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.
Warming means water loss for Colorado River | Los Angeles Times
A team of scientists at UCLA estimated that from 2000 to 2021, rising temperatures led to the loss of about 32.5 million acre-feet of water in the Colorado River Basin, more than the entire storage capacity of Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir. The scientists said that if it weren’t for the effects of climate change, the river’s reservoirs probably would not have declined to the point of triggering the first-ever government-declared shortage. (UCLA’s Benjamin Bass was quoted. Also: KTLA-TV.)
Immigrants face grim future without retirement benefits | Los Angeles Times
Víctor Narro, project director and professor of labor studies at the UCLA Labor Center, said that although elderly undocumented immigrants urgently need help, strengthening Social Security seems to be a political non-starter, especially any plan that would extend it to immigrants who are undocumented. “The state is facing an unprecedented crisis when it comes to its rapidly aging undocumented population,” Narro said.
The human toll of the U.S.–Mexico border | Los Angeles Times
In the absence of legal pathways like the European Union’s temporary protections for refugees, like those leaving Ukraine, people fleeing violence in Latin America or seeking to return to their relatives in the U.S. will continue to die by the “killing machine that simultaneously uses and hides behind the viciousness of the Sonoran Desert,” writes Jason de León, an anthropologist at UCLA.
L.A.’s high rents make overcrowding common | Los Angeles Times
(Commentary co-written by UCLA’s Paula Nazario) My sister and I have called Westlake and Koreatown home our entire lives, but rising rent priced us out of our own community. Southern California’s high costs of living and limited homeowner support programs made it nearly impossible to find a better housing situation for our family.
‘Barbie’ and the beauty of growing old | Los Angeles Times
And just as I was taking stock of where I’ve been and where I’m going, the Little Hoover Commission was doing the same with Gov. Newsom’s directive to get the state ready for 2030, when people 60 and older will make up a quarter of the state’s population. Fernando Torres-Gil, of the UCLA Policy Center for Research on Aging, serves on a committee overseeing the master plan’s implementation. He testified at the hearing, expressing both optimism and some concerns about pulling together all the people needed to make the plan work. At times, he said, it’s like “trying to herd kittens.”
Advice for newbies on L.A. City Council | Los Angeles Times
“People will respect an elected official who takes a calculated risk in the interest of the public,” said [Zev] Yaroslavsky, who served several terms on the county Board of Supervisors and is now director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Cosmo Whyte’s metal beaded curtains | Los Angeles Times
[Artist Cosmo Whyte] moved to Los Angeles last year, having left a teaching position at Florida State University to take on an assistant professor role teaching Beginning and Advanced Drawing to undergraduate and graduate students at UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture. (Whyte was quoted.)
Veterans advocate for bill to decriminalize psychedelics | KNBC-TV
Charles Grob, M.D., is a Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences and Pediatrics at UCLA. He has been researching the effects psychedelic substances — such as MDMA, ayahuasca, and psilocybin — have had on people since the 1990s. “The war on drugs has been a colossal failure,” he said, and it was used to “identify certain undesirable groups, whether that be on a racial basis or a political basis,” and further marginalize those people.
Confusion about urinary tract infections | New York Times
A lot of the misconceptions around U.T.I.s crop up because there is very little quality research into the issue, said Dr. Ja-Hong Kim, a urologist at UCLA Health.
GI doctors reveal what they eat and avoid | NBC’s ‘Today’
“I like eating steel-cut oatmeal for breakfast because it is high in fiber, including the soluble fiber beta-glucan, which keeps the gut regular and prevents constipation,” gastroenterologist Dr. Wendy Ho, health sciences clinical professor at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, tells TODAY.com.
Finding relief from the swelter | Christian Science Monitor
A visit to the interactive heat map by the University of California, Los Angeles shows that Bakersfield’s Kern County has an average 126 additional heat-related emergency-room visits on days with extreme heat, which experts point out is responsible for more deaths than any other extreme weather event.
Blood screening for cancer raises hopes, worries | California Healthline
“A screening test has to be magnificent, mathematically, for it to be beneficial,” said Jerome Hoffman, a professor emeritus at UCLA’s Department of Medicine and a longtime critic of overtesting and overdiagnosis. “The biggest threat on the horizon is overdiagnosis — finding things that don’t matter but that we intervene on anyway.”
Predicting landscapes through AI | Spectrum News 1
Landslides cause massive destruction and happen all over the world. However, a team of scientists and engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is on a mission to understand the causes and effects of landslides. So they developed new artificial intelligence to help predict them. I talked to Kevin Shao, a doctoral graduate in Earth, planetary and space sciences and co–first author of the AI landslide research. He told me predicting landslides is a challenge.
Has Hollywood given up on pushing for diversity? | Guardian
A UCLA study conducted in 2020 found that 92% of the chairs or CEOs of 11 major studios were white, and 68% were men. And among all senior executives, 93% of positions are held by white people and 80% by men. White male executives comprise the vast majority of people who ultimately approve whether a film or TV show can be made, making executive diversity roles at studios all the more crucial. (UCLA’s Darnell Hunt was quoted.)
Training tomorrow’s mental health care providers | EdSurge
“We’re in a child mental health crisis,” says Dr. Eraka Bath, the director of the Community Partnerships Core for the Youth Mental Health Academy at the Child Mind Institute. She also works as an associate professor of psychiatry and the vice chair for justice, equity, diversity and inclusion at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. “We need to increase our behavioral health workforce by any means necessary,” she says.
Transgender America fights back | Wall Street Journal
The number of youth who say they identify as transgender or gender fluid has grown, although the numbers still remain small. About 1.6 million people ages 13 and above identify as transgender, according to University of California Los Angeles Williams Institute.
California’s lottery fever | KCAL-TV
“This is absolutely designed to stimulate what we call dopamine and adrenaline at a very, very, very low cost. For $2, you can generate hope, wonderment, amazement, dream,” said UCLA’s Dr. Timothy Fong (approx. 1:05 mark).
Women’s adversity affects health of offspring | KTLA-TV
“The major headline is basically that these experiences that mothers had in their childhood seem to have an impact on their children’s microbiomes, these bacteria that live in the body and are associated with people’s health and well-being,” said UCLA’s Dr. Bridget Callaghan.
