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.
Heat waves making L.A. firefighters sick | Los Angeles Times
Another study, published in August and led by UCLA PhD candidate Noam Rosenthal, found that the number of Californians exposed to the “multi-hazards” of heat and wildfire smoke is growing with climate change. “Climate change is going to be increasing the intensity, the frequency and the duration of heat waves,” Rosenthal said. “It’s going to result in an increase in vapor pressure deficit — things are going to get drier — and when you have extreme dryness and extreme heat, you’re going to see an increase in fire ignition.”
Central California’s dirty water, drying wells | Los Angeles Times
“We’re fighting an uphill battle due to climate change,” said Gregory Pierce, director of the Human Right to Water Solutions Lab at UCLA. “Even with the progress we’re making, there are other losses that few people anticipated when it comes to heat impacts on water quality … and the pace at which people, and even larger systems, are at risk of running out of water entirely.”
Tests show pandemic-fueled education equity gaps | Los Angeles Times
“What I worry is that there is the risk that the already underachieving students now will never be able to catch up,” said Li Cai, professor of education at UCLA. “That over time they will never be able to match the achievement of those students that may have been born into luckier circumstances. We have to ask ourselves, is that something we want as a society?” Cai added.
Gorbachev didn’t set out to open door to democracy | Washington Post
(Analysis by UCLA’s Daniel Treisman) Mikhail Gorbachev, who died Tuesday, opened the door to democracy in Russia. But that was not what he intended to do. A fervent believer in a more humane version of communism, he thought the policies of glasnost and perestroika that he introduced in the late 1980s would revitalize the stagnating Soviet system. Under his leadership, Gorbachev imagined that the U.S.S.R. would once again inspire admirers, both at home and abroad.
Trump hands Biden a theme to run on | Los Angeles Times
For now, the U.S. system has become “calcified,” with voters locked into party identities that they’re unwilling to depart from, as UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck and her colleagues John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch put it in a soon-to-be-published book on American politics, “The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Election and the Challenge to American Democracy.”
What can lawmakers do about California’s heat? | Los Angeles Times
The Legislature did little to address failures to protect communities from extreme heat that were identified in a state-commissioned study released last year by UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation, which found the state’s response was fragmented “with no centrally-responsible authority.” “Heat is one of the greatest climate injustices facing California, yet we have no coordinated action,” said V. Kelly Turner, a heat researcher who co-directs the Luskin Center. “So you get piecemeal actions that don’t actually address the problem.” (Turner was also interviewed by KPCC-FM’s “AirTalk.”)
America’s moral panic over trans people | New York Times
The Williams Institute, a sexual orientation research group at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, also found that young people make up a large share of people who identify as trans. There are about 300,000 transgender people age 13 to 17 in the United States, accounting for about 18 percent of the country’s transgender population, Williams researchers said.
California especially vulnerable to global warming | New York Times
In other words, the very characteristics that make these climates famous (the rain-free summers) “predispose those regions to water scarcity,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If the storms don’t occur during the wet season, you’re screwed.”
Vaccines for teens without parental consent? | CalMatters
It’s not unusual for Democrats to not be in agreement, especially over this kind of legislation, said Jim Newton, editor of Blueprint Magazine, a politics and policy publication at UCLA. “On one hand, you can see the obvious public health implications but it’s always a little rough to say to parents that they’d allow children to do things that are against their wishes,” Newton said. “It doesn’t surprise me that there would be some Democrats that would break.”
Woman’s pregnancy covered cancer symptoms | NBC’s “Today”
Historically, colorectal cancer has affected older people, said Dr. Fola May, a medical advisor for the charity Fight Colorectal Cancer and associate director of the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Equity at University of California, Los Angeles. But “when we look at the data in the United States since the early 1990s, we’ve had a 45% increase in the number of people under 50 that get colorectal cancer,” May told TODAY. “We need to be on the lookout for this disease in people in their 40s and 50s.”
California bills protect abortion access | Reuters
The UCLA Center on Reproductive Health, Law and Policy estimates that about 10,600 people will travel to seek care in California annually as a result of abortion bans in other states.
Long COVID symptoms may mask other ailments | Wired
The condition may be common, but issues like fevor, shortness of breath, and fatigue can also be signs of other illnesses … Nisha Viswanathan, director of the UCLA Health Long Covid Program, estimates that a quarter of the patients she sees end up diagnosed with something other than long Covid.
White House should take gun policies to state level | Daily Beast
Given the difficulty of passing even the most popular gun-control measures through the Senate, that’s not surprising, said Adam Winkler, a professor who specializes in constitutional law and gun policy at the UCLA School of Law. “Biden has made gun safety reform a centerpiece of his agenda, but with the current composition of the Senate there is only so much he can do,” Winkler said, noting that PLCAA repeal might not even win a majority of Democrats in the chamber, much less 10 Republican votes.
Renewables aren’t causing power grid’s problems | Vox
“We’re at an extremely sensitive, and I would say potentially dangerous, transition point,” said [UCLA’s Eric] Fournier. “If renewables are painted as the problem, we may miss the window to prevent ourselves from getting into a really desperate, dangerous level of climate change. We have a short window right now. If we panic, it’s going to get really ugly.”
UCLA’s Robin D.G. Kelley on Black freedom | Essence
The dust has settled on what we thought was the racial reckoning of 2020. During uprisings and protests across the globe, books from Black authors made it to the tops of sales charts. “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical "Imagination,” first published in 2003 and authored by [UCLA] scholar Robin D. G. Kelley, was among the titles that generated interest during what Kelley calls the “Black Spring” rebellion. (Kelley is interviewed.)
