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.
In Vietnam, the Year of the Rabbit is the Year of the Cat | NPR
Quyen Di, a lecturer at UCLA, has several other possible explanations for Vietnam’s unique celebration. One has to do with the landscapes of China and Vietnam. “Originally, the Chinese lived in the savanna area, while the Vietnamese lived in the lowland area,” he says. “The people of the savanna prefer a nomadic life, close to the wilderness, and they chose the rabbit as an animal that lived in the wild fields.”
Desert dust masks true extent of global warming | CBS News
The UCLA research, published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment on Tuesday, found that the amount of atmospheric dust has increased by about 55% since pre-industrial times, with many ups and downs along the way. According to lead study author Jasper Kok, that increase is likely due to changes in global climate, such as wind speeds in some deserts, as well as land-use changes, such as transforming land into agriculture and diverting water for irrigation.
Some missed crucial hepatitis treatments amid pandemic | Los Angeles Times
Fewer people have gotten crucial medication for hepatitis C under Medi-Cal in recent years, troubling advocates who have pushed to expand the lifesaving treatment … UCLA Health has a rolling clinic that is part of a study assessing the effectiveness of a one-stop unit to link people who inject drugs to health services, including hepatitis C treatment.
Was YouTube to blame for terrorist killing? | ABC News
The Gonzalez case is the first time the nation’s highest court will consider limits to immunity for internet companies. “There are enormous amounts of money at stake if the platforms were to be held liable for every time a terrorist attack could in any way be tangentially traced to material that the platforms carried,” said Michael Karanicolas, executive director of the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at UCLA.
West’s snow boom could be followed by more dry weather | CNN
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said one thing that would concern him is if the West sees a series of warmer storms in the next couple months. One of the signatures of a warming climate, he said, is that storms in the region are becoming increasingly warmer, bringing rain instead of snow to higher elevations.
He’s 109, but living longer can come at a cost | Los Angeles Times
UCLA psychologist Stephen Sideroff says that as the population of aging people swells, we’d do well to consider how we live in addition to how long we live. “We don’t want to simply extend old age if it means more years of disability and dementia,” Sideroff said. “Increasing one’s health span, unlike life span, means staying healthy and functioning … as long as possible, and reducing the time at the end of life where you are disabled in one way or another.”
Man’s Google searches helped lead to murder charge | Washington Post
Diane Birnholz, a criminal law professor at UCLA Law, said she was amazed Walshe allegedly made such internet searches while his wife was missing, noting that most people would expect investigators to check their online activity. “I don’t know how the defense is going to explain this,” she said.
Lab-grown meat moves closer to American plates | Reuters
Still, a lot of people are grossed out by cultivated meat, said Janet Tomiyama, a health psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies human diets. In a 2022 study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, she found that 35% of meat eaters and 55% of vegetarians would be too disgusted to try cultivated meat. Some people may perceive the meat to be “unnatural” and have a negative attitude about it before even trying it, she said.
City Council adopts tenant protections | City News Service
Tenant groups feared a wave of evictions once the long-standing protections expire. The volume of eviction filings has begun to resemble pre-pandemic levels, according to Kyle Nelson, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA and a member of the LA Renters’ Right to Counsel Coalition. Nelson, who has compiled data on evictions in Los Angeles County during the pandemic through court filings, said the number of filings could increase to levels not seen since the Great Recession — which contributed to more than 72,000 eviction filings in 2008.
Rural trans people struggle to find health care | Kaiser Health News
However, the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates for LGBTQ+ issues, used 2014–17 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data from selected ZIP codes in 35 states to estimate that roughly 1 in 6 transgender adults in the U.S. live in a rural area. When that report was released in 2019, there were an estimated 1.4 million transgender people 13 and older nationwide. That number is now at least 1.6 million, according to the Williams Institute, a nonprofit think tank at the UCLA School of Law.
Chemists synthesize ocean-based molecule that could fight Parkinson’s | Phys.org
Organic chemists at UCLA have created the first synthetic version of a molecule recently discovered in a sea sponge that may have therapeutic benefits for Parkinson’s disease and similar disorders. The molecule, known as lissodendoric acid A, appears to counteract other molecules that can damage DNA, RNA and proteins and even destroy whole cells. (UCLA’s Neil Garg was quoted. Also: Scienmag.)
How dogs perceive time | Discover Magazine
“There’s a lot of evidence that dogs know when somebody’s supposed to come home,” says Greg Bryant, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But a lot of those stories don’t include details that are probably important.”
Resources in the wake of the Monterey Park shooting | LAist
Melissa Brymer, Director of Terrorism and Disaster Programs at the UCLA–Duke National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, said it also might be therapeutic for families to have conversations about what they can do to bring about change, whether that be contributing to an organization or reaching out to other families.
Taking 12th grade math opens door to higher education | Phys.org
Students who take math in the 12th grade improve their chances of enrolling and continuing in higher education, according to a new report by the Los Angeles Education Research Institute at UCLA … The report yields several findings that can inform current debates over education policy in California, said Meredith Phillips, co-founder of the institute known as LAERI, which is housed at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Why are some football players wearing collars? | KPCC-FM’s “AirTalk”
“I think that is a plausible hypothesis as to how it would work, but I think there are also additional hypotheses I think that we would want to address. In particular, the idea that the slosh effect is creating damage in the brain,” said UCLA’s Dr. Christopher Giza (approx. 6:25 mark).
Tech industry’s influence online and in communities | “Our Body Politic” podcast
“And part of what I have been studying for the last 10 years is the way in which we are seduced into engaging with so many different kinds of platforms and technologies, whether it’s social media or YouTube or Search. And people think that they’re engaging with something that’s just neutral, a tool. They don’t really give it a second thought,” said UCLA’s Safiya Noble. (Noble was interviewed.)
