia or directly infect heart cells and brain cells, causing inflammation of those organs, Dr. Tara Vijayan, an infectious disease doctor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in an email. She added that inflammation can result in the body’s own cells dying.
What to know about the recent California storms | New York Times
“We are nearing the end of this active cycle — we just need to get through this weekend and Monday,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, noting that at least one more large storm system is expected to hit the state on Sunday before a shift in the weather patterns bring drier conditions.
Trans asylum-seeker appeals to Supreme Court | ABC News
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear the appeal of a 33-year-old transgender woman from Guatemala who is seeking asylum in a case her attorney calls life or death … A 2021 study by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found an estimated 30,900 LGBTQ people applied for asylum in the United States between 2012 and 2017, with nearly 4,000 seeking asylum due to fear of persecution on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Most were natives of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
UCLA basketball coach says Title IX inequities persist | Los Angeles Times
Cori Close and Tara VanDerveer have a clear view of Riverside City College despite not having set foot on campus… They’ve been career-long warriors on the front lines of the fight to enforce Title IX, the 50-year-old federal law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in education programs and activities — including athletics. Close, 51, in her 12th season as coach of No. 8-ranked UCLA, is president of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Assn. and is active in lobbying Congress to increase funding for and enforcement of Title IX. (Close was quoted.)
Appeals court ruling on Trump-era gun law | USA Today
This case is very likely not the last word on bump stocks or federal agency power, said Adam Winkler, a professor who specializes in constitutional law, the Supreme Court and gun policy at UCLA Law. “The Supreme Court has been cutting back executive agency power,” Winkler said. “Many think it’s the new defining characteristic of the new Roberts court. They have been curtailing agency power in case after case. So it’s possible this case would be looked at with the same lens.”
Illinois’ firearms ban certain to end up in court | Chicago Tribune
“It’s clear that the courts are becoming more hostile to gun safety regulations,” said Adam Winkler, a UCLA School of Law professor and author of the book “Gun Fight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.” “The law (in Illinois) is going to be challenged, and there is a good chance it will be overturned.”
Deaths from China’s COVID outbreak may be underreported | Bloomberg New
“This reported number of COVID-19 deaths might be the tip of the iceberg,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, chair of the department of epidemiology at the Fielding School of Public Health at University of California, Los Angeles. While the figure is roughly in line with what Zhang estimated might be coming from the country’s hospitals, he said it’s only a fraction of the total Covid deaths across the country.
After facelift, UCLA’s Pritzker Hall stands tall again | Bloomberg
Pritzker Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles is typical for a building designed by Paul Revere Williams, in that it doesn’t much resemble anything else he ever built. There’s an affinity, for sure, between the stately geometry of the 1967 tower and its grid-like concrete facade and the long window panes of another project on campus, UCLA’s Botany Building, which Williams completed in 1959.
The complexities of L.A.’s new ‘mansion tax’ | Daily Breeze
[The “mansion tax”] taxes all properties worth above $5 million, not just lavish houses. According to a recent UCLA Lewis Center report, most of Measure ULA’s sales tax revenue will come from the sale of commercial buildings, industrial properties, and apartment buildings, including modest ones. Just 38% of funds would come from single-family home sales … UCLA housing researchers Shane Phillips and Maya Ofek forecasted that 4% of the city’s annual housing production could be deterred by Measure ULA’s tax — equivalent to 650 homes per year, based on L.A.’s 2021 homebuilding pace.
Did woman get HPV-related cancer from nail salon? | ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’
For months, Garcia said she dealt with the pain and followed up with her doctor. Then, in April 2022, about five months after she first received the cut, Garcia was referred to UCLA Health dermatologist Dr. Teo Soleymani for a biopsy. “It came back as a squamous cell carcinoma, which is a very common form of skin cancer,” Soleymani told “GMA” of the biopsy test result. “But interestingly … she didn’t have any of the traditional signs … hers was HPV-driven. And it’s an interesting thing to see.”
Impaired vision in older Americans | HealthDay News
More than 1 in 4 U.S. seniors lives with untreated vision problems that, in many cases, could be solved with an inexpensive pair of glasses, a new study reports … “I was kind of surprised how many people may have vision that could be probably improved with reading glasses, because we just don’t think of that as being a problem,” said Dr. Anne Coleman, a University of California, Los Angeles professor of ophthalmology who wrote an editorial accompanying the new study.
Flat Earth claims won’t go away | USA Today
The reason day and night exist at all is because the Earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours, said Jaahnavee Venkatraman, a graduate researcher in UCLA’s department of Earth, planetary and space sciences. The moon only revolves around Earth once every month. “This means that on any given day during the month, the moon is never visible to us in the sky during the same time window as the previous day,” Venkatraman said.
Fight over Big Tech in Supreme Court | Voice of America
An upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case that asks whether tech firms can be held liable for damages related to algorithmically generated content recommendations has the ability to “upend the internet,” according to a brief filed by Google this week … “It has pretty profound implications, because with tech regulation and tech law, things can have unintended consequences,” John Villasenor, a professor of engineering and law and director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, told VOA.
Physically linking national parks could help wildlife | Popular Science
“We’ve known that larger patches of habitat support more species for longer periods of time than smaller patches, and practically this means that animals in isolated parks and reserves will eventually go extinct,” Dan Blumstein, a conservation biologist and professor at UCLA who was not involved in the latest study, wrote in a statement to Popular Science. “The statistical approach Newmark and his colleagues used here shows the value of connecting isolated parks and can inform the basis of increased land protection,” he explained.
Obit: Lewis Hunter, screenwriter and UCLA professor | Variety
Lewis R. “Lew” Hunter, a screenwriting professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (TFT) who taught many celebrated Hollywood screenwriters, including Michael Colleary, Alexander Payne and Michael Werb, died Jan. 6 at a care facility in Arizona from COVID-19 … Hunter was a professor emeritus at UCLA, where he began teaching in 1979 and helped helm the university’s graduate FTV 434 course, a methodical guide to writing a full-length screenplay in 10 weeks. He was named co-head of the screenwriting program in 1988, a title he held until his retirement in 2000. (UCLA’s George Huang was quoted.)
Magnetic field disturbances can lead migratory birds astray | Earth.com
Scientists have long known that bad weather can make migratory birds disoriented during their annual fall migrations, causing them to wind up in territories they are not accustomed to (a phenomenon called “vagrancy”). However, a team of researchers led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has now found that disturbances to the Earth’s magnetic field can also lead birds astray even in perfect weather, and particularly during fall migrations. (UCLA’s Morgan Tingley and Benjamin Tonelli were quoted.)
Could we get from Earth to Neptune in a year? | Popular Mechanics
Traveling at only 3.6 AU (1 AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun) a year, the Voyager missions took nearly half a human lifetime to reach the heliopause. Artur Davoyan of UCLA wants to speed up that process dramatically by using fast-moving particles propelled by lasers.
“How the Soviet Jew was made” | Los Angeles Review of Books
(Book review by UCLA’s Yelena Furman) In his new book “How the Soviet Jew was Made,” Sasha Senderovich, a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Washington, discusses the “process by which the somewhat nebulous contours of the Soviet Jew came into focus.” The seminal period for this process was between the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the 1930s … and he devotes each of his five chapters to writers or filmmakers whose works reflected and shaped this image.
Video: Is it possible to schedule happiness? | CNN International
“It is an important one, because so many of us feel like we don’t have enough time to do all that we want to do. And there’s this feeling called ‘time poverty’ which is exactly that: that we so feel that we don’t have enough hours in the day to do what we want to, what we have to and what set out to,” said UCLA’s Cassie Holmes (Holmes was interviewed.)
