UCLA In the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. See more UCLA In the News.
These scientists are radically changing how they live to cope with climate change | BuzzFeed News
“I think it’s a good thing for climate messengers to ‘walk the talk,’” said Peter Kalmus, an associate project scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has stopped flying altogether and created the website No Fly Climate Sci for others to publicly share why they are flying less. “It makes the message much more effective.” … Peter Kalmus’s journey down the path of a carbon-limited life started years before Trump’s presidency, back in 2006. He was a graduate student in astrophysics at Columbia University at the time, and a new father. One of the department’s weekly talks featured then-NASA climate scientist James Hansen, and his presentation had Kalmus on the edge of his seat. In the years since, he switched careers to focus on climate change, cut meat from his diet, and gave up flying…. “You can’t have systematic change unless a whole bunch of individuals are essentially voting for it and voting for it with their actions,” he said.
Valorie Kondos Field era ends for UCLA gymnastics | Los Angeles Times
She dabbed at her eyes more than once, but this wasn’t a time for sorrow. There were hugs to be doled out and people to thank, words of comfort and encouragement to be whispered before she could think of herself. And there was music playing. Not a victory song, but rhythms that compelled Valorie Kondos Field to give herself up to the beat, to smile and sway and remember how right her mentor, John Wooden, had been when he told her success isn’t always predicated on winning. She knew that, on some level, but she never felt that as deeply as she did Saturday night…. “I’m gonna share with them what I see really special in each of them and how they’re ready to step up in a leadership role,” she said, “that next year is a really, really pivotal role for UCLA gymnastics, and they’re gonna be making history. And they’re going to set another layer on the foundation of this program, and it starts with them, and that’s on them.” (Also: Los Angeles Times)
New research shows how badly a citizenship question would hurt the 2020 Census | Washington Post Analysis
(Commentary co-written by UCLA’s Matt Barreto) Latinos and immigrants fear citizenship information wouldn’t be protected. The first piece of evidence comes from a survey conducted by UCLA political scientist Matt Barreto from July 10 to Aug. 10. It included a random sample of about 6,300 adults, including oversamples in California, the city of San Jose and two predominantly Latino counties in Texas, Cameron and Hidalgo…. Barreto and George Washington University political scientist Chris Warshaw found that respondents told about a citizenship question were less likely to say they would take the census.
A historic L.A. mural was whitewashed, and the artist is fed up with the lack of respect | Los Angeles Times
Judy Baca saw the graffiti marring her giant mural of an Olympic runner as little acts of oppression…. But the Los Angeles artist was shocked when she learned that sometime in March — during Women’s History Month — someone had painted over the mural, concealing the woman entirely…. Baca, one of Los Angeles’ most respected artists and a UCLA professor, uses traditional Mexican techniques in her murals. “Hitting the Wall” was covered in a glaze that made it appear as though light were emanating from the turquoise bricks the runner breaks through.
Would it be so bad if Instagram hid the number of likes on posts? | Forbes
A 2016 study by UCLA researchers measured adolescents’ behavioral and neural responses to Instagram Likes, calling them “a quantifiable form of social endorsement and potential source of peer influence.” They found that subjects were more likely to like photos that had already been liked many times, illustrating “the influence of virtual peer endorsement.” Using fMRI imaging, they were also able to show that viewing photos with many Likes “was associated with greater activity in neural regions implicated in reward processing, social cognition, imitation, and attention.” A follow-up study in 2017 replicated these results and also showed that younger users (high school students, in this case) showed greater activity in the brain’s reward center when viewing photos with many Likes.
The beauty and the power of African blacksmiths | NPR
Blacksmiths tailored the design of these tools to meet the continent’s varied climate, terrain, soil types and crops, yielding a wide diversity of forms. Such craftsmanship elevated blacksmiths to prominent roles in many African societies, according to Marla Berns, a co-curator of this exhibit. She is also the director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, which debuted “Striking Iron” last year. A blacksmith’s artistry could also transform the tool into a ritual object, symbolizing productivity and fecundity, says Berns.
Forget Tide pods. P&G bets water-free soap ‘swatches’ are the future | Wall Street Journal
The amount of water used in the production of soaps and detergents represents a fraction of water consumed in the process of using the products. To substantially reduce water use, P&G would need to work on ways to cut down on how much water is needed to, for instance, do a load of laundry, said Deepak Rajagopal, an assistant professor at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Most of the impact happens on the consumer side,” he said.
L.A. quadruples the fine for disabled-placard fraud, but will it help? | Los Angeles Times
“The big things everybody says will solve the problem are more [disabled] parking places, increasing the fine and increasing enforcement. I’ll go on record as saying those three approaches will not solve the problem,” said Fernando Torres Gil, a professor of social welfare and public policy at UCLA and a polio survivor who was vice chair of the National Council on Disability under President Obama. Instead, he and his UCLA colleague, urban planning expert Donald Shoup, have rallied local politicians behind a dramatic and deeply unpopular reform: a split system such as the one now in effect in Illinois and Michigan, that would strip many existing rights from thousands of disabled Californians.
Overlooked no more: Aloha Wanderwell, explorer and filmmaker | New York Times
Mordaunt Hall, a reviewer for The New York Times, didn’t think much of the Wanderwells’ first travelogue, “With Car and Camera Around the World” (1929), writing, “The film, for the most part, is exactly what a majority of tourists would take with a motion-picture camera. But she evolved as a filmmaker, focusing more on editing, said Jess DePrest, a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is writing a dissertation on Wanderwell and early female travelogue filmmakers.
Fight against upzoning bill gets fiery as it moves through state Senate | Los Angeles Daily News
But Michael Lens, associate professor of urban planning at UCLA, said that shouldn’t stop the state from making bold changes to the housing code. “There is an absence of evidence mainly because we don’t have a lot of experience upzoning anything like this, in these sorts of ways,” Lens said. “The trend across the board in American cities in the last 50, 60 years … is to downzone, downzone, downzone and then protect single family neighborhoods.” … “SB 50 is, I think, an end-around. It’s trying to get around that problem that we might not ever solve, that of fierce local protection of single family, mostly white mostly high income neighborhoods. And the state is less beholden to Sherman Oaks and the Westside of Los Angeles than the city is and therefore they can make bolder changes,” he said.
Want the West Coast’s best in opera? You have to go to Europe | Los Angeles Times
The Brooklyn Academy of Music was a reliable importer and remains so, if on a smaller scale, and what would we do without the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA or REDCAT downtown?... Yet back home, L.A. Opera has lost much of its moxie since Nagano’s departure a decade ago. The company ignores not only Sharon but also [Peter] Sellars, two of the world’s most notable directors; the latter also a longtime UCLA professor. Rather than mount Sellars’ revelatory production of “La Clemenza di Tito,” created for the Salzburg Festival two years ago, which gave new currency to Mozart’s neglected last opera, L.A. Opera recently made a new production crammed with clichés that sank fine singing and conducting.
Doctor transforms patient’s life with innovative hand transplant | ABC’s “20/20”
“The hand is probably the most remarkable, I’d say, instrument that I’ve ever seen,” said UCLA’s Dr. Kodi Azari. As surgical director of UCLA’s hand transplant program, Dr. Azari’s passion often inspires him to wax poetic about his favorite appendage. “If there is any evidence of divine intervention, it would be the human hand. This same hand can break bricks. It can also have the precision to be a concert pianist.”
New technologies help unravel nature’s methane recipes | Scienmag
In 2014, three new instruments came online with the potential to change the face of deep carbon science, and they have not disappointed, says Edward Young, of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), co-leader of DCO’s Deep Energy Community with Isabelle Daniel of the Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 in Lyon, France. Using complementary techniques of mass spectrometry and absorption spectroscopy, scientists at UCLA, the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are analyzing natural methane samples to better understand how abiotic methane may be produced. “A molecule of methane (CH4) appears remarkably simple, made up of only five atoms,” says Dr. Young. “Rare isotopes of both hydrogen and carbon are occasionally incorporated into methane molecules, however, and the frequency of these ‘heavy’ isotopes reveals the secret of how they formed and at what temperatures.”
FDA approves new ADHD treatment device | KABC-TV
The FDA has just approved use of a non-invasive medical device developed by doctors and researchers at UCLA. The Monarch ETNS system can be used by children between the ages of seven and twelve who are not currently on medication for the disorder. It delivers a low-level electrical pulse to the parts of the brain responsible for ADHD symptoms. The device also shows potential as a treatment for traumatic brain injuries.
Measles cases spread across the U.S. | KCRW-FM
“I think it’s definitely the presence of social media. ‘I read on the Internet,’ ‘I heard from my friends on social media,’ ‘I read on Facebook’ — and so I think social media has been a game changer for this debate because, you know, there have always been vaccine skeptics,” said UCLA’s Alice Kuo. “Ever since vaccines have been on the scene, there have been people questioning why we would purposely introduce a potential pathogen in order to elicit an immune response, and there have always been people concerned about that. But social media had given that very, very small minority a large voice, a large megaphone to promote their message, and I think it caused a lot of confusion amongst parents.
Some U.S. colleges fail to reach rural students | Voice of America
Recruiters help colleges and universities better identify the kinds of students they are looking to admit and stay in contact with them, says Ozan Jaquette. He is an assistant professor of education at the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA). Jaquette says recruiting also usually means more students will apply to the school. And, students who meet with a recruiter may be more likely to choose to go to that school if they are admitted. “This is a way of developing … a stronger bond with … students so they feel a sense of warmth about that university, because, ‘Hey, this person from this university came and wanted speak to me,’ he told VOA. “And it’s also kind of a means of a higher touch sales pitch.”
