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.

Fentanyl prompts a re-envisioning of the war on drugs | Los Angeles Times

“It’s just really clear now from 50 years of trying to stop the supply, it doesn’t work,” Dr. David Goodman-Meza, an infectious disease doctor at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, told me. Goodman-Meza recently testified at a contentious Capitol hearing, and is piloting a mobile pharmacy in Los Angeles to bring addiction treatment to the places people need it most. “Cartels want to bring drugs because we have a massive demand for them,” he points out.

Five symptoms that could signal dementia | Fortune

Dr. David Reuben, director of the Multicampus Program in Geriatrics Medicine and Contrology at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, agrees. He equates aging, a normal biological phenomenon, to a “computer processor up in your brain that doesn’t work quite as quickly.” An example: When a word or phrase is “on the tip of your tongue,” and you find yourself saying, “give me a couple of minutes and it will pop back in.” Such retrieval deficits are “very common with aging,” he says.

Remembering Los Angeles political pioneer Gloria Molina | LAist 89.3 FM

“It’s the passing of an era, and there won’t be another Gloria Molina passing our way anytime soon, if ever. She was a remarkable human being. … She was the first Latina in the legislature, she was the first Latina on the L.A. City Council, the first on the county Board of Supervisors and only the second women on the county Board of Supervisors in the 200-year history of the county. But it didn’t end with that. She wasn’t satisfied with being the first,” said UCLA’s Zev Yaroslavsky (approx. 26:15 mark).

Striking writers stress urgency of AI regulations | KABC-TV

Alex Alden teaches internet law at UCLA and says AI will require the legal community to create new copyright law to ensure writers are paid for the use of their work. “Certain forms of artificial intelligence are beneficial to the creative process whether that’s being used for research or for first drafts and the important thing is being able to document the evolution of a script in other words to impose a standard that says, ‘If you’re going to go out and write a TV series, you have to list all your sources,’” said UCLA professor Alex Alden.

Forecasters say El Niño could soon take over | NPR

Forecasters say the weather phenomenon known as El Niño that brings cold, wet winters to the southern U.S. could soon takeover. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says El Niño will take hold after back-to-back La Niña seasons. UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain says even after a record-breaking winter, El Niño could prompt an even wetter 2024. “I would still expect to see a strong tilt in the odds towards wetter than average conditions next winter in California, if that strong east Pacific-centered El Niño materializes.”

In Ancient Egypt, severed hands were spoils of war | New York Times

“Painstaking work was done on the surgical nature of the amputations,” said Kara Cooney, a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Flesh and nails are still attached to the hands, providing more information for a carefully gathered collection of hands.”

Almost 40% of wildfires traced to carbon emissions | Los Angeles Times

Rong Fu, the director of the UCLA Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, has also studied the link between global warming and increasingly destructive wildfires. If anything, study authors might have underestimated the impacts of the companies’ emissions because they included aerosol emissions in their calculations, Fu said.

Oil companies might face new penalty for health impacts | Capital & Main

Beth Kent, a fellow in environmental law and policy at UCLA who hasn’t been involved with the bill, pointed to conclusions from the state’s own advisory panel in 2021 as evidence that the legislation’s central mechanism could hold up in court. The California Oil and Gas Public Health Rulemaking Scientific Advisory Panel affirmed “with a high level of certainty” that close proximity to wells is associated with perinatal and respiratory harms. “That’s a strong hook for the causation argument,” Kent told Capital & Main.