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A graphic of the predictive model.

UCLA model ID’s areas that should have priority for vaccine, other COVID-19 help

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The predictive model can guide public health officials and leaders across the nation in harnessing local data that can help prevent infections and save lives, the UCLA researchers say. (Photo Credit: UCLA CNK-BRITE)

To help slow the spread of COVID-19 and save lives, UCLA public health and urban planning experts have developed a predictive model that pinpoints which populations in which neighborhoods of Los Angeles County are most at risk of becoming infected.

The researchers hope the new model, which can be applied to other counties and jurisdictions as well, will assist decision makers, public health officials and scientists in effectively and equitably implementing vaccine distribution, testing, closures and reopenings, and other virus-mitigation measures.

The model maps Los Angeles County neighborhood by neighborhood, based on four important indicators known to significantly increase a person’s medical vulnerability to COVID-19 infection — preexisting medical conditions, barriers to accessing health care, built-environment characteristics and socioeconomic challenges.

The research data demonstrate that neighborhoods characterized by significant clustering of racial and ethnic minorities, low-income households and unmet medical needs are most vulnerable to COVID-19 infection, specifically areas in and around South Los Angeles and the eastern portion of the San Fernando Valley. Communities along the coast and in the northwestern part of the county, which are disproportionately white and higher-income, were found to be the least vulnerable.

“The model we have includes specific resource vulnerabilities that can guide public health officials and local leaders across the nation to harness already available local data to determine which groups in which neighborhoods are most vulnerable and how to prevent new infections to save lives,” said research author Vickie Mays, a professor of psychology in the UCLA College and of health policy and management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

Mays, who also directs the National Institutes of Health–funded UCLA BRITE Center for Science, Research and Policy, worked with urban planner Paul Ong, director of the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, to develop the indicators model, along with study co-authors Chhandara Pech and Nataly Rios Gutierrez. The maps were created by Abigail Fitzgibbon.

Utilizing data from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research’s California Health Interview Survey, the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the California Department of Parks and Recreation, the researchers were able to determine how the four vulnerability indicators differentially predicted which racial and ethnic groups in Los Angeles County were the most vulnerable to infection based on their geographical residence.

Racial and ethnic groups with the highest vulnerability

Preexisting conditions. The authors found that 73% of Black residents live in neighborhoods with the highest rates of preexisting health conditions like diabetes, obesity and heart disease, as well as poor overall health and food insecurity. This was followed by 70% of Latinos and 60% of Cambodians, Hmongs and Laotians, or CHL. Conversely, 60% of white residents live in areas with low or the lowest vulnerability.

Barriers to accessing services. Forty percent of Latinos, 29% of Blacks, 22% of CHL and 16% of “other Asians” reside in neighborhoods with the greatest barriers to health care, characterized by high proportions of non–U.S. citizens, poor English-language ability, a lack of access to computer broadband service, lower rates of health insurance and poor access to vehicles for medical purposes. Only 7% of whites live in these neighborhoods.

Built-environment risk. Sixty-three percent of CHL, 55% of Latinos, 53% of Blacks and 32% of whites live areas considered to be at high or the highest vulnerability due to built-environment challenges, which include high population density, crowded housing and a lack of parks and open spaces.

Social vulnerability. According to the Centers for Disease Control, neighborhoods with high social vulnerability are characterized by lower socioeconomic status and education attainment, a higher prevalence of single-parent and multigenerational households, greater housing density, poorer English-language ability and a lack of access to vehicles, among other factors. While only 8% of whites live in these neighborhoods, 42% of both Blacks and Latinos do, as do 38% of CHL.

How the model can help with COVID-19–mitigation efforts

“When the pandemic hit, we were slowed down by a lack of science and a lack of understanding of the ways in which health disparities in the lives of some of our most vulnerable populations made their risk of COVID-19 infection even greater,” Mays said. “We thought elderly and people in nursing homes were the most vulnerable, yet we found that lacking a number of social resources contributes to a greater likelihood of getting infected as well.”

► Read an interview with Mays on the how COVID-19 is affecting Black Americans and how better data can help prevent its spread.

And while nationwide statistics have shown that the virus has had a disproportionate effect on low-income communities and communities of color, knowing precisely which populations are the most vulnerable and where new infections are likely to occur is critical information in determining how to allocate scarce resources and when to open or close areas, Mays and Ong said.

If, for example, English-language ability is a barrier to accessing health information and services in a vulnerable neighborhood, health officials should develop campaigns in Spanish or another appropriate language highlighting the availability of testing, the researchers stress. If access to a car is a barrier for families in an at-risk area, walk-up testing sites should be made available. When crowded housing in a high-risk neighborhood is the predominant housing stock, testing resources should be set up for entire households and hotel vouchers made available to help with quarantining after a positive test.

The data can also provide critical knowledge and insights to social service providers, emergency agencies and volunteers on where to direct their time and resources, such as where to set up distribution sites for food and other necessities. And importantly, identifying the areas and populations with the highest vulnerability will help decision-makers equitably prioritize vaccine-distribution plans to include the most vulnerable early.

In the longer term, the researchers say, the model will also provide valuable information to urban planners so that they can target specific areas for the development of less-dense housing and more parks and open spaces, creating healthier neighborhoods that can better withstand future pandemics while promoting equity in long-term health outcomes.

This article, written by Elizabeth Kivowitz Boatright-Simon, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

Center for Community Engagement debuts new name, new website, and campus database for community partnerships

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Jessa Calderon (Tongva and Chumash) Photo credit: Kote Melendez

The UCLA Center for Community Learning has a new name.

As of November 10, the Center will be known as the UCLA Center for Community Engagement, reflecting the Center’s continued goal to connect UCLA students with community partners to provide both a learning experience for students and a benefit to the communities, locally and globally.

The Center for Community Engagement promotes and supports community-engaged research, teaching and learning in partnership with communities and organizations throughout Los Angeles, regionally, nationally and globally. The Center facilitates faculty and student work that integrates sustained, reciprocal engagement with the public and helps transform UCLA’s mission to support the co–creation, co–dissemination, co–preservation and co–application of knowledge.

A photo of Gaye Theresa Johnson, meeting with cilantro workers.

A recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Scholars, Gaye Theresa Johnson, meeting with cilantro workers as part of her ongoing community-engaged research on food justice. (Photo Credit: UCLA)

The Center is tasked by the Undergraduate Council to administer the university’s “community-engaged course” framework. It does this by supporting faculty across the university who are interested in developing such community-engaged courses, and ultimately approving the “XP” course suffix that identifies these courses.

The Center also coordinates the Chancellor’s Awards for Community-Engaged Scholars, a program that recognizes outstanding scholarship and supports faculty to develop new courses to integrate undergraduates into their ongoing community-engaged research. The Center’s student-facing programming includes 195CE internship courses, the community engagement and social change minor, the Astin Community Scholars research program, the Changemaker Scholars program, and AmeriCorps volunteer programs.

The name change was inspired by Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Emily A. Carter at a meeting last year with the vice chancellors and Chancellor Gene Block. Center for Community Learning director Shalom Staub and Vice Provost for International Studies and Global Engagement Cindy Fan gave a presentation about UCLA’s new strategic priorities for local and global engagement.

Staub said Carter took note of the reciprocal nature of the Center’s community-engaged programs. She noticed that the Center’s name only notes the value for student learning but ignores the ways that the work is intentionally designed to create value for community partners. The name “Center for Community Learning” didn’t convey both sides, she said.

“This name change highlights the importance of meaningful engagement as the cornerstone of effective community-based research and education,” Carter said. “It is a stronger reflection of the center’s philosophy and work, and it emphasizes the idea that our relationships with communities and organizations throughout Los Angeles are true reciprocal partnerships.”

Dean of Undergraduate Education Adriana Galvan said the new name represents the meaningful learning and authentic community-engaged experiences students have with community partners as well as UCLA’s commitment to creativity, community engagement, research, and learning across disciplines.

“Community engagement is a crucial ingredient to the undergraduate experience because it brings to life the learning that happens in a classroom and ensures that our students have the opportunity to reflect on the ways in which the university connects to the broader community,” she said.

In addition to the name change, the Center launched a new website and will soon debut a new online database of community engaged work at UCLA. Through an online platform called Collaboratory, community-centered research or teaching at UCLA will be logged, categorized and searchable, allowing users to see how community-engaged work at UCLA is connected across campus and across community partner organizations.

“Rather than talk abstractly about community-engaged work, or rather than describe just the work of a specific course, this is going to allow us to aggregate and to visualize community-engaged work at UCLA,” Staub said. “The scale and scope of this work is going to start to become much more real.”

This article was written by Robin Migdol. 

 

 

Birthrates, marriage, gender roles will change dramatically in post-pandemic world, scientists predict

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Marriage rates will plummet and people will put off having children in a virus-plagued world, potentially leading to a drop in nations’ populations, UCLA professor Martie Haselton and colleagues say. (Photo Credit: wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock.com)

COVID-19 and America’s response to it are likely to profoundly affect our families, work lives, relationships and gender roles for years, say 12 prominent scientists and authors who analyzed 90 research studies and used their expertise to evaluate our reaction to the pandemic and predict its aftermath.

The group, which included three UCLA researchers, foresees enduring psychological fallout from the crisis, even among those who haven’t been infected. Their predictions and insights, published Oct. 22 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, include:

– Planned pregnancies will decrease in a disease-ridden world, birthrates will drop, and many couples will postpone marriage, said senior author and UCLA professor of psychology and communication studies Martie Haselton.

– People who are single are less likely to start new relationships. Women who can afford to be on their own are likely to stay single longer, Haselton said.

– With children home due to the pandemic, women are spending more time providing care and schooling, are less available for paying work and may come to rely more on male partners as breadwinners, Haselton said. This will push us toward socially conservative gender norms and potentially result in a backslide in gender equality.

– Unlike many past crises, this pandemic is not bringing people closer together and, despite some exceptions, it is not producing an increase in kindness, empathy or compassion, especially in the U.S., said lead author Benjamin Seitz, a UCLA psychology doctoral student with expertise in behavioral neuroscience.

– “Our species is not wired for seeking a precise understanding of the world as it actually is,” the authors write, and our tribal predispositions toward groupthink are resulting in the large-scale spread of misinformation We tend to seek out data that supports our opinions, and we too often distrust health experts, they say.

“The psychological, social and societal consequences of COVID-19 will be very long-lasting,” Haselton said. “The longer COVID-19 continues, the more entrenched these changes are likely to be.”

COVID-19: A worldwide social experiment

As marriage rates plummet and people postpone reproduction in a virus-plagued world, some nations’ populations will shrink and fall precipitously below “replacement level,” the authors write. These birthrate drops, in turn, can have cascading social and economic consequences, affecting job opportunities, straining the ability of countries to provide a safety net for their aging populations and potentially leading to global economic contraction.

Research has shown that even before the pandemic, women were more stressed than men by family and job responsibilities. Now they are managing more household responsibilities related to child care and education. In medicine and other sciences, women scholars are already publishing substantially less research than they did a year ago, while men are showing increased productivity, Haselton said.

She and her co-authors foresee a shift toward social conservatism. A consequence of the pandemic could be less tolerance for legal abortion and the rights for sexual minorities who don’t align with traditional gender roles. In addition, in a time of economic inequality, many women will sexualize themselves more to compete with one another for desirable men, Haselton said.

People who meet online will often be disappointed when they meet in person. “Does a couple have chemistry? You can’t tell that over Zoom,” Haselton said. In new relationships, people will miss cues, especially online, and the disappointing result will often be overidealization of a potential partner — seeing the person the way you want the person to be rather than the way the person actually is.

The pandemic has become a worldwide social experiment, say the authors, whose areas of expertise include psychology, neuroscience, behavioral science, evolutionary biology, medicine, evolutionary social science and economics.

An evolutionary struggle

For the study, the authors used an evolutionary perspective to highlight the strategies the virus has evolved to use against us, the strategies we possess to combat it and the strategies we need to acquire.

Humans today are the products of social and genetic evolution in environments that look very little like our current world. These “evolutionary mismatches” are likely responsible for our frequent lack of alarm in response to the pandemic, the scientists write.

Americans in particular value individuality and the ability to challenge authority. “This combination does not work especially well in a pandemic,” Seitz said. “This virus is exposing us and our weaknesses.”

Haselton agreed, calling the virus “wily” for its ability to infect us through contact with people we love who seem to be healthy. “Our social features that define much of what it is to be human make us a prime target for viral exploitation,” she said. “Policies asking us to isolate and distance profoundly affect our families, work lives, relationships and gender roles.”

All infectious agents, including viruses, are under evolutionary pressure to manipulate the physiology and behavior of their hosts — in this case, us — in ways that enhance their survival and transmission. SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, may be altering human neural tissue to change our behavior, the authors say. It may be suppressing feelings of sickness, and perhaps even enhancing our social impulses, during times of peak transmissibility before symptoms appear. People who are infected but do not feel sick are more likely to go about their usual activities and come in contact with others whom they might infect.

Disgust is useful and motivates us to avoid people who display clear signs of disease — such as blood, pale skin, lesions, yellow eyes or a runny nose. But with COVID-19 infections, this is not what most people see. Family, friends, co-workers and strangers can look perfectly healthy and be asymptomatic for days without knowing they are infected, the authors note.

It may sound counterintuitive, but normal brain development requires exposure to a diverse set of microbes to help prepare younger animals for a range of pathogenic dangers they may encounter in adulthood. But safer-at-home and quarantine health measures have temporarily halted social activities that would otherwise bring millions of adolescents into contact with new microbes. As a result, children and adolescents whose immune systems and brains would, in normal times, be actively shaped by microbial exposures may be adversely impacted by this change, the scientists say.

By understanding how SARS-CoV-2 is evolving and having behavioral and psychological effects on us that enhance its transmission, we will be better able to combat it so it becomes less harmful and less lethal, the authors write.

Other co-authors of the study are Steven Pinker of Harvard University, bestselling author Sam Harris, Barbara Natterson-Horowitz of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Paul Bloom of Yale University, Athena Aktipis of Arizona State University, David Buss of the University of Texas, Joe Alcock of the University of New Mexico, Michele Gelfand of the University of Maryland and David Sloan Wilson of the State University of New York at Binghamton.

This article, written by Stuart Wolpert, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. 

A photo of a Page of works by Landacre.

UCLA Clark Library gains works by artist Paul Landacre

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A photo of a Page of works by Landacre.

Page of works by Landacre (Photo Credit: Jeff Weber)

A new gift to UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library from collectors Robert and Toni Crisell highlights the legacy and artistic practice of Southern California wood engraver and naturalist Paul Hambleton Landacre.

The Crisells recently donated an expansive Landacre archive comprising prints, print proofs, preliminary drawings and page layouts, chapbooks, correspondence, catalogs, clippings, magazines, photographs and ephemera, as well as more personal items.

The gift adds to the Clark Library’s existing Landacre collection, the majority of which was donated by Landacre’s brother Joseph in 1986 and 1991. The library holds artwork, books, manuscripts, correspondence, blocks and tools related to Landacre.

Robert Crisell called Landacre “the first artist from Southern California to be recognized across America for his achievements.

“The more we did our research on the legacy of Paul Landacre, the more we felt an obligation to make certain that the bulk of the ephemera was made available to the public for future generations for research and to further the memory of him and his work,” Crisell said. “During a career that spanned nearly four decades, Landacre was praised by the most respected people in printmaking. In 1939, John Taylor Arms, president of the American National Committee of Engraving, referred to him as ‘America’s number one wood engraver.’”

Included in the newly donated archive are numerous proofs and drawings that allow scholars to understand Landacre’s working methods, alongside personal items such as blue ribbons he won for his work at the Los Angeles County Fair and portfolio cases he used during his lifetime.

“We are excited to receive this generous gift from the Crisells,” said Nina Schneider, rare books librarian at the Clark, which is located in Los Angeles’ West Adams neighborhood. “Scholars and admirers of Paul Landacre’s work now have the opportunity to study more of his working methods and techniques while expanding the context of the art of wood engraving. We look forward to being able to make this collection available to researchers.”

Landacre work from “Road of a Naturalist”

Engraving by Landacre from Donald Culcross Peattie’s 1941 book “The Road of a Naturalist.” (Photo Credit: Jeff Weber)

Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1893, Landacre attended Ohio State University as a horticulture major, but a mysterious infection left him partly paralyzed and cut short his academic career. He moved to Southern California in 1916, where he began working as a commercial illustrator. From 1923 to 1925, he attended the Otis Art Institute, where he returned to teach for 10 years until his death in 1963.

“There is so much more to know about this underappreciated artist that we thought the only choice for this important part of his legacy was to donate it to the Clark Library, to not only supplement the archival materials on this artist they already own but to allow future scholars to fill in missing pieces of his life and work,” Crisell said.

Landacre’s skill at wood engraving and linocut, particularly of natural and landscape subjects, was first recognized by the bookseller Jake Zeitlin. During the 1930s, Landacre produced editions of single prints, and illustrations for books published mostly by local fine presses. Increasing commissions for book illustrations from about 1942 drew his attention away from art prints. The most notable books containing his work are “California Hills” (1931), “The Boar and Shibboleth” (1933), “De Rerum Natura” (1957) and “On the Origin of Species” (1963).

The Crisells started collecting Landacre materials after becoming interested in American prints of the period between World War I and World War II. After collecting several important prints by Landacre and other artists, they said they felt fortunate to acquire the entire Landacre collection originally started in 1966 by Patricia Adler Ingram.

This article, written by Jessica Wolf, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom. 

A photo of a California poll tax receipt from 1857

California has removed most obstacles to voting. Why are so many still not going to the polls?

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A photo of a California poll tax receipt from 1857

During California’s early years, paying a poll tax was considered an obligation of citizenship. (Photo Credit: Edson Smith Photo Collection/Courtesy of the Santa Barbara Public Library)

A new report by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy takes a historical view to understand why, in 2020, the electorate in California remains demographically and socioeconomically skewed.

The authors contend that vote-by-mail, near-automatic voter registration, a vote-by-mail ballot tracing system and other practices have expanded voting rights to most Californians. Yet longstanding inequities in voting patterns persist.

Despite persistent statewide policy efforts to increase voting access since 1960, voter registration and turnout are lower among people of color than among white people, the report notes. And California voters today — especially those who vote by mail — tend to be older, wealthier and whiter than the state’s overall population. For example, in Los Angeles County, wealthier and whiter districts cast as many as 40% more votes than those with heavily Latino and working-class populations.

The paper suggests that ongoing factors like gerrymandering and the disenfranchisement of former felons who are on parole may explain part of that phenomenon. (If it passes in November, however, California’s Proposition 17 would enable people on parole for felony convictions to vote.)

“Notwithstanding the efforts of the past 60 years, California still has work to do,” said Alisa Belinkoff Katz, the report’s lead author and a fellow at the center, which is housed in the UCLA College. “California’s electorate does not reflect the diversity of its population. We can only meet the present moment if we understand and eliminate policies that have historically restricted the franchise.”

For the first hundred years after 1850, when California became a state, voting laws limited access to the franchise, in effect suppressing the vote of poor and minority populations. The state passed several such policies during the late 1800s, including English literacy tests. And the federal government banned citizenship for most Native Americans and all Chinese immigrants, excluding them from the franchise altogether.

California also implemented stringent voter registration rules that made voting more difficult for people with lower incomes and those without a settled address.

After World War II, however, state officials changed course. They worked diligently both to overturn discriminatory policies and to make it easier to register and vote, launching voter registration drives, expanding absentee voting, and experimenting with all-mail elections. The state has passed legislation designed to expand the franchise almost every year since 1960.

But the study reinforces the reality that structural inequality still keeps many Californians from participating in the political process.

“California, and American society at large, must reckon with and overturn the racial and socioeconomic barriers that discourage or prevent large numbers of eligible voters form voting,” said David Myers, a UCLA professor of history and director of the Luskin Center.

Other key takeaways from the report:

– California enacted voter registration — requiring a settled address — in 1866. This limited access to the vote for the working class, poor, immigrants and racial minorities.

-From the 1890s to 1924, voter turnout in presidential elections dropped dramatically across the United States, from around 80% of eligible voters to just 49%, in part because of voter registration laws.

-California suppressed the vote with an 1899 law requiring voters to re-register every two years. The state established permanent voter registration in 1930, but that law also purged thousands of registered voters from the rolls each year if they had failed to vote in prior elections.

-A constitutional amendment allowing absentee voting barely passed in 1922 after failing three previous times. But the use of absentee voting was limited until a series of reforms beginning in 1978. Today, the vote-by-mail option is open to all, but it has not been used by all Californians at equal rates.

-An English literacy requirement for voting remained on the books until the early 1970s. It was rarely applied to European or Asian immigrants, but in the 1950s it was sometimes used by political candidates to challenge Mexican American voters at the polls.

Katz is also associate director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. The research team also included Zev Yaroslavsky, a senior fellow at the center; Izul de la Vega, a UCLA doctoral student; Saman Haddad, a UCLA undergraduate; and Jeanne Ramin, a recent UCLA graduate. As part of their research, the authors interviewed California Secretary of State Alex Padilla and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, two of the state’s most important elections officials.

This article, written by Maia Ferdman, originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

A photo of a sleeping baby.

UCLA-led team of scientists discovers why we need sleep

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A photo of a sleeping baby.

A UCLA-led team of scientists explains why sleep is so vital to our health and shows for the first time that a dramatic change in the purpose of sleep occurs at the age of about 2-and-a-half. (Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com)

Prolonged sleep deprivation can lead to severe health problems in humans and other animals. But why is sleep so vital to our health? A UCLA-led team of scientists has made a major advance in answering this question and has shown for the first time that a dramatic change in the purpose of sleep occurs at the age of about 2-and-a-half.

Before that age, the brain grows very rapidly. During REM sleep, when vivid dreams occur, the young brain is busy building and strengthening synapses — the structures that connect neurons to one another and allow them to communicate.

“Don’t wake babies up during REM sleep — important work is being done in their brains as they sleep,” said senior study author Gina Poe, a UCLA professor of integrative biology and physiology who has conducted sleep research for more than 30 years.

After 2-and-a-half years, however, sleep’s primary purpose switches from brain building to brain maintenance and repair, a role it maintains for the rest of our lives, the scientists report Sept. 18 in the journal Science Advances. This transition, the researchers say, corresponds to changes in brain development.

All animals naturally experience a certain amount of neurological damage during waking hours, and the resulting debris, including damaged genes and proteins within neurons, can build up and cause brain disease. Sleep helps repair this damage and clear the debris — essentially decluttering the brain and taking out the trash that can lead to serious illness.

Nearly all of this brain repair occurs during sleep, according to senior author Van Savage, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and of computational medicine, and his colleagues.

“I was shocked how huge a change this is over a short period of time, and that this switch occurs when we’re so young,” Savage said. “It’s a transition that is analogous to when water freezes to ice.”

The research team, which included scientists with expertise in neuroscience, biology, statistics and physics, conducted the most comprehensive statistical analysis of sleep to date, using data from more than 60 sleep studies involving humans and other mammals. They examined data on sleep throughout development — including total sleep time, REM sleep time, brain size and body size — and built and tested a mathematical model to explain how sleep changes with brain and body size.

The data were remarkably consistent: All species experienced a dramatic decline in REM sleep when they reached the human developmental equivalent of about 2-and-half years of age. The fraction of time spent in REM sleep before and after that point was roughly the same, whether the researchers studied rabbits, rats, pigs or humans.

REM sleep decreases with the growth in brain size throughout development, the scientists found. While newborns spend about 50% of their sleep time in REM sleep, that falls to about 25% by the age of 10 and continues to decrease with age. Adults older than 50 spend approximately 15% of their time asleep in REM. The significant dropoff in REM sleep at about 2-and-a-half happens just as the major change in the function of sleep occurs, Poe said.

“Sleep is as important as food,” Poe said. “And it’s miraculous how well sleep matches the needs of our nervous system. From jellyfish to birds to whales, everyone sleeps. While we sleep, our brains are not resting.”

A chronic lack of sleep likely contributes to long-term health problems such as dementia and other cognitive disorders, diabetes, and obesity, to name a few, Poe said. When you start to feel tired, she said, don’t fight it — go to bed.

“I fought sleep and pulled all-nighters when I was in college, and now think that was a mistake,” Savage said. “I would have been better off with a good night’s sleep. Now when I feel tired, I don’t have any guilt about sleeping.”

For most adults, a regular seven-and-a-half hours of sleep a night is normal — and time lying awake doesn’t count, Poe says. While children need more sleep, babies need much more, roughly twice as much as adults. The large percentage of REM sleep in babies is in stark contrast to the amount of REM sleep observed in adult mammals across an enormous range of brain sizes and body sizes. Adult humans have five REM cycles during a full night of sleep and can have a few dreams in each cycle.

A good night’s sleep is excellent medicine, Poe says. And it’s free.

Co-authors of the study are Junyu Cao, who conducted research in Savage’s laboratory and is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Alexander Herman, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; and Geoffrey West, a physicist who is the Shannan Distinguished Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

Funding sources included the National Science Foundation and the Eugene and Clare Thaw Charitable Trust.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

A photo of powerlines in Southern California.

What the wildfires tell us about the shortcomings of California’s electric grid

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A photo of powerlines in Southern California.

Powerlines along a road in Playa del Rey, California. (Photo Credit: Sean Brenner)

In addition to the vast destruction they have caused, the wildfires that have engulfed California in recent weeks have laid bare serious concerns about the state’s electric grid.

In an email interview, UCLA’s Eric Fournier explains why the architecture of California’s grid isn’t well suited for such extreme conditions and what it would take to improve it. Fournier has been research director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability since 2018 — he joined UCLA as a postdoctoral researcher in 2016 — and his research involves analyzing energy systems and the mechanics of the electric power system.

What are the core issues that the wildfires have exposed about our power grid?

The wildfires are exposing some of the inherent weaknesses of the grid’s current architecture, which relies upon highly centralized sources of power generation.

The grid has historically been designed to support the unidirectional flow of power from a few large generator stations to many smaller consumers. That architecture seeks to take advantage of the economies of scale in power production that come from building generator stations as large as possible.

One thing that happens under this approach, however, is that these large generator stations tend to be built far away from the consumers. For fossil fuel–based generator plants, that’s because their operations produce large amounts of harmful air emissions that can negatively affect public health. For renewable generator plants, it’s because they need to be on sites with access to renewable energy flows — whether that’s wind, sun or hydraulic potential, for example — and those locations are typically remote.

As a result, the grid’s operations depend heavily on transmission infrastructure to move power around. If this infrastructure becomes compromised either due to age or some other external hazard — like extremely high heat or wildfire — grid operators have a difficult time maintaining reliable service.

The public safety power shut-offs in response to wildfires and other high-risk weather conditions are attempts to mitigate the grid’s exposure to these hazards. These measures are obviously not ideal, however, because power outages result in significant disruptions to the lives of large numbers of people.

Ideally, we should be taking a longer-term view on how we can mitigate both these underlying hazards as well as the extent of the grid’s exposure to them.

What are some ways California could realistically address those problems? 

Adopting distributed renewable energy generation and storage would have a number of potential benefits, in terms of both mitigating hazards and reducing exposures.

In the former case, generating energy renewably avoids the emissions of greenhouse gases. This would help slow the rate of climate change and reduce the likelihood of more severe wildfires occurring in the future. In the latter case, generating energy in a distributed way helps reduce our reliance upon transmission infrastructure, and it would provide some capacity to continue making power available to consumers in the event of a transmission infrastructure failure.

What would it take to make those things happen? 

There are a number of barriers to achieving a more renewable, more decentralized energy future. Some of them are technical and some are legal and administrative.

On the technical side, the grid will require extensive modernization upgrades to support higher levels of distributed energy resource penetration and, even further down the road, fully bi-directional power flows. These efforts will need to be supported by a dramatic expansion in the grid’s capacity to store and share the energy that is produced by renewable sources — such as with batteries. This will be necessary to address problems related to many types of renewables’ only intermittent ability to produce electric power.

On the legal and administrative side, there needs to be a recognition of the benefits associated with decentralized energy solutions. And these benefits should be considered during long-term energy system planning.

Utility companies have extensive experience building, operating and maintaining the grid as it currently exists. The proposed alternative represents a paradigm shift within this sector and will have to be supported with strong policy mandates. Otherwise, it is highly likely that in the future we will simply replace our existing, large-scale, remote, fossil fuel generation facilities with new, large-scale, remote, renewable generation facilities. That would mean that we would be retaining all of the same systemic vulnerabilities to climate change and wildfire that are inherent to the current system.

Finally, relative to this idea that we should promote greater decentralization: It is crucial that questions of equity be considered in the process. These solutions will fundamentally not work if they are only the provenance of the rich. Thus, we need to be forceful about ensuring that residents of disadvantaged communities are not left behind due to the cost or other difficulties associated with the adoption of these types of new technologies.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

A photo of Professor Lili Yang.

How a UCLA scientist is using stem cells to take on COVID-19

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A photo of Professor Lili Yang.

Lili Yang (Photo Credit: UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center)

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, UCLA researchers are rising to the occasion by channeling their specialized expertise to seek new and creative ways to reduce the spread of the virus and save lives. Using years’ — or even decades’ — worth of knowledge they’ve acquired studying other diseases and biological processes, many of them have shifted their focus to the novel coronavirus, and they’re collaborating across disciplines as they work toward new diagnostic tests, treatments and vaccines.

Here’s a look at one project in which UCLA scientist Lili Yang, associate professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics in the UCLA College is using stem cells — which can self-replicate and give rise to all cell types — to take on COVID-19.

Invariant natural killer T cells, or iNKT cells, are the special forces of the immune system. They’re extremely powerful and can immediately recognize and respond to many different intruders, from infections to cancer.

Yang is testing whether iNKT cells would make a particularly effective treatment for COVID-19 because they have the capacity to kill virally infected cells, offer protection from reinfection and rein in the excessive inflammation caused by a hyperactive immune response to the virus, which is thought to be a major cause of tissue damage and death in people with the disease.

One catch, though, is that iNKT cells are incredibly scarce: One drop of human blood contains around 10 million blood cells but only around 10 iNKT cells. That’s where Yang’s research comes in. Over the past several years, she has developed a method for generating large numbers of iNKT cells from blood-forming stem cells. While that work was aimed at creating a treatment for cancer, Yang’s lab has adapted its work over the past few months to test how effective stem cell–derived iNKT cells could be in fighting COVID-19. With her colleagues, she has been studying how the cells work in fighting the disease in models of SARS-CoV-2 infection that are grown from human kidney and lung cells.

“My lab has been developing an iNKT cell therapy for cancer for years,” Yang said. “This means a big part of the work is already done. We are repurposing a potential therapy that is very far along in development to treat COVID-19.” Read more.

For more on campus-wide research efforts related to COVID-19, visit: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/stem-cell-research-covid-19

Teo Ruiz: Amid uncertainty and adversity, we can find strength in beauty

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Teo Ruiz finds beauty in the efforts of health care workers, protests for social justice and the optimism and passion of the young. (Video: UCLA Broadcast Studio)

The news around COVID-19 has not been encouraging of late. Positive cases are once again surging around the country. In Los Angeles, government and public health officials are considering resuming safer-at-home orders to prevent the spread of the disease. Many of us have been largely stuck at home since March, while others have been risking their lives every day doing that essential work that keeps us healthy and fed and the economy, such as it is, going. With how indefinitely it appears this will continue, it’s easy to get discouraged.

To counter that, we share this video essay from Teo Ruiz, professor emeritus of history, who asserts that “beauty saves,” and asks how we each can add beauty to the world.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

A photo of Professor Paula Diaconescu.

Chemist Paula Diaconescu to lead new NSF Center for Integrated Catalysis

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A photo of Professor Paula Diaconescu.

Professor Paula Diaconescu leads the Center for Integrated Catalysis with the goal to mimic biological systems in development of synthetic chemical catalytic processes.

The National Science Foundation announced a five year, $1.8 million award to establish the NSF Center for Integrated Catalysis (CIC), effective Sept. 1. The center is led by Paula Diaconescu, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

Diaconescu said the inspiration for the research conducted in CIC comes from nature’s remarkable ability to construct structurally complex products by combining different processes. Synthetic chemists, in contrast, usually run each chemical reaction individually. The goal of the CIC is to mimic biological systems in the development of synthetic chemical catalytic processes.

The center will develop the fundamental chemistry needed to prepare synthetic plastics in a single reactor using spatially separated and switchable catalysts. Simple starting materials will be used to supply networks of multiple catalysts operating together on a single platform, with the aid of temporal and spatial control, to produce new polymeric materials.

Switchable catalysts can be activated or deactivated as needed using external stimuli, such as light or electrochemical potential. The center’s research may lead to new materials that are sustainable and degradable and are of high complexity for commercial uses.

The center will host monthly seminars, including sessions on business and entrepreneurship topics, as well as chemistry and other scientific topics.

A goal of the center is to ensure the recruitment and retention of underrepresented minorities in the center’s research and activities. Students will be trained in interdisciplinary collaborative chemistry, including students who are underrepresented in the sciences.

Chong Liu, UCLA assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, who holds the Jeffery and Helo Zink Development Chair, is among the faculty members of the center.

This article was originally published by the UCLA Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry.