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.
Safe cleaning after wildfires | NPR’s “All Things Considered”
[Dr. Reza] Ronaghi is a pulmonologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. So, he is well-acquainted with the health risks associated with breathing in wildfire smoke. But even he, a medical professional, was shocked to see how many potential health risks lurked in the detritus, ash and smoke left behind after the fires.
Is the air quality index actually useful right now? | National Public Radio
The [Environmental Protection Agency] collects data for the [Air Quality Index] from some 4,000 air quality monitoring stations dotted around the country. But air quality can vary on a hyperlocal scale, meaning the network of official sites is “fairly sparse,” says Michael Jerrett, an air pollution expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Much of SoCal experiencing driest start to winter on record | LAist
Fossil fuel pollution in our atmosphere is supercharging Southern California’s natural weather cycles, driving what’s called “weather whiplash.” Two years of historically wet winters allowed lots of vegetation growth, then a record hot summer dried it all out. UCLA researchers found vegetation was about 25% drier than normal this January due to human-caused climate change.
‘Survivor’s guilt’ is real right now in L.A. | Los Angeles Times
Survivor’s guilt, says Diana Winston, director of Mindfulness Education at the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, is a “constellation of feelings” — “despair, hopelessness, guilt, shame.” The longer we sit with them, especially shame, the more reticent we can become to discuss them. Winston recommends a simple mindfulness trick called the RAIN method, an acronym that stands for “recognize, allow, investigate and nurture.”
Why California fires are growing larger and more destructive | USA Today
To make things worse, the drought and high temperatures followed two very wet years that promoted plant growth in the surrounding chaparral and coastal sage scrub, said Glen MacDonald, a professor of geography at University of California, Los Angeles. All that extra plant growth had time to really dry out, leaving it primed to burn.
L.A.’s burned houses were workplaces for thousands | Wall Street Journal
Nearly 73,000 service workers are employed in houses and businesses within the wildfire evacuation zones, according to an analysis of American Community Survey data by the Latino Policy and Politics Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Smoke and fire are sickening L.A.’s children | Wall Street Journal
More children have sought care for asthma and other respiratory illnesses as the wildfires, among the most destructive in California’s history, leveled swaths of L.A., doctors in the region said. Dr. Sande Okelo, Soren’s pulmonologist at UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital, said he was seeing more patients experiencing asthma episodes after the fires.
There is no way to retreat from the risk of wildfires | New York Times
(Commentary co-written by UCLA’s Liz Koslov) Thirty years ago, the historian and critic Mike Davis published “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” a classic essay that questioned the vast resources spent fighting fires and rebuilding mansions in a setting that was certain to burn again.
L.A.’s next potential threat? Floods, landslides, toxic debris flows | The Hill
As for possible flooding in the upcoming weeks and months, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, expressed some trepidation about what might be in store at a webinar earlier this week. While forecasts do not indicate that such a deluge is imminently on the horizon, Swain noted that major rain is “still quite possible in February or March or even April.”
Wildfire smoke is always toxic. L.A.’s is even worse | Grist
“These fires are different from previous quote-unquote ‘wildfires,’ because there are so many structures that burned,” said Yifang Zhu, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Everything in the households got burned — cars, metal pipes, plastics.”
Battery plant fire started during boom for energy storage | Associated Press
Since then several gigawatts of battery storage has been added, a major reason [California Independent System Operator] hasn’t ordered rotating outages in nearly four years, according to Denise Grab, an energy policy researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Trump takes aim at clean energy, climate change | Los Angeles Times
“California has ambitious goals and huge risks, as have been highlighted [by the wildfires] the last couple weeks in Los Angeles,” said Cara Horowitz, executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the UCLA School of Law. “It does not have a lot of time — nor do any of us — to tackle climate change. To the extent that the Trump administration and the fights that it provokes slow things down, that’s not great for any of us. It’s certainly not great for achieving California’s ambitious climate goals.”
Tracking California’s lawsuits against Donald Trump | CalMatters
One of California’s most successful legal challenges ended with a victory outside the court, said Julia Stein, an environmental law professor at UCLA. After the Trump administration revoked California’s permission to set its own emission limits on car exhaust — which comes from an Environmental Protection Agency waiver of the federal law’s preeminence over state rules — California sued. Then it sued again.
On Trump’s first day, California’s targeted immigrants lie low | CalMatters
“Economically, the entire country is going to be deeply affected negatively,” said Cecilia Menjívar, a professor of sociology at UCLA. “I think it’s super important to recognize that it’s not only undocumented immigrants we’re talking about. Lawful permanent residents, naturalized citizens, all immigrant labor, all immigrants, all foreign-born, contribute vitally to critical sectors of the entire economy of the country: health, services, hospitality, care for children, care for the elderly, high tech, you name it.”
Experts fear “democratic erosion” in North Carolina | Salon
While election challenges in close races are not unusual, Griffin’s is different, Rick Hasen, director of UCLA Law’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, told Salon. “It seeks to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters after an election based upon questionable interpretations of state law after the issues were not aggressively litigated before the election,” he said. “It’s especially troublesome that the state Supreme Court may be the one deciding the composition of one of its own members.”
Republicans propose new limits on transgender identity | New York Times
There are about three million transgender adults in this country, according to an estimate from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, which researches the LGBTQ+ population.
The latest on the ceasefire in Gaza | KNBC-TV
“This is an approximately six-week process that’s going to involve a tiered release of hostages in exchange for additional prisoners being released from Israeli jails. These are Palestinian prisoners,” said UCLA’s Benjamin Radd.
Are dental X-rays safe? | New York Times
A typical series of bitewing X-rays — in which a patient bites down on a wing-shaped device to hold X-ray film in place — gives off about five microsieverts of ionizing radiation, said Sanjay Mallya, an oral and maxillofacial radiologist at the UCLA School of Dentistry. That’s less radiation than you’d be exposed to in a typical day, he said.
NASA’s Genesis is still teaching us about solar wind | Space.com
Kevin McKeegan of the University of California, Los Angeles, is a Genesis mission science team member. Like other Genesis researchers, McKeegan underscores that, unfortunately, what many people remember about Genesis is the crash. “What they should know, however, is that the Genesis mission was very successful, achieving all of its major scientific objectives,” McKeegan told Space.com.
Why calling loved ones by their name is strangely awkward | The Atlantic
Names are a special feature of conversation in part because they’re almost always optional. When an element of a conversation isn’t grammatically necessary, its use is likely socially meaningful, Steven Clayman, a sociology professor at UCLA, told me.
