UCLA In the News August 18, 2020

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.

Made-for-TV conventions in the COVID era | Bloomberg

Lynn Vavreck, a politics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that she’ll be curious to see how this year’s events play out. “It seems like a great opportunity,” she said, “especially because we’ve all been watching ‘Wheel of Fortune’ reruns for a month.”

What are Kamala Harris’s economic priorities? | Marketplace

[UCLA’s Sonja] Diaz also said Harris has focused on economic issues that impact people of color since the earliest days of her political career. “It’s just been clear throughout her time in elected office, especially as attorney general of California, where she took on the big banks, and she really advocated for relief and remedies for California homeowners, who frankly, were hard hit by discriminatory mortgage lending during the Great Recession,” said Diaz.

Fight over Kamala Harris’ citizenship is a shameful distraction | Press-Enterprise editorial

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, notes that the concept of a natural-born citizen “was a familiar phrase to the Framers — an adaptation of the English term ‘natural-born subject.’” As Volokh explains, this in turn was defined by Sir William Blackstone, characterized by Justice Antonin Scalia as “the Framers’ accepted authority on English law,” as those “born within the dominions of the crown of England” and that “the children of aliens, born here in England, are, generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such.”

How’s your money game? | Los Angeles Times column

“We live in a world of financial illiteracy,” said David Ravetch, a senior accounting lecturer at UCLA. “We as a society don’t like to talk about money.” For many people and families, it’s a taboo topic, he told me. “We are more open to talking about relationship challenges than we are about money,” Ravetch said. “Most people are really afraid of it.”

On companies choosing their own bankruptcy court | Wall Street Journal

Companies’ ability to choose their preferred bankruptcy court has long been a source of controversy. Lynn LoPucki, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles said venue rules have created a situation where top courts compete to attract large chapter 11 cases, a dynamic that undermines the integrity of the bankruptcy system. “The leading bankruptcy lawyers tell the judges what to do,” Mr. LoPucki said. “They’re not asking, they’re telling.”

After the pandemic, could psychedelic treatment help us heal? | Mic

“This is huge, and we’re nowhere near being out of it,” says Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, whose research focuses on psychedelics, of the pandemic. “It’s going to have a very significant impact on the general population for all sorts of reasons,” such as a lack of social connection, as well as loss, whether of loved ones, employment, or a sense of normalcy.

How long are you immune after COVID-19? | Forbes column

Several studies have suggested that immunity may last for at least a few months. In a research letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July, a team from the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), led by Otto Yang, MD, a Professor of Medicine, described how they followed the antibody levels over time in a sample of 34 patients who had had mild Covid-19 coronavirus infections.

Heat and health risks for UPS workers | NBC News

“Heat illnesses, heat cramps — these can be deadly,” said R. Jisung Park, an environmental and labor economist at the University of California, Los Angeles who studies heat’s effects. “But there’s evidence that finds that hotter temperatures raise the risk of other injuries, too.”

Latinos most affected by economic issues amid COVID-19 | USA Today

Latinos are more likely than white, Black and Asian Americans to be worried about economic issues related to coronavirus as the nation continues to deal with the ongoing pandemic, according to a new survey. The concerns aren’t unfounded: Latinos are more likely than all other racial groups to have a spouse lose their job in the last year or have had a drop in household income in the last year, according to a survey from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape Project.

COVID-19 deaths skew younger among minorities | Wall Street Journal

“Latinos tend to be very, very poorly connected to the formal medical and public-health infrastructure,” said David Hayes-Bautista, who directs the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles’s medical school.

In California, you can still drill for oil next to a home | Los Angeles Times column

In July, researchers from UCLA and the University of Southern California published a study examining the effects of flaring — the open combustion of gas at extraction sites — on pregnant women in the Eagle Ford shale drilling region of south Texas. They found that women living within 3 miles of 10 or more nightly flaring events were 50% more likely to give birth prematurely.

Movie theaters are starting to reopen | Entertainment Weekly

“We’re seeing upticks in numbers of cases because things have been reopening, people have been going out,” Dr. Anne W. Rimoin, a professor of epidemiology at UCLA, previously told EW. “Just because things are opening up, doesn’t mean that it’s safe... As an epidemiologist, I would prefer a drive-in.”

UCLA lands grant to study gun safety and violence | KPCC-FM

The director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research is Ninez Ponce, and we asked her what new questions she expects to see added. “How many firearms are kept in and around your home? How many of these firearms are kept loaded? How worried are you about being the victim of gun violence?” said Ponce.

California heat wave causes rolling blackouts | Vox

“A very intense and prolonged heatwave now appears likely for a large portion of California over the next 7-10 days, and this event will likely have wide-ranging impacts from human health, wildfire, and electricity demand perspectives,” wrote Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles on Friday. (Also: KCBS-TV and LAist.)

Why U.S. is seeing a sharp increase in COVID-19 in children | Xinhua

“The sharp increase in the number of cases among children is mainly concentrated in COVID-19 ‘hotspots’ such as California, Florida and Arizona. The surge in adult cases in these states also led to an increase in children infections,” Zhang Zuofeng, professor of epidemiology and associate dean for research with the school of public health at University of California, Los Angeles, told Xinhua.

LAUSD begins COVID-19 testing, tracking | City News Service

The testing and contact-tracing program and its corresponding research are a collaboration between LAUSD and scientists from UCLA, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, Microsoft and healthcare companies Anthem Blue Cross and Health Net… “UCLA will bring breadth and depth of scientific expertise to study the impact and effects of Los Angeles Unified’s reopening plan and to share the information learned from these research efforts throughout the world,” said Dr. Steven M. Dubinett, Director of the UCLA Clinical & Translational Science Institute.

How sleep ‘cleanses’ your brain | Healthline

Dr. Alon Y. Avidan, MPH, is the director of the UCLA Sleep Disorders Center and a professor in the department of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Avidan told Healthline that while we’re sleeping, our glymphatic system goes into full action to clear proteins, toxins, and waste products. “Poor sleep makes the glymphatic system less efficient,” Avidan said. “These proteins are toxic to the cell, to the neuron, and their accumulation leads to inflammation and degeneration of those neurons in the brain that over time contribute to Alzheimer’s dementia.”

Judge tosses criminal case over divorce blog | Marin Independent Journal

Eugene Volokh, a University of California, Los Angeles, law professor who specializes in free speech issues, said the Velyvis case is “a useful reminder that our First Amendment rights don’t vanish” for litigants in family court. “Judges aren’t allowed to tell us to stop discussing certain topics — whether they’re big-picture politics or just our personal relationships,” Volokh said.

Time to overcome our instinct to lock people up | Zócalo’s “Connecting California”

And the best attempt at a new narrative comes from the best L.A. book of the 21st century, “City of Inmates,” by UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez: Her 2017 history reveals that L.A.’s creativity has long been expressed through its pioneering cruelty in incarcerating people.… Lytle Hernandez argues that L.A.’s devotion to caging is a product of its history of “settler colonialism,” with its settlers seeking “to block, erase, or remove racialized outsiders from their claimed territory.”

Benchmarks for optimizing quantum computer performance | ScienceDaily

Two UCLA computer scientists have shown that existing compilers, which tell quantum computers how to use their circuits to execute quantum programs, inhibit the computers’ ability to achieve optimal performance. Specifically, their research has revealed that improving quantum compilation design could help achieve computation speeds up to 45 times faster than currently demonstrated… “We believe in the ‘measure, then improve’ methodology,” said lead researcher Jason Cong, a Distinguished Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.

NASA THEMIS mission unlocks mysteries | Phys.org

“Now we know for certain that the formation of these beads is part of a process that precedes the triggering of a substorm in space,” said Vassilis Angelopoulos, principal investigator of THEMIS at the University of California, Los Angeles. “This is an important new piece of the puzzle.”