By: Brianna Aldrich, UC Los Angeles | May 13, 2021 For UCLA dental students Isaiah “Izzy” Sampson and Ryan Davis, entering the dental field was, in a word, perplexing. Growing up in several different states, Sampson never saw a Black person in his family’s dentist offices. Not the dentists, the hygienists or even the office staff. As he started thinking about ... Continue Reading »
Health + Behavior
Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar to speak at UCLA’s Luskin Lecture for Thought Leadership, May 13
By: Margaret MacDonald, UC Los Angeles | April 29, 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ayad Akhtar will speak at the Luskin Lecture for Thought Leadership on Thursday, May 13 at 4 p.m. Following his remarks, Akhtar will take part in a conversation with Ali Behdad, UCLA’s John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature. The online event is free and open to the public. “This ... Continue Reading »
Survey shows UC retirees embrace volunteering, active retirement
By: Cynthia Lee, UC Los Angeles | April 7, 2021 Results from a recent survey of nearly 5,000 University of California retirees provide a snapshot of mostly active, engaged individuals who, during the past three-and-a-half years, have put their talents and time to good use by volunteering; teaching, writing and consulting; and starting new jobs and businesses, among many ... Continue Reading »
Now rescinded, Trump-era ‘public charge’ policy may still harm immigrants’ health
By: UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative | April 7, 2021 The Trump administration’s expansion of the “public charge” rule — a move that sought to disqualify immigrants who used social programs like Medicaid from obtaining legal residency in the U.S. — led to widespread disenrollment from these programs and left scores of children in California without access to health ... Continue Reading »
Babies prefer baby talk, whether they’re learning one language or two
By Alison Hewitt, UC Los Angeles | March 23, 2021 It can be hard to resist lapsing into an exaggerated, singsong tone when you talk to a cute baby. And that’s with good reason. Babies will pay more attention to baby talk than regular speech, regardless of which languages they’re used to hearing, according to a study by UCLA’s Language Acquisition Lab and 16 ... Continue Reading »
Study unravels antibiotic resistance in MRSA ‘superbug’ infections
By Elaine Schmidt, UC Los Angeles | March 3, 2021 Researchers applied a new approach pioneered at UCLA to predict which methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, infections will fail to respond to antibiotic treatment. By focusing on epigenetics — changes to gene expression that can't be detected by standard DNA sequencing — the study examined how the immune ... Continue Reading »
Understanding the evolution of SARS and COVID-19 type viruses
By Andy Fell, UC Davis | February 24, 2021 As COVID-19 sweeps the world, related viruses quietly circulate among wild animals. A new study shows how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and SARS-CoV-1, which caused the 2003 SARS outbreak, are related to each other. The work, published recently in the journal Virus Evolution, helps scientists better understand the ... Continue Reading »
Prioritizing oldest for COVID-19 vaccines saves more lives, years of life
By Yasmin Anwar, UC Berkeley | February 25, 2021 Challenging the idea that older people with shorter life expectancies should rank lower in coronavirus immunization efforts, new UC Berkeley research shows that giving vaccine priority to those most at risk of dying from COVID-19 will save the maximum number of lives, and their potential or future years of life. The ... Continue Reading »
Childhood diet has lifelong impact
By Jules Bernstein, UC Riverside | February 3, 2021 Eating too much fat and sugar as a child can alter your microbiome for life, even if you later learn to eat healthier, a new study in mice suggests. The study by UC Riverside researchers is one of the first to show a significant decrease in the total number and diversity of gut bacteria in mature mice fed an unhealthy ... Continue Reading »
Fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke more harmful than pollution from other sources
By Robert Monroe, UC San Diego | March 5, 2021 Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego examining 14 years of hospital admissions data conclude that the fine particles in wildfire smoke can be several times more harmful to human respiratory health than particulate matter from other sources such as car exhaust. While this distinction has been ... Continue Reading »