UCLA In the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription to view. See more UCLA In the News.
UCLA research reveals why sleep is so important | City News Service
A dramatic change in the purpose of sleep occurs when children are about 2 1/2 years old — a time when sleep’s primary purpose changes from brain-building to brain maintenance and repair, according to a study released Friday by researchers at UCLA. “Don’t wake babies up during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Important work is being done in their brains as they sleep,” said Gina Poe, the senior study author and a UCLA professor of integrative biology and physiology who has conducted sleep research for more than three decades. (UCLA’s Van Savage is also quoted. Also: Reuters, New Scientist, Science Codex and CTVNews.)
John Wasson, UCLA cosmochemist, dies at 86 | Los Angeles Times
Wasson collected meteorites at a furious pace, slowly amassing a trove that would eventually fill a large room on the third floor of UCLA’s Geology Building. With the help of others it became the UCLA Meteorite Collection, the largest such display in the West… “He arrived at UCLA at the right time, during the NASA Apollo missions to the moon when scientists for the first time were able to study lunar samples brought back from the surface,” said [UCLA’s] Alan Rubin, cocurator of the meteorite collection.
Biden’s case to Latino voters: Will they listen? | The New Yorker column
Latino Decisions is now advising the Biden campaign, and the firm’s co-founder, [UCLA’s] Matt Barreto, told me that as a result of the pandemic Latino voters were only now focussing on the race. “The high intensity of coronavirus in our community made it more difficult to have the election be a top-of-mind issue for us,” he said. Latinos have suffered disproportionately — they are twice as likely to die from the coronavirus as whites. “At the beginning it was just a matter of survival, frankly,” Barreto said. “Now, the longer it goes on, many people are connecting this ongoing pandemic to our failed political leadership.”
Trump’s effort to court Latino voters puts pressure on Biden | CNN
“What appeals to Latino voters who are supporting Trump is the same thing that appeals to voters who support Trump,” said Sonja Diaz, founding director, Latino Policy & Politics Initiative, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and a former policy counsel to Sen. Kamala Harris during the vice presidential candidate’s time as California attorney general. “It’s likely that Latino males will support Trump in 2020 at higher rates than Latinas. And you see that generally in terms of the trends of White voters and White males in particular,” Diaz said. (UCLA’s Matt Barreto was also quoted.)
Wildfires rage: The future we were worried about is here | NBC News
And while climate change is not the only factor at play, it is the driving force, according to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Global warming essentially stacks the deck by not only increasing the chances that wildfires occur, but also increasing their severity when they do. “Wildfires aren’t new in any of these places, but the character of the fires — how quickly they become very large and destructive — is shocking, even compared to recent extremes,” he said. (Swain was also quoted by FactCheck.org and the Washington Post.)
California’s future hinges on managing megafires | Guardian (U.K.)
“Everyone in California has versions of the story that they never had to think about this smoke and now they do,” said Suzanne Paulson, an air pollution expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. The repeated plumes of smoke over the UCLA campus provide Paulson with air samples but they also deter her from riding her bicycle to work.
During L.A. heat wave, chairs sat empty at cooling centers | Los Angeles Times
Beyond Los Angeles, “people have documented that cooling centers are relatively underutilized across the U.S.,” said David Eisenman, a UCLA professor of medicine and public health. What researchers have found, Eisenman said, is that people are more likely to use such centers if they are a part of everyday life. “If it’s a library, people will go to a library and use that. If it’s a senior center they’ve gone to, they’ll be happy to go on an extreme heat day,” he said.
COVID-19 vaccine timeline | CNN
“This is a huge problem. We are using faith in all of our institutions that dictate public health here. We’ve lost of confidence in the FDA, with the politicization. Now, CDC has also fallen prey to politics. And so, it’s not surprisingly that people who previously were not vaccine-hesitant or worried about vaccines are feeling worried,” said UCLA’s Anne Rimoin.
Pandemic inspires new push to shrink jails and prisons | Science
Even now, political calculations explain why jails — most of whose inmates have not been convicted — shrank more than prison populations during the pandemic, says Sharon Dolovich, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and head of the Covid-19 Behind Bars Data Project, which tracks efforts to improve conditions and reduce populations in jails and prisons.
Some COVID-era adaptions will remain once pandemic ends | Press-Enterprise
Dr. Alex Young, interim chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, said video conferencing also will become a permanent facet of treatment for mental health patients. “I anticipate a sort of hybrid model, as we come out of this,” he said. By that, Young said he believes patients will be treated through a combination of office visits, video conferencing and a health-monitoring mobile app.
California’s individualism proves costly in coronavirus fight | Press-Enterprise opinion
(Commentary co-written by UCLA’s Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Dr. Steven Teutsch and Ellie Faustino) In early April, California seemed on track to control the spread of COVID-19. By July the outbreak was exploding, and by July 23 the number of COVID cases in California had surpassed that of New York. What happened?
Can America confront its racist past? | Washington Monthly opinion
It is important to keep in mind what Trump is referring to when he talks about critical race theory. According to the UCLA School of Public Affairs, it was developed by legal scholars in order to provide an analysis of race and racism from a legal perspective.
A brain-scanning backpack | Science
Searching for a better way, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), have developed what they call the mobile deep brain recording and stimulation platform.… “The beauty of this is that you have many streams of data that are coming in simultaneously,” says study author Zahra Aghajan, a UCLA neurophysicist.
Are people who vote healthier than those who don’t? | Medical Xpress
A new policy brief by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research shows that California adults who in are good health with little psychological distress are more likely to consistently vote in local, state and national elections than those with physical or psychological health issues… “We found differences in voting by health and neighborhood factors that suggest that people who vote are healthier, have better access to health care and live in more cohesive and safer neighborhoods than those who don’t vote,” said Susan Babey, lead author of the study and a senior research scientist at the center. (UCLA’s Joelle Wolstein was also quoted. Also: Times of San Diego and Patch.)
California unemployment rate still above national average | KQED-FM
“One thing that we’re seeing is that a significant portion of those who (initially) made first-time claims for unemployment and claimed they were furloughed, are now moving into the permanently unemployed,” said economist Jerry Nickelsburg, who directs the UCLA Anderson Forecast. “And that’s the damage that this recession has done. That’s going to take a while to resolve itself as people have to find new employers and maybe even new sectors.”
Scientists raid DNA to explore Vikings’ genetic roots | National Geographic
“It’s a wonderful study,” says archaeologist Jesse Byock, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who leads the Mosfell Archaeological Project in Iceland. He was not involved in the genetic research. “It provides new information, but reinforces almost all of what we know about the Viking age.”