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 »
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National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences elect 36 new UC members
By: UC Newsroom, April 30, 2021 The National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced their newly elected members this week, expanding their ranks by 11 and 25 UC faculty, respectively. Membership in these prestigious organizations puts one in distinguished company. The National Academy of Sciences was established in 1863 under ... Continue Reading »
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 »
Carbon sequestration: a critical but less-understood piece of the climate puzzle
By: Name, UC Los Angeles Institute if the Environmental & Sustainability | April 21, 2021 After passing the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, Congress turned its attention to other critical efforts, including comprehensive legislation to battle climate change. The bill, introduced into the House of Representatives on March 2, aims to fully decarbonize the ... 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Now rescinded, Trump-era ‘public charge’ policy may still harm immigrants’ health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 »
Century-old problem solved with first-ever 3D atomic imaging of an amorphous solid
By Wayne Lewis, UC Los Angeles | March 31, 2021 Glass, rubber and plastics all belong to a class of matter called amorphous solids. And in spite of how common they are in our everyday lives, amorphous solids have long posed a challenge to scientists. Since the 1910s, scientists have been able to map in 3D the atomic structures of crystals, the other major class of solids, ... 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 »
Genetic tool could improve monitoring of marine protected areas
Sonia Aronson, UC Los Angeles | February 24, 2021 Researchers used to need to scuba dive to find out which fish live in any given area of the ocean. Now, a new UCLA study has found that environmental DNA, or eDNA, can be used to identify marine organisms living in a certain space. Environmental DNA is the term for the DNA from cells that are constantly released ... Continue Reading »