UCLA In the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. See more UCLA In the News.
Caffeine peps up solar energy, thanks to UCLA researchers | Scientific American
Inspiration struck during one of the most critical rituals of university life: a coffee break. “We need coffee to boost our energy,” Rui Wang told Jingjing Xue, a fellow graduate student in the engineering department of the University of California, Los Angeles. Maybe, Wang suggested jokingly, we should caffeinate our experimental solar cells to make them work better, too. Xue’s response: That might actually work. It was a moment of “pure luck,” says UCLA engineer Yang Yang, Wang and Xue’s graduate advisor. Yang’s lab has been trying to improve the lifespan of a promising but unstable type of solar panel, made from a material called perovskite, by lacing panels with certain stabilizing compounds. “We needed some kind of molecule with lone electron pairs,” Yang says. Such isolated duos of electrons at a molecule’s edge (a feature caffeine actually has) could interact with or bind to other materials like perovskite. (Also: Cosmos, Inverse, International Business Times)
UCLA No. 4 on Forbes’ America’s Best Value Colleges list | Forbes
With more than 137,000 undergraduate applications for fall 2018, University of California, Los Angeles is the most applied-to school in the country…. Its faculty and alumni helped create the Internet, pioneered reverse osmosis, and have played a central role in more than 140 companies with technology developed at UCLA. (Also: Fox Business)
Court finds marking tires of parked cars unconstitutional | New York Times
Though officers these days may also take time-stamped photographs to document the infraction, “chalking tires is very old-fashioned,” said Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The first references I’ve seen to it were in the 1920s.” Every city with a parking ordinance probably used chalking at one time, Professor Shoup said, but the practice is becoming less common, replaced by computerized meters, pay-by-phone apps and digital vehicle recognition systems, including one called autoChalk. The manual version has always been arbitrary and inefficient anyway, Professor Shoup said: “The enforcement is kind of random, so whenever you get a ticket you say, ‘Why me?’”
Parents cautious of new FDA-approved device for kids with ADHD | ABC News
Dr. Andy Leuchter, director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Clinical and Research program at UCLA, was involved in the research phase of the device’s clinical trial. Dr. Leuchter believes the Monarch eTNS system is something parents can trust, but also says more research, including potentially pairing it with other known ADHD medication, would help. “This is as close to a side effect free treatment device that you’re going to get,” he said. “So there’s very little downside risk to seeing if there’s a benefit.”
NRA beset by infighting over whether it has strayed too far | Associated Press
The long history between the public relations firm and the NRA has made their potential parting of the ways all the more surprising to longtime watchers of the group. “The battle in the NRA board that must have occurred with this breakup of a decades-long relationship must have been something,” said Adam Winkler, a professor at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law and gun rights expert.
‘The Big Bang Theory’ takes math notes from Dartmouth professor | Phys.org
“The Big Bang Theory” is known for dressing the set with “Easter eggs” to delight the self-avowed science nerds in the audience. When UCLA physics professor David Saltzberg, technical consultant for “The Big Bang Theory,” heard about the [“Proof of the Sheldon Conjecture” paper], he contacted Pomerance to ask if they could use it in the show, which was broadcast April 18.
Los Angeles County uses technology to locate missing seniors | Associated Press
The program “seems like a very good potential use of location-tracking technology,” said John Villasenor, a professor of engineering and public policy at University of California, Los Angeles.
UCLA report finds that Poseidon desalination plant would harm poor ratepayers | OC Weekly
The proposed Poseidon desalination plant in Huntington Beach would drive up water bills, harming poor Orange County ratepayers without providing any water quality or reliability benefits, concludes a new study by UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation. “While potential positive HRW [human right to water] benefits from desalinated ocean water can occur in certain contexts, we find that no such benefits can be plausibly realized by the Poseidon agreement in Orange County,” states the report’s executive summary. “Nearly all of the county’s households are connected to community water systems which already provide high-quality, reliable water service and thus would not see supply improvement from ocean desalination.”
Cold-pressed juice is all the rage, but does it live up to the claims? | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A 2017 study at the University of California-Los Angeles followed 25 people through several days of a juice-only diet. It was conducted by 11 scientists with a focus on the impact of juicing on gut microbiota. It produced no clinical outcomes, said Dr. David Heber, a physician in internal medicine at UCLA Health, founder of the Center for Human Nutrition and one of the study’s authors. “The study [showed] changes in the microbiome,” he said, “but the concept of detoxification is nonscientific. It is a mental concept. People think, ‘I’m going to clean out my system, but you don’t want to do that, and you can’t. It’s nonsense.”
Indian election could be influenced by organized groups of Indian Americans | KPCC-FM
“Indian Americans have long felt that they have been inconsequential in American politics and in Indian politics, and I think there is a sense of resentment about that,” said UCLA’s Vinay Lal.
Remembering an artificial intelligence pioneer | Axios
Judea Pearl, the leading AI researcher at UCLA, called [Nils] Nilsson “an AI pioneer, and a mentor to many of us since the 1970s. Always encouraging and always insisting on understanding new ideas, and how they fit together in the grand scheme. I will miss him immensely.”
As measles spreads, a reminder to make sure you are up to date on vaccines | KPCC-FM
“It’s a really important question not to assume you are protected but to ask the question, because I think the seriousness of [measles] is underestimated,” said UCLA’s Deborah Lehman.
