UCLA In the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. See more UCLA In the News.
What Civil War soldiers can teach us about how trauma is passed from generation to generation | Los Angeles Times
UCLA economic historian Dora L. Costa inherited stewardship of a trove of Civil War service documents in 2013 after the death of her mentor, Nobel laureate Robert William Fogel. She had always assumed the records would tell a story of how education, class and economic differences influenced the adjustment of former soldiers and their families back to civilian life. “I was wrong,” Costa said. Instead, she found evidence to suggest that no matter how poor or prosperous his background, a father’s extreme hardship and privation alter the function of his genes in ways that can be passed on to his children.
Paid protesters? They’re real — and a Beverly Hills firm that hires them stands accused of extortion in a lawsuit | Los Angeles Times
Crowds on Demand isn’t the only outfit that hires paid protesters, though it is perhaps the most open about what it does, said Edward Walker, a UCLA sociology professor who wrote a book on astroturfing, “Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy.” “There are hundreds of lobbying firms and public affairs firms that do this work, though not all in the same way,” he said.
Top Music Law Schools list includes UCLA | Billboard
This past year, UCLA Law launched a Music Industry Clinic created by veteran music attorney Susan Genco, president of Azoff MSG Entertainment, where students learn fundamentals of laws governing the music industry and work pro bono to help independent artists and producers forge licensing agreements and band agreements, among other tasks. The clinic launched in tandem with the school’s new Documentary Film Legal Clinic.
Measles outbreak raging in Europe could be brought to U.S., doctors warn | NBC News
Many parents are unfamiliar with the havoc measles can wreak because there have been few cases in the U.S. since the vaccine became widely available, said Dr. Jeffrey D. Klausner, a professor of medicine and public health at the University of California, Los Angeles. “People don’t see them and so they forget about them or they think the diseases don’t exist anymore,” Klausner said. “They don’t realize their child is at risk for measles meningitis, encephalitis and permanent brain damage.”
‘The Advocates’ examines the complexities behind L.A.’s homelessness issue | Los Angeles Times
While director Remi Kessler has a panel of experts at his disposal, including UCLA law professor emeritus Gary Blasi and veteran L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez, to provide the simple math leading to where we are today, the situation proves more complex than the escalation of L.A. rents in proportion to the long languishing minimum wage.
Your life span is written in your DNA, and we’re learning to read the code | MIT Technology Review
Steve Horvath, a UCLA biostatistician who grew up in Frankfurt, Germany, describes himself as “very straight,” while his identical twin brother is gay. So he had a personal interest when, a few years ago, a colleague asked him for help analyzing biological data from the saliva of twins with opposite sexual orientations. The colleague was trying to detect chemical changes that would indicate whether certain genes were turned on or off…. “After five years of research, there is nobody who disputes that epigenetics predicts life span,” he says.
Mabanckou’s novel ‘Black Moses’ wins 2018 Hurston/Wright fiction award | Washington Post
The judges called the book “a funny, efficiently rendered picaresque tale” that “superbly traces the hero’s psychic collapse.” [Alain] Mabanckou, who was born in what is now the Republic of Congo and is now a professor of literature at UCLA, writes about the “the perils of tyrannical government” in a setting that “is vivid and engrossing.”
Rent control on ballot as California seeks a fix for housing costs | Christian Science Monitor
A recent UCLA poll showed that more than a quarter of Los Angeles County’s 10.1 million residents worried about losing their home in the previous year. The figure spiked to 41 percent among tenants in a county with a median monthly rent of $2,440 and where renters occupy more than half the households.
#HimToo should be a conversation about male victims of sexual assault | Pacific Standard
A 2014 meta-study of data on male victims of sexual assault by Lara Stemple and Ilan Meyer, both scholars at the University of California–Los Angeles School of Law, found that gendered assumptions—such as the idea that the penetrator is always male and always in control—can limit our understanding of the pervasiveness of sexual assault in American society. What’s more, most surveys seeking data on sexual assault focuses on “households,” according to Stemple and Meyer, thus erasing the experiences of incarcerated men.
The flu shot can’t infect you — and other flu facts | Healthline
Given that 900,000 people were hospitalized in the United States over the course of the last flu season, getting vaccinated is crucial, said pediatrician Dr. James Cherry. Cherry, a professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and Mattel Children’s Hospital, pointed out that last year’s flu season was particularly deadly…. “We’re nowhere near peak and that won’t be for usually another month. If you haven’t been vaccinated and haven’t yet had the flu, you should get the vaccine,” Cherry said.
The best way out is always through | Inside Higher Ed
News reports empirically validate the struggles of the students whom I come across in my teaching. The Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, which has been surveying first-year students across the country since 1966, notes a significant decline in the emotional health of college students. Life has apparently become even more complicated than it was when I was a teenager worrying about my future.
To keep your blood pressure in check, don’t forget to brush and floss | Los Angeles Times
At a time when federal health insurance for the poor and disabled is being scaled back and the requirements of the Affordable Care Act are being whittled away, it’s unlikely that patients with gum disease will get better access to dental care any time soon. But if they did, it might help, said Dr. Gregg L. Fonarow, a cardiologist at UCLA. “It’s suggested by this data, but would need to be proven,” Fonarow said. In the meantime, he said, the existence of a link is clear: Patients with hypertension should make every effort to improve their oral health, and those with poor gum health should be vigilant for hypertension.
Cancer center administers its first personalized cancer vaccine | Medical Xpress
And killing stubborn tumors is about more than proper targeting, adds Dr. Siwen Hu-Lieskovan, a clinical oncologist at David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The clinician and researcher is UCLA’s lead investigator for an ongoing neoantigen trial by Boston-based Neon Therapeutics. Cancer cells, she noted, create significant changes in their immediate surroundings, what scientists call their microenvironment.
Why this year is so bad for allergies | KPCC-FM’s “Take Two”
“Well, we’ve been seeing a lot of red swollen eyes, sneezing, coughing, itching, lots of signs of someone having allergies.… Actually, the pollen count is at zero. We can’t blame the trees and the grasses and the weeds this time. But it is that dry, warm weather that increases mold spores, increases dust mites. Add to that the high winds, and we’ve recently had fires. So those high winds are carrying those mold spores, the dust mites, all the ash from the fires, and those small particles are what are getting into your nose and the eyes, and that’s what’s triggering those reactions,” said UCLA’s Rita Kachru. (Approx 41:15 mark)
Children struggle with limited options during Ebola outbreaks | Infectious Diseases in Children
According to Anne W. Rimoin, PhD, MPH, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles Fielding School of Public Health and director of the UCLA-DRC Research Program in Kinshasa, armed conflict between the DRC military and Rwandan Hutu rebel forces in North Kivu has made diagnosing the disease a serious challenge, and health officials have had difficulty accurately gauging the size of the outbreak. Some areas, she said, “are just off limits.”
Misfiring visual cells may underlie key sensory problem in fragile X | Spectrum
“We uncovered a deficit in one particular cell type in the brain,” says lead investigator Carlos Portera-Cailliau, professor of neurology and neurobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Now we have a handle on potential therapies.” The hallmark of fragile X syndrome is intellectual disability, but many people with the syndrome have problems with perceiving sensory information, including motion. “Most of the activities that we do, even recognizing people’s facial expressions, involves recognizing movements,” Portera-Cailliau says.
Trump revives fiery immigration talk for ‘caravan’ election | Associated Press
But some warn that as Trump seeks to pump up his base, he could energize opposition. Matt Barreto, co-founder of the research firm Latino Decisions, said an elevated immigration message could hurt Trump, too. “I think you run the risk of angering minority voters across the board, Latino, black and Asian-Americans and also alienating and distancing from whites, including conservatives and moderates, now that they see what’s happening with the family separations,” said Barreto, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
