In the News

— September 13, 2023 —

Magic, Cooking and Droids Inspire This Roboticist
by Science News Explores

“Robots can do things that people don’t want to do,” says Dennis Hong, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.

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— September 10, 2023 —

BBC World News with UCLA Prof. Jonathan Stewart
by BBC News

Earthquake engineering expert and UCLA civil and environmental engineering professor Jonathan Stewart spoke with BBC World News TV about the 6.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Morocco September 8, sharing insights on the location and impact of the tremor.

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— September 8, 2023 —

CNN Interview with Prof. Jonathan Stewart on Morocco Earthquake
by CNN

UCLA civil and environmental engineering professor Jonathan Stewart sat down with CNN anchor Michael Holmes late that evening to explain the impact and what’s to expect next.

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— September 1, 2023 —

Developing More Durable Solar Cells
by Tech Briefs

“Renewable energy is critically important,” said corresponding author Yang Yang, the Carol and Lawrence E. Tannas, Jr. Professor of Engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. “Perovskite will be a game changer because it can be mass produced in a way silicon cannot, and we’ve identified an additive that will make the material better.”

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— August 26, 2023 —

San Francisco Radio
by KCBS–AM

NSF supported engineers from UCLA have discovered the intrinsic morphology of metallic lithium to be that of a rhombic dodecahedron, a 12-sided figure similar to the dice used in role-playing games … “It’s a direct correlation between what the lithium looks like and battery performance,” said Professor Yuzhang Li.

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— August 22, 2023 —

Issam Najm Speaks About a Chemical Plant
by KQED-FM

Issam Najm is an environmental engineer at UCLA and a nearby resident. “The reality of it is this facility continues to emit toxic chemicals, tons of toxic chemicals every year as documented by the air quality management district. There is no answer other than closing it down,” said Issam Najm, an adjunct associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.

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— August 21, 2023 —

Navigating Back to School 3 Years After the Pandemic
by Spectrum News 1

Bedford sought out several learning opportunities to supplement what Zachary wasn’t getting at school. In addition to tutoring offered by LAUSD, he participated in two UCLA programs: a mathematics achievement program, known as MAP, and another program called VIP Kings to re-acclimate him to in-person learning.

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— August 11, 2023 —

Lithium Rolls the Dice on Batteries
by Materials Today

“There are thousands of papers on lithium metal, and most descriptions of the structure is qualitative, such as ‘chunky’ or ‘column-like’,” said Yuzhang Li, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, a member of CNSI and corresponding author of the paper.

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— August 2, 2023 —

UPI
Researchers Maker Discovery That Could Reduce Explosions of Lithium-metal Batteries
by UPI

“There are thousands of papers on lithium metal, and most descriptions of the structure is qualitative, such as ‘chunky’ or ‘column-like,’’ said Yuzhang Li, the study’s corresponding author, in a news release.

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— July 22, 2023 —

Who Invented the Internet? Key People, Explained
by BBC Science Focus Magazine

Leonard Kleinrock poses next to the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) at the University of California, Los Angeles laboratory, where the first Internet message was sent. Kleinrock, an American computer scientist, published an article on his packet switching theory in July 1961 and a book on the subject in 1964. His theory was that an online network could be created in which computers communicated via “packets of information” rather than circuits.

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— July 18, 2023 —

KCRW logo
Amid Rising Temperatures, LA City Council Weighs Making AC Mandatory
by KCRW

Rajit Gadh, professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, expects that the local measure would increase energy consumption in Los Angeles by about 5%. But some of that could be offset by storing energy during the day in the batteries of electric cars and school buses and other electric vehicles, then pumping that energy back into the grid after the sun goes down.

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— July 17, 2023 —

As the Salton Sea Shrinks, Agriculture’s Legacy Turns to Dust
by Civil Eats

TMDLs are needed to stabilize the sea’s water quality, says Michael Stenstrom, a professor of environmental engineering at University of California, Los Angeles. ‘It’s going to be so expensive, and there’s so much resistance to the kinds of things that are needed to fix it, I wonder if they’re ever going to happen,’ he says.

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— July 10, 2023 —

kcal
Recent SoCal Landslides Spark Insurance Concerns for Homeowners
by KCAL NEWS – CBS NEWS Los Angeles

With several major landslides affecting Southern California in recent months, thousands of homeowners are placed on edge as most insurance plans don’t actually cover land movement.

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— July 7, 2023 —

The Lawlessness of Large Numbers
by Quanta Magazine

“In one project, he took on the finite version of the first of this year’s breakthroughs — a February paper by Zander Kelley, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Raghu Meka of the University of California, Los Angeles. Kelley and Meka found a new upper bound on how many integers between 1 and N you can put into a set while avoiding three-term progressions, or patterns of evenly spaced numbers.

— July 5, 2023 —

matter
Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Four Invited Works Celebrating Four Years of Matter
by Matter

To celebrate our fourth anniversary, as we head into our fifth year, the Matter team looked through our archives at some of the papers that contributed to our own success and invited the corresponding authors to contribute to this issue with new manuscripts… First, we have Prof. Jun Chen, a rising star in the Department of Bioengineering at UCLA… His work in this issue, “A textile magnetoelastic patch for self-powered personalized muscle physiotherapy,” adds to the field of smart fabrics using a magnetic-driven patch as the go-between to convert muscle biomechanical activities into electrical signals, effectively using novel functional materials to translate “living” output to “digital” input for parallel real-time analysis (in this case, tracking rehabilitation process) without a need for an external power supply.)

— July 4, 2023 —

Lab-grown Meat: the Science of Turning Cells into Steaks and Nuggets
by Nature

Meanwhile, the logistics of the process hold plenty of opportunities for improvement. For example, food scientist Amy Rowat at the University of California, Los Angeles, received a GFI grant to develop edible beads as scaffolds for muscle cells to adhere to and flex against, to improve fiber texture.

— July 1, 2023 —

A New Model for Human Origins in Africa Upends Commonly Held Beliefs About Our Evolution
by Salon

In an interview with Salon, Sriram Sankararaman, an associate professor in UCLA’s Departments of Computer Science, Human Genetics and Computational Medicine, praised the research team’s thorough exploration of possible models and use of rich, diverse data sets. But he doubts this is the end of the story.

The resulting complexity of the model means that it’s difficult to say exactly how closely it reflects reality,” Sankararaman, who was not involved with the Nature study, said. “Given these models are so complicated, it’s probably a reasonable thing to assume that the true models are going to be even more complicated than anything they say so far.”

— June 30, 2023 —

How Leonard Kleinrock Transformed Into Superman Of The Internet
by Investor’s Business Daily

It’s a good thing Leonard Kleinrock loved Superman and comic books. If not, you might not be surfing the internet or posting on Facebook or Instagram.Today, Kleinrock, 89, is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California at Los Angeles. Most people know him as one of the founding fathers of the internet.

— June 28, 2023 —

The Ocean is the Next Frontier for the Carbon Removal Industry
by Time Magazine

Equatic, another California-based company, signed an agreement to remove 62,000 tons of carbon on behalf of aerospace giant Boeing earlier this summer. Originally spun out of experiments at University of California, Los Angeles, its technology combines principles from direct air carbon capture, like the Climeworks Orca plant, with the approach of increasing the ocean’s alkalinity (the ocean becomes more acidic as it absorbs CO2, while adding alkalinity, in theory, allows the ocean to absorb more carbon).

— June 21, 2023 —

PBS logo
We’re Designing Robots to Look Like Us. What Could Go Wrong?
by PBS

Humanoid robots are no longer a thing of science fiction. Engineers have built machines that can mimic human movements and speech with remarkable precision. Why are scientists so determined to make robots look like us? Are they going to take our jobs? In this episode of Far Out, we unveil the secrets and moral complexities of humanoid robots.

— June 16, 2023 —

Neanderthal DNA Could Be to Blame for Your Poor Immune System
by Newsweek

“The overall effect of Neanderthal alleles on metabolism/immune system is complex,” Sriram Sankararaman, a co-author on the study and Professor of Computer Science, Genetics and Computational Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Newsweek.
* Also mentioned in todayuknews.

— June 6, 2023 —

dot.LA
LA Tech Week: Local Climate Investors Assess and Vet Green Startups
by dot.LA

David Jassby, associate director of UCLA Institute for Carbon Management, said he has been writing educational grants to fund graduate students’ research since Obama’s presidency. “In terms of the university, the research topics and the research dollars have not really changed, which is, to me, really encouraging,” Jassby said, noting that federal workers are eager to issue grants for cutting-edge climate research, regardless of political affiliation.

— June 2, 2023 —

Pioneering Advanced Math from Behind Bars
by Scientific American

For incarcerated people, days of tackling 21st-century problems with a pen and paper, however, may be coming to an end. (Christopher) Havens co-founded a national nonprofit, the Prison Mathematics Project (PMP), to help other people in prison overcome the challenges of studying mathematics there. Advised by Amit Sahai, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, the project has already paired 171 incarcerated people in 27 states with a mentor to work on topics from combinatorics to abstract algebra.

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— June 1, 2023 —

Boeing Signs Alternative Fuel Deal with Los Angeles Startup to Cut Carbon Footprint
by Associated Press

Equatic said Boeing has agreed to pre-purchase the hydrogen, which will be produced when it employs the carbon-removal system — developed by University of California Los Angeles engineering faculty — at facilities at the port of Los Angeles and Singapore. It is slated to be up and running in 2025. Researchers have been testing the system at demonstration sites in both locations.

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— May 31, 2023 —

Boeing Bets on Startup Equatic With Massive CO2 Removal, Hydrogen Deal
by Forbes

Equatic recently spun out of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management and is part of a new wave of companies with a mission to slow the buildup of climate-warming CO2 by pulling it out of the atmosphere. Founder Gaurav Sant, director of the UCLA initiative, believes its approach amplifies natural processes and is the cheapest, most energy-efficient way to achieve gigaton-level CO2 removal and produce hydrogen from nonpolluting sources.

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— May 18, 2023 —

CNN
Scientists Have a Way of Removing Carbon Dioxide from Our Oceans
by CNN Bold Pursuits

Dante Simonetti, Associate Professor, Institute for Carbon Management, UCLA: So the ocean stores approximately 150 times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So our process removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by leveraging the power of the ocean to naturally absorb carbon dioxide from air. (at 8:10)

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— May 16, 2023 —

A UCLA Startup Hopes to Make a Dent in Climate Change by Removing Carbon from the Ocean
by LAist AirTalk

Now UCLA has gotten into the business, debuting project SeaChange, which will remove more than 40 tons of carbon from the air every year. How does the technology work? Is it possible to scale it? And how does it fit into carbon capture efforts more broadly? Joining us to discuss is Dante Simonetti, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and associate director of the Institute for Carbon Management at UCLA.

— May 15, 2023 —

WNYM
A Climate Change with Matt Matern
by KABC 790AM Los Angeles, WCPT 820AM Chicago and WNYM 970AM New York

Listen in to learn about the breakthrough carbon removal technologies of the trailblazing Professor Gaurav Sant, UCLA Professor and Founder of CarbonBuilt & Equatic.

KABC 7
How UCLA Researchers Are Attempting a Climate Solution by Removing Carbon Dioxide from the Ocean
by abc7

Carbon dioxide levels are 150 times more concentrated in seawater than in the air. Project Sea Change, led by researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, can now learn if extracting that carbon from the ocean is an effective way to reverse the effects of climate change.

— May 12, 2023 —

How Shocking the Ocean Could Turn It Into a Carbon Removal Powerhouse
by Bloomberg

A startup has begun a unique experiment in the Port of Los Angeles to electrochemically treat seawater and safely store carbon.

— May 11, 2023 —

U.S. Focuses on Invigorating ‘Chiplets’ to Stay Cutting-Edge in Tech
by The New York Times

Chiplets, a way to design chips for higher performance, has become a key prong of U.S. industrial policy. But pushing for more of this activity domestically is challenging.

Paper-based Test Scans for Multiple Biomarkers
by Photonics.com

Researchers led by UCLA professor Aydogan Ozcan developed a deep learning-enabled biosensor for multiplexed, point-of-care (POC) testing of disease biomarkers.

— May 10, 2023 —

Opinion: Another Reason Hollywood Will Love AI
by The Wall Street Journal

UCLA professor John Villasenor and student Jeremy Baum write in a piece published by the Brookings Institution about their testing of the popular ChatGPT program. They report that “for certain combinations of issues and prompts, in our experiments ChatGPT provided consistent—and often left-leaning—answers on political/social issues.”
There are caveats. The chatbot often yields conflicting and inconsistent answers. But the UCLA researchers write that “inconsistencies aside, there is a clear left-leaning political bias to many of the ChatGPT responses.” One source of the bias may simply be that the software is trained with large volumes of material from the Internet and much published media is biased.

Robot to Compete in Summer Competition
by Spectrum News 1

Robots come in all shapes and sizes and this one can walk run and even kick a ball. Meet Artemis, a full-size electric powered humanoid robot built by researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. It’s developed with first of its kind technology according to Dennis Hong, who leads the school’s robotics and mechanisms lab.

— May 9, 2023 —

Translucent Organic Solar Cells Can be Designed to Absorb Narrow Light Band
by MerCom

Earlier, a team of material scientists at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering in California designed a solar roof with semi-transparent solar cells for a miniature greenhouse prototype, producing sufficient energy from sunlight to grow plants or crops.

— May 8, 2023 —

Everyone Was Wrong About Reverse Osmosis—Until Now
by Wired

A new paper showing how water actually travels through a plastic membrane could make desalination more efficient. That’s good news for a thirsty world.

“They’ve nailed it,” agrees Eric Hoek, an environmental engineer at UCLA who trained under Elimelech 20 years ago but was not involved in the study. “Finally, somebody has put the nail in the coffin.”..
Still, Hoek says, “20 years ago it was anathema to suggest that it was incorrect.” Hoek didn’t even dare to use the word “pores” when talking about reverse osmosis membranes, since the dominant model didn’t acknowledge them. “For many, many years,” he says wryly, “I’ve been calling them ‘interconnected free volume elements.’”
Over the past 20 years, images taken using advanced microscopes have reinforced Hoek and Elimelech’s doubts. Researchers discovered that the plastic polymers used in desalination membranes aren’t so dense and poreless after all. They actually contain interconnected tunnels—although they are absolutely minuscule, peaking at around 5 angstroms in diameter, or half a nanometer. Still, one water molecule is about 1.5 angstroms long, so that’s enough room for small clusters of water molecules to squeeze through these cavities, instead of having to go one at a time.

— May 4, 2023 —

Carbon Removal Features Filters, Fans — and Ivory Towers
by Climate Wire

Climeworks is also involved in a project intended for Kern County, Calif., that includes researchers from UCLA; California State University, Bakersfield; and the University of Michigan as well as a few national labs. The oil company California Resources Corp. is leading the effort and seeking $12.5 million in matching funds to advance the project. UCLA sees the project as a way to test some its carbon removal technologies outside of the lab.

“You don’t want knowledge that you developed to be orphaned. And if you don’t want knowledge to be orphaned, you need a way for some of the knowledge to go out into the real world,” said Gaurav Sant, the director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management. “That’s what these hubs and other things like them allow.”

— May 3, 2023 —

UCLA’s Robotic Footballer is Going to the RoboCup
by Wired Middle East

Engineers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have created a state-of-the-art humanoid robot called ARTEMIS (Advanced Robotic Technology for Enhanced Mobility and Improved Stability) which is set to compete in the soccer category of the 2023 RoboCup, the annual international robotics competition, in France.

Dennis Hong, one of the lead developers of ARTEMIS at UCLA, claimed that creating footballer robots could help with developing machines for more serious uses like firefighting or disaster relief. “If your robot cannot even play a game of soccer, how would you be able to use these robots for more important things, such as saving people’s lives?” Hong asked.

— May 1, 2023 —

Researchers Develop Method to Remove Carbon from Ocean
by VOA News – Learning English

Gaurav Sant is the director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management and helped lead the development project. He told the AP that the technology, called SeaChange, is meant to use the ocean’s natural abilities to reduce carbon levels in the sea.

— April 25, 2023 —

How Was the Internet Created?
by Scripps News

“That high speed line was the first piece of the internet backbone, and it was running at the blazing speed of 50,000 bits per second,” said Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist and professor at UCLA. “Now we — you and I — wouldn’t pay a nickel for 50,000 bits per second access line right now, but in those days, it was high speed.”

— April 21, 2023 —

California Researchers Attempt Ocean Climate Solution
by AP News

The technology, dubbed SeaChange, developed by the University of California Los Angeles engineering faculty, is meant to seize on the ocean’s natural abilities, said Gaurav Sant, director of UCLA’s Institute of Carbon Management.

— April 20, 2023 —

California Researchers Attempt Ocean Climate Solution
by Spectrum News

— April 19, 2023 —

This Robot Can Walk Upright, Play Soccer and Potentially Save Lives in Disaster Zones
by Independent Tribune

“In robot news, mechanical engineers at RoMeLA – the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory of the University of California in Los Angeles have developed a humanoid-sized robot.”

— April 18, 2023 —

Power of Water: Bringing Clean Water to the Most Remote Water-Starved Areas
by ABC News

Yoram Cohen, the director of the water technology research center at UCLA, told ABC News that those costs may not be sustainable. Cohen noted that the average person needs about 2 liters of water a day, but the hydro panels currently produce 3 to 5 liters for one household. “If you are in an area where you have no water whatsoever… the question is why? Why would you want to actually develop residential [properties]?” he asked.

— April 16, 2023 —

‘Big sponge’: New CO2 Tech Taps Oceans to Tackle Global Warming
by Yahoo!

Scientists from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have been working for two years on SeaChange—an ambitious project that could one day boost the amount of CO2, a major greenhouse gas, that can be absorbed by our seas. Their goal is “to use the ocean as a big sponge,” according to Gaurav Sant, director of the university’s Institute for Carbon Management (ICM).

— April 13, 2023 —

Could Removing Carbon from the Ocean be a Climate Change Solution?
by Los Angeles Times

(First-person account by Rosanna Xia) So with all that in mind, I took a tour Wednesday of what has been billed as a game-changing, first-of-its-kind technology in removing carbon dioxide from the ocean. The pilot system, dubbed SeaChange, essentially pumps in seawater, extracts the carbon dioxide, and then, through a surprisingly simple process, converts the CO2 into a solid mineral that can be stored safely away. This in turn frees up the ocean to absorb more carbon emissions from the atmosphere. It’s a multimillion-dollar idea that researchers from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have been putting to the test.

UCLA Team Launches Ocean Carbon Capture Project at Port of Los Angeles
by Los Angeles Daily News

Prof. Dante Simonetti stood on a 100-foot barge Wednesday morning, tethered close to shore just outside one of AltaSea’s massive warehouses at the Port of Los Angeles. In one hand, Simonetti, who helps head up UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, held a copper block called an electrochemical reactor. When a jolt of electricity is applied to the device and ocean water passes through it, he explained, a chemical reaction turns any dissolved minerals from that seawater into powder-fine solids.

— April 12, 2023 —

UCLA Engineers Develop Solution to Reduce Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
by CBS News LA

Researchers from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have developed a groundbreaking electrochemical process in an effort to mitigate climate change, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by leveraging the world’s oceans.

An L.A. Startup Aims to Turn the Oceans Into A CO2 Sponge and ‘Green’ Hydrogen Machine
by Forbes

Created by scientists at UCLA’s ambitious Institute for Carbon Management, Equatic has developed a way to remove an environmentally harmful greenhouse gas from our atmosphere — and simultaneously generate usable green fuel.

— April 7, 2023 —

Chip-Free Origami-Inspired Robots for Use in Space and Surgery
by AZO Robotics

A team at UCLA has built origami-inspired robots that overcome a crucial design challenge that has previously prevented the flexible autonomous machines from reaching their full potential – the folding robots are now chip-free.

— April 6, 2023 —

The Robots Are Already Here
by Tech Crunch

The second research project is from UCLA’s Samueli School of Engineering, which recently published findings from its work around origami robots. The Origami MechanoBots, or “OrigaMechs,” rely on sensors embedded into their thin polyester building blocks. Principal investigator Ankur Mehta has some fairly far out plans for the tech.

— April 4, 2023 —

Foldable Robots with Intricate Transistors Can Squeeze into Extreme Situations
by Popular Science

A team of UCLA researchers has designed a new way to integrate traditionally inflexible semiconductor and sensory components into their devices’ structural materials. Enter a new dimension to origami-based robotics. “These types of dangerous or unpredictable scenarios, such as during a natural or manmade disaster, could be where origami robots proved to be especially useful,” said Ankur Mehta, the study’s principal investigator and director of UCLA’s Laboratory for Embedded Machines and Ubiquitous Robots.

— April 3, 2023 —

Regulating AI: 3 Experts Explain Why It’s Difficult to Do and Important to Get Right
by The Conversation

John Villasenor, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Law, Public Policy, and Management, University of California, Los Angeles.

— March 30, 2023 —

Sustainable Infrastructure Can’t Rely on Concrete
by City Monitor

“The market for cement replacements is, for all practical purposes, nonexistent,” says Gaurav Sant, founder of the cleantech start-up CO2Concrete and a professor of civil engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “I would wager that the number of companies that have started in the space and shut down, rather than succeeded, is actually bigger than the number of companies that actually exist today.”

Without encouragement from governments, risk-averse engineering firms are unlikely to choose a novel concrete. “What we need are strong signals to the markets that public entities and legislators are serious about this,” Sant says. Subsidy schemes or carbon taxes could have a role to play, as could regulations that ask developers to measure and report on the CO2 embedded in their buildings.

— March 28, 2023 —

Lebanon’s IT Folks Face Double Trouble as Leaders Delayed Daylight Savings Time
by The Register

UCLA computer science professor Paul Eggert, editor and coordinator of the Time Zone Database, said in a mailing list message, “Unfortunately, many GNU/Linux and other downstream suppliers take some time (a week or more) to test changes before they release data to their users. So unless you’re using one of the smaller, faster-moving distros like Alpine Linux you’ll likely be out of luck.”

— March 24, 2023 —

The Danger of Those Trump ‘Deepfake’ Images
by The Independent

“As we have all seen, it is so much easier to make fake videos and fake images and make them look really realistic,” Vwani Roychowdhury, a professor at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, told HuffPost. “Whether it’s the correct information or socially acceptable information or misinformation, in my opinion, they’re all embedded as part of a narrative.”

— March 22, 2023 —

Trump Didn’t Get Arrested (Not Yet, At Least). That Was Just AI.
by HuffPost

An Arizona Plant Will Pull CO2 from the Air and Trap it in Concrete
by Yahoo News

After forming in UCLA’s engineering school in 2014 and then spinning out in 2019, CarbonBuilt has demonstrated its technology at coal- and gas-fired power plants in northern Wyoming and central Alabama, using the plants’ CO2-rich flue gases to cure concrete. In 2021, it won $7.5 million from the NRG Cosia Carbon Xprize for its technology.

— March 21, 2023 —

Surprise Computer Science Proof Stuns Mathematicians
by Quanta Magazine

On Sunday, February 5, Olof Sisask and Thomas Bloom received an email containing a stunning breakthrough on the biggest unsolved problem in their field. Zander Kelley, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, had sent Sisask and Bloom a paper he’d written with Raghu Meka of the University of California, Los Angeles. Both Kelley and Meka were computer scientists, an intellectual world apart from the additive combinatorics that Sisask and Bloom study.

— March 16, 2023 —

Robot Helpers Could be Coming Sooner Than You Think
by CBS News Sacramento

A pioneering lab at UCLA has been developing humanoid companions meant to work, and maybe even play alongside us. Professor Dennis Hong is a mechanical and aerospace engineer with a love of Star Wars and its charismatic robots. Now he and his graduate students at the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (ROMELA) are developing next-generation humanoids.

Kick Off: Robot That Can Run and Jump to Comet in Football Tournament – and Creators Say it Could be ‘Better’ Than Messi
by The Sun (U.S.)

The robot, known as ARTEMIS, has been created by the robotics lab at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. The team of researchers are already a five-time RoboCup champions, “We’re very excited to take ARTEMIS out for field testing here at UCLA and we see this as an opportunity to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics to a much wider audience,” Dennis Hong added.

— March 15, 2023 —

Strange Material Breaks a Classic Rule of Physics
by Scientific American

“Now that we’ve made this first discovery, we think this can’t be the only material with abnormal behavior,” says study senior author Yongjie Hu, a chemist and mechanical engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles. If other substances show this property, “the established understanding of thermal conductivity might not be correct.”

How a Beam of Pellets Could Blast a Probe Into Deep Space
by Wired

“There’s rich physics in there,” says (Artur) Davoyan, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at UCLA. To create propulsion, he continues, “you either throw the fuel out of the rocket or you throw the fuel at the rocket.” From a physics perspective, they work the same: Both impart momentum to a moving object.

— March 14, 2023 —

UCLA Prof. Dennis Hong on KFI News
by KFI News

Professor Dennis Hong of mechanical and aerospace engineering speaks to Kris Adler of KFI News about ARTEMIS, a new full-sized humanoid robot developed by Hong and his team at Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) at UCLA. The team has previously won five RoboCup championships and will attempt to get its sixth at RoboCup 2023 this July in Bordeaux, France.

Deep learning: A Powerful Tool for Biophotonics in Labs and Clinics
by SPIE

The increasing importance of deep learning (DL), artificial intelligence (AI) and related computational methods to biophotonics and clinical practice was highlighted during a BIOS plenary event at SPIE Photonics West in January. Aydogan Ozcan of UCLA chaired the session and is also received the Dennis Gabor Award in Diffractive Optics in recognition of his accomplishments in diffractive wavefront technologies, a field of central importance to the breakthroughs under discussion.

Morning News at 4:30
by KTLA 5

A humanoid robot created by UCLA engineers has earned a spot at this year’s Robocup Soccer Competition. The robot is now undergoing intense training in Westwood to prepare for his big match.

— March 9, 2023 —

What the Snowfall in California Will Mean for the State’s Drought Conditions
by CBS News

Some parts of California have been hit with up to 12 feet of snowfall. Alvar Escriva-Bou, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, joins CBS News to discuss the impact of the recent severe weather on the state’s drought conditions.

— March 8, 2023 —

How We Stay Cool | Getting Warmer Episode 6
by Bloomberg

“Cooling, whether that’s air conditioning or refrigerators, is probably one of the 4biggest challenges we face with respect to climate change,” – Aaswath Raman, assistant professor of materials science and engineering.

— March 6, 2023 —

UCLA Unveils New ARTEMIS Robot for Soccer Tournament
by Teslarati

UCLA has posted a new video showing off its latest iteration of the ARTEMIS robot project, which will compete in the RoboCup soccer league.

Popular Science logo
Scientists Think This Tiny Greenhouse Could be a Game Changer for Agrivoltaics
by Popular Science

The field of agrivoltaics, in which land is used for both farming and solar power generation, has some basic logistical issues. Namely, it has been difficult to build structures that can both efficiently generate solar power while not blocking the sunlight needed for crops to actually grow. A team of researchers at UCLA recently discovered a novel solution to the issue that relies on organic materials.

— March 2, 2023 —

Years of Warnings and Inaction in Turkish City Destroyed by Earthquakes
by Washington Post

Widespread diagonal cracking in the exterior of buildings was evidence of shear, or the horizontal force created by the earthquake, said Jonathan Stewart, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles. Though some may remain habitable, the buildings must be inspected for additional cracking in key structural areas, he said. “If that is present, it is possible that these structures are on the verge of collapse.”

— March 1, 2023 —

NOW Tonight March 1
by NBC News NOW

“Retrofit is really non-uniform across the region. It really depends on the local ordinances that are in place.” – Jonathan Stewart, professor of civil and environmental engineering

Los Angeles News and Talk Station
by KNX-AM

Jonathan Stewart is an engineering expert at UCLA, he tells us what a project like this would entail, and why it matters. “We’re talking about concrete buildings that were constructed prior to a major code change in the late 1970s, and the structures from that area were not detailed in a very good way, by modern standards.”

— February 23, 2023 —

The World’s Largest 3D-Printed Neighborhood Is Here
by Bloomberg

Gaurav Sant, director of the Institute for Carbon Management at the University of California at Los Angeles, says it’s too early to tell if 3D printing will upend construction, though he says the industry is ripe for disruption thanks to its substantial carbon footprint. “But the fact that major companies are setting foot in the space and saying, ‘Let’s pressure-test this and really understand the value proposition and environmental impact’ is clearly a step in that direction,” says Sant, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA’s Samueli School of Engineering.

— February 22, 2023 —

How to Engineer Buildings That Withstand Earthquakes
by Scientific American

During a quake, the ground beneath a building moves quickly back and forth. But because the building has mass, it has inertia. “The earthquake is shaking the ground, and the building is trying to stay put,” says Ertugrul Taciroglu, a structural engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles.

— February 19, 2023 —

Startups Turning to the Ocean to Capture More Carbon Off Southern California’s Coast
by The Orange County Register

“We can be more efficient with fossil fuel usage. We cannot completely stop using it,” said Dante Simonetti, a chemical and biomolecular engineering professor at UCLA who is helping to spearhead ocean carbon capture pilot programs along the Los Angeles and Singapore coasts.

— February 18, 2023 —

Research Group Studying Massive Earthquake in Turkey for Similarities to California
by CBS News Los Angeles

“Essentially, we’re trying to design for a condition in California that we haven’t seen,” said Jonathan Stewart, a civil engineer and Professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “So, the ability to go see what that looks like and learn from it is really once in a lifetime.” Stewart has been in regular contact with a team of four experts on the ground in Turkey, who rushed to witness the devastation and study the aftereffects due to the similarities the region’s tectonic system shares with the West Coast of the United States.

— February 14, 2023 —

NOW Tonight – NOW Tonight: Jonathan Stewart on the Earthquake in Turkey and Syria
by NBC News NOW

In an interview on NBC News Digital platform, Civil and environmental engineering professor Jonathan Stewart discussed similarities between earthquake faults in Turkey and California, the factors that led to the earthquake in Turkey (including the movement of the tectonic plates), and the importance of reevaluating old buildings and how to prioritize which building codes need to be implemented.

— February 11, 2023 —

How ChatGPT Can Improve Education, Not Threaten it
by Scientific American

A professor explains why he is allowing students to incorporate ChatGPT into their writing process instead of banning the new technology

— February 10, 2023 —

Fact check: False Claim That Turkey Earthquakes Were a Man-made Attack on Kurdish People
by USA TODAY

“The Arabian plate is moving north towards the Eurasian plate, which is squeezing a block of crust wedged between these to the west,” Jonathan Stewart, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of California Los Angeles, told USA TODAY. “The southern boundary of that block is the East Anatolian fault where the magnitude 7.8 (earthquake) occurred.”

Los Angeles Fire Department Trains in Urban Search and Rescue
by Spectrum News

Ertugrul Taciroglu is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA. He says there are still buildings that are not earthquake safe here. “In Los Angeles we have about 1500 of them identified so today we have reinforced concrete buildings in Los Angeles that could collapse just like those that collapsed in Turkey. Hopefully something like this big won’t happen until you completely replace them here in L.A.”

— February 9, 2023 —

The Twitch Seinfeld Show Proves AI Shouldn’t Write Comedy
by Wired

Nanyun Peng, an assistant professor of computer science at UCLA, studies AI’s ability to be creative and cowrote the papers “A Unified Framework for Pun Generation with Humor Principles” and “Pun Generation with Surprise.” She says AI’s unfunniness stems from the fact that it uses a probabilistic model to determine the most expected idea, and humor is based on unexpected responses.

VOA
Turkey Earthquake
by Voice of America TV

“We really need to learn from earthquakes like this to better prepare ourselves and help others prepare better for future effects,” said Jonathan Stewart, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of California Los Angeles. The broadcast was done in Russian with the original interview in English.

— February 8, 2023 —

How Seawater Might Soak Up More Carbon
by Nautilus

Early this year, Gaurav Sant will flip a switch on a machine aboard a battered barge tied up at a dock on the Los Angeles waterfront. Sant, an engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles, is thinking much, much bigger. He estimates that nearly 1,800 full-size factories on coastlines around the world could coax the ocean into removing 10 gigatons—10 billion metric tons—of extra CO2 per year. That’s one-quarter of humanity’s annual carbon emissions. “These are exciting times,” says Gaurav Sant.

Engineer Explains Earthquake Damage To Buildings In Turkey, Syria
by The Weather Channel

“This is a much bigger earthquake than any of us have a memory of here in California,” said UCLA professor Jonathan Stewart. “You really have to go back to 1906 to see an earthquake comparable in size.”

INSIGHT – Lawsuits Pile up as U.S. Parents Take on Social Media Giants
by Reuters

John Villasenor, the co-director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law, and Policy, said it could be hard to distinguish between a well-designed algorithm and one that might under some circumstances promote addictive behaviors.
Also mentioned by the following outlets: National Post, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, and OCanada.

— February 7, 2023 —

Turkish Americans Grieve in the Wake of Deadly Earthquake
by Spectrum News 1

Ertugrul Taciroglu is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA. He’s also from Turkey and says buildings like the one Fuat’s family lived in have been most impacted … “The particularly vulnerable building inventory in Turkey are those buildings that were built primarily before the 1980s when they had a design code change. I believe we will see in the end, when the damage and losses are kind of archived, that most of the buildings that collapsed could be from that older stock.”

KFBK NBC
The Earthquake: One of Strongest to Hit the Region in More Than 100 Years on the East Anatolian Fault.
by KFBK and NBC NEWS RADIO

UCLA civil engineering professor Jonathan Stewart perceives the long-term effects this earthquake will have on residence and Turkey’s infrastructure.

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Could LA Buildings Collapse Like Those In Turkey When The Big One Hits?
by LAist

“The buildings that collapsed (in Turkey) are most likely those that were built prior to 1980s, and some that weren’t built to code requirements,” said Ertugrul Taciroglu, chair of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA.

In Turkey and Syria, Outdated Building Methods All But Assured Disaster from a Quake
by npr

Scenes of thousands of buildings reduced to rubble in southern Turkey and northern Syria following Monday’s deadly magnitude 7.8 earthquake — and its many aftershocks — come as no surprise to civil engineer Jonathan Stewart.

— February 4, 2023 —

Needs to Prioritize Weaknesses in Infrastructure
by Spectrum News SF Valley

“Attention needs also to be given to where the greatest vulnerabilities are, just in terms of ground movements during earthquakes and things like that. I think that’s a challenge for the city and any other entity that worries about this things, transportation, and so on,” said Jonathan Stewart.

— February 3, 2023 —

Chinese Spy Balloon Has Unexpected Maneuverability
by Scientific American

“This maneuverability is beyond the capabilities of most high-altitude balloons,” says John Villasenor, director of the Institute for Technology, Law and Policy and a professor of electrical engineering, law, public policy and management at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Scientists Propose Method That Shoots Lasers At Spacecraft To Increase Speed Of Space Travel
by California18

Artur Davoyan, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA, says there are two problems to solve: the first is that it cannot be applied to vehicles with very heavy loads and that the fact that it works with solar rays, it limits the fact that its greatest momentum will be lost when it gets too far away from the massive star.

— February 2, 2023 —

Can a Robot Ever Become Your Friend?
by Science News Explores

“That’s totally what my aim is,” says Alexis E. Block. And, she adds, “I think we’re on the right track. But there’s a lot more work to do.” Block is a roboticist who built a machine that gives hugs. She is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles and the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany.

Meet the Scientists Who Want to Make Medical Devices Work for Everyone, Finally
by Inverse

The indifference speaks to a wider, persisting crisis of bias within medicine, health care, and pharmaceutical or medical device development, Achuta Kadambi, an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, tells Inverse. “There’s essentially three types of bias: The bias of the physical layer, which is what we’re talking about often with pulse oximeters,” he says. “Then there’s bias at the [artificial intelligence], or computational, layer, and a third layer is interpretation bias, which means that even if the rest of the system is equitable, you might have a human factor adjust the output accordingly.”

The Many Facets of Flow Cytometry
by Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News

Dino Di Carlo, PhD, the Armond and Elena Hairapetian Chair in Engineering and Medicine and Professor of Bioengineering at UCLA, says that his laboratory’s lab-on-a-particle technology could be very helpful to the flow cytometry community. Di Carlo and colleagues recently manufactured nanovials, which are hydrogel-based chemically functionalized microcontainers that act as a solid support, and to which adherent or suspension cell types can be attached.

— February 1, 2023 —

STEAM: Meet Dr. Rajit Gadh, a Green Energy Futurist
by CBS News Los Angeles

Inside UCLA Samueli School of Engineering is the “green energy futurist” Rajit Gadh, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, whose research focuses on innovative power solutions from V2G to AI-powered systems.

— January 31, 2023 —

A Quick Remedy Proves Elusive for Life-Saving Pulse Oximeter’s Problems with Darker Skin
by Forbes

“Race-based corrections lead to a lot of confusion later on that exacerbates bias,” said Achuta Kadambi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles, who’s working on more equitable remote heart monitoring. “It’s a slippery slope. You want the physics of the device to be sensing things in a manner that’s robust.”

— January 24, 2023 —

See the 2023 U.S. News Ranking for Best Online Programs
by US News

After ranking at No. 2 the prior year, the University of California—Los Angeles’ Henry Samueli School of Engineering claimed the top spot in the rankings of online master’s in engineering programs.

— January 18, 2023 —

Optical AI Could Feed Voracious Data Need
by IEEE Spectrum

A brain-imitating neural network that employs photons instead of electrons could rapidly analyze vast amounts of data by running many computations simultaneously using thousands of wavelengths of light. All this computing “does not consume power, except for the illumination light,” says study senior author Aydogan Ozcan, an optical engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles.

— January 17, 2023 —

Race to Zero: Can California’s Power Grid Handle a 15-fold Increase in Electric Cars?
by CalMatters

Rajit Gadh, director of UCLA’s Smart Grid Energy Research Center, said challenges exist. As with many of the problems related to energy and electric vehicles, “it’s a matter of time, education, awareness and incentives,” Gadh said.

— January 14, 2023 —

VOA
Fight Over Big Tech Looms in Supreme
by VOA News

“It has pretty profound implications, because with tech regulation and tech law, things can have unintended consequences,” John Villasenor, a professor of engineering and law and director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, told VOA.

— January 10, 2023 —

Planes on Titan and Pipelines on the Moon: NASA Considering Some Wild Future Tech
by Yahoo

NASA wants Artur Davoyan from the University of California, Los Angeles, to further develop his pellet-beam propulsion system concept, which the mechanical and aerospace engineer envisions as means for transporting heavy spacecraft to targets across the solar system and even into interstellar space.

Deep Learning-designed Diffractice Processor Computes Hundreds of Transformations in Parallel
by Phys.org

The same UCLA research group that first introduced the diffractive optical networks has recently addressed this question. In a recent study published in Advanced Photonics, they employed a wavelength multiplexing scheme in a diffractive optical network and showed the feasibility of using a broadband diffractive processor to perform massively parallel linear transformation operations. UCLA Chancellor’s Professor Aydogan Ozcan, the leader of the research group at the Samueli School of Engineering, briefly describes the architecture and principles of this optical processor.

— January 9, 2023 —

Why Hospitals Are Struggling to Meet Earthquake Safety Deadline
by CalMatters

“If you have a hospital that serves a population that may not have a lot of mobility, say a disadvantaged population, and that hospital can’t work after an earthquake when you might have a lot of injuries, that is a big problem,” said Jonathan Stewart, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA.

— January 7, 2023 —

How the Internet Was Created by Government — Not Private — Innovation
by Salon

“One way to think about this is to recognize that early on there were at least three independent threads that were responsible for the creation of the Internet,” computer scientist and UCLA professor Dr. Leonard Kleinrock told Salon by email.

— January 5, 2023 —

Solar-sailing Probes May Soon Get Their Moment in the Sun
by Space

Then there’s the “extreme solar sailing” development work being conducted by Artur Davoyan of the University of California, Los Angeles and sponsored by NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. “We envisage a new generation of breakthrough science missions that were not possible before, from probing fundamental laws of nature at the outskirts of our solar system to peering into distant worlds,” Davoyan explained in a NIAC briefing about his work.

— December 28, 2022 —

‘Bomb Cyclone’ Underscores Vulnerabilities of Nation’s Electric Grid
by The Hill

The “bomb cyclone” that hit large swaths of the country left hundreds of thousands of Americans without power at one point or another over Christmas weekend, exposing vulnerabilities in the country’s electrical system.

— December 27, 2022 —

Who Celebrates the New Year First and Last? It’s Complicated.
by National Geographic

The article quotes Paul Eggert, a senior lecturer of computer science at UCLA Samueli who maintains the authoritative global Time Zone Database, on the potential for confusion with 38 local time times in use around the globe, some of which are offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by 30- or 45-minute increments.

— December 19, 2022 —

Epigenetic Variation Predicts Behavior in Dogs
by Earth.com

“Here we show that the behavior of dogs is associated with their epigenome, in particular DNA methylation. Our results open the door to using epigenetics to screen and select for desired behavioral traits in companion or service dogs,” said study senior author Matteo Pellegrini, an expert in Epigenomics and Computational Biology at UCLA.

— December 16, 2022 —

Vint Cerf Helped Create the Internet on the Back of an Envelope
by The Wall Street Journal

While at UCLA, Dr. Cerf got swept up in what would become a precursor to the internet. The Advanced Research Projects Agency, another post-Sputnik federal effort to drive technological innovation (later renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA), sought a way to reduce costs and speed progress in computer science and artificial intelligence by linking various university computers together.

IEEE Honors Iconic Engineers
by IEEE Spectrum

Meet the recipients of the 2023 IEEE Medals and Recognitions. The awards are presented on behalf of the IEEE Board of Directors.

— December 14, 2022 —

This Semiconductor Breaks the Rules of Physics Under Pressure
by Chemical & Engineering News

For this reason, experimental measurements of myriad materials—such as diamond, ice, and quartz—have all supported the conclusion that thermal conductivity increases with pressure up until the material breaks down or changes phase, says Yongjie Hu, a chemist and mechanical engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles. Computational simulations predicted that BAs might buck the trend, so Hu decided to investigate how the semiconductor performs under pressure.

— December 13, 2022 —

The Ezra Klein Show: Time Is Way Weirder Than You Think
by The New York Times Opinion

“You are the best time machine that has ever been built,” Dean Buonomano writes in his book “Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time.” Buonomano is a professor of neurobiology and psychology at U.C.L.A. who studies the relationship between time and the human brain.

ASCE Launches Its First Multidisciplinary, Open-access Journal
by ASCE Civil Engineering Source

ASCE OPEN’s first editor-in-chief, Ertugrul Taciroglu, Ph.D., F.EMI, of the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, recently spoke with Civil Engineering Source about the new project and what kinds of articles readers and researchers should expect to read in the journal.

Approved L.A. City Ordinance Will Require Newly-Built Properties To Be All-Electric, We Discuss Potential Logistics & Implications
by KPCC AirTalk

Rajit Gadh was interviewed on KPCC AirTalk to discuss the energy implications and logistics of building all-electric properties, per L.A city council’s newest ordinance.

— December 9, 2022 —

Is ChatGPT a Marvel or a Force? We Interviewed the Chatbot to Find Out
by Los Angeles Times

“The fact that this chatbot generates long and coherent responses without inconsistency (within a single response) is an amazing achievement.” Violet Peng, assistant professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, told Los Angeles Times.

— December 7, 2022 —

North Carolina Attack Underscores Vulnerability of Power Grid
by The Hill

“A single cyberattack can shut down hundreds if not thousands of substations at once,” said Rajit Gadh, director of UCLA’s Smart Grid Energy Research Center.

— December 6, 2022 —

Handheld Diagnostic Platform Could Help Combat Epidemics
by Physics World

Researchers led by Dino Di Carlo and Sam Emaminejad from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have now developed a handheld viral diagnostic test based on a swarm of millimetre-sized magnets (termed “ferrobots”).

— December 5, 2022 —

A Handheld Kit Provides Accessible Diagnoses for Future Pandemics
by Springwise

A research team at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has developed a technology that could significantly increase the speed and volume of disease testing, while reducing the costs and usage of scarce supplies.

AI-designed Structured Material Creates Super-resolution Images Using a Low-resolution Display
by TechXplore

In their paper titled “Super-resolution image display using diffractive decoders,” UCLA researchers, led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan, used deep learning to spatially-engineer transmissive diffractive layers at the wavelength scale, and created a material-based physical image decoder that achieves super-resolution image projection as the light is transmitted through its layers.

— November 30, 2022 —

As Crypto Chaos Continues, the Next Generation of Hires is Having Doubts
by Marketplace Radio

John Villasenor has noticed a particular correlation among his University of California, Los Angeles, computer science students. “I’ve found in the last seven or eight years that interest in the crypto space, generally speaking, tends to track the price of bitcoin,” he said.

— November 29, 2022 —

Intelligent Materials: Science Fiction to Science Fact
by Physics

Materials that learn to change their shape in response to an external stimulus are a step closer to reality, thanks to a prototype system produced by engineers at UCLA.

— November 21, 2022 —

AI Material That Adapts to Its Surroundings
by Tech Briefs

“This research introduces and demonstrates an artificial intelligent material that can learn to exhibit the desired behaviors and properties upon increased exposure to ambient conditions,” said Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Jonathan Hopkins, UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. The same foundational principles that are used in machine learning are used to give this material its smart and adaptive properties.

— November 14, 2022 —

UCLA Team Develops Test Kit to Hasten Disease Diagnosis
by The Engineer

UCLA researchers have developed a technology that could significantly increase the speed and volume of disease testing, while reducing the costs and usage of supplies. UCLA Samueli School of Engineering Professor Dino di Carlo (bioengineering) and Associate Professor Sam Emaminejad (electrical and computer engineering) co-authored a study, which has been published in Nature.

— November 9, 2022 —

Visionary Behind Hubble Space Telescope Control System and Passenger Safety Technology Awarded Prince Philip Medal
by Royal Academy of Engineering

Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal, Royal Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, presented the Academy’s most prestigious individual award, the Prince Philip Medal, to space technology pioneer Dr Asad Madni FREng in London on 8 November. The award recognises Dr Madni’s decades’ long career developing and commercialising intelligent sensors and systems across the aerospace, manufacturing and transportation industries.

— November 8, 2022 —

Cars, Tugs—and Elevators? Big Changes Coming for Transportation in the Future
by Wall Street Journal

Dedicated lanes aren’t the best long-term solution, says Dennis Hong, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and founding director of the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles.

— November 7, 2022 —

They Used to Call California Ocean Desalination a Disaster. But Water Crisis Brings New Look
by Los Angeles Times

Yoram Cohen, a desalination expert and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCLA, is running a pilot program of small-scale, remotely run desalination units in the Salinas Valley, where groundwater is often contaminated with salt and other chemicals.

Power Up! How We Avoided Critical Blackouts During the Last Heat Wave and Why it Matters
by LAist

UCLA engineering professor Rajit Gadh said the million electric vehicles in California today alone could be their own massive battery in conjunction with large-scale renewable energy run by utilities.

— October 31, 2022 —

Concrete.ai Releases Beta Version of Tool Reducing Cost and Carbon Intensity of Concrete Construction
by Architect’s Newspaper

The core technology employed by Concrete.ai was developed at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Institute for Carbon Management (ICM) by Gaurav N. Sant and Mathieu Bauchy, both of whom are faculty members in UCLA’s Samueli School of Engineering in the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering

— October 24, 2022 —

Engineers Design Dynamic Materials Using Artificial Intelligence
by MachineDesign

“This research introduces and demonstrates an artificial intelligent material that can learn to exhibit the desired behaviors and properties upon increased exposure to ambient conditions,” said mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Jonathan Hopkins of the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering who led the research.

— October 21, 2022 —

dot.LA
UCLA’s Latest ‘MNN’ Project Proves AI Is More Advanced Than You Thought
by dot.LA

A team of UCLA mechanical engineers has recently created a new material that can adapt to changing circumstances through artificial intelligence.

This appears to be a summary of our newsroom story; Jonathan Hopkins is quoted. There are reprints of this story on Innovation Report, Geeky News and Incentive Mind.

— October 6, 2022 —

Pharmacy Times Logo
Researchers Are Developing Bispecific CAR Proteins to “Wake Up” the Immune Systems of Cancer Patients
by Pharmacy Times

In an interview with Pharmacy Times at the Sixth International Cancer immunotherapy Conference (CICON) 2022, Yvonne Chen, PhD and Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, also breaks down the latest research from her laboratory, where she is engineering CAR proteins that can “wake up” the immune system.

— September 30, 2022 —

Can We Trick the Ocean into Swallowing More CO2?
by Deutsche Welle

Marine environments are effective at capturing carbon and storing it for thousands of years. But what if we could engineer them to capture even more? Can they take on this burden?

— September 27, 2022 —

UCLA’s ‘Ultra Secure’ AI Camera Only Records What It’s Programmed for
by KCBS Radio

Aydogan Ozcan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering as well as bioengineering, was interviewed live on this Bay Area radio station about his privacy protecting camera.

— September 26, 2022 —

Carbon Sucks!
by The Week on Earth podcast

Or, how to suck carbon. In this episode, Donnie and Chris try really hard to understand CO2, our most prolific greenhouse gas. Featuring UCLA scientist and X-Prize winner Dr. Gaurav Sant from the Institute of Carbon Management, and Mike McGee, the creator of CO2.earth. Plus the latest climate news.

— September 21, 2022 —

Sarcos is Developing a ‘Human-Like’ Robotic Hand to Help the US Navy in Safely Defusing Mines
by Tech Times

Dr. Veronica Santos at UCLA and professor Jonathan Posner at the University of Washington are researching some basic science, while Sarcos is applying it to real-world robotics.

— September 20, 2022 —

This Pittsburgh Company Is Building A Robotic Hand For The US Navy To Safely Defuse Mines
by Forbes

Dr. Veronica Santos at UCLA and University of Washington professor Jonathan Posner are developing some of the basic science, and Sarcos is implementing it in real-world robotics.

Five Ways Deep Learning Has Transformed Image Analysis
by Nature

An electrical and computer engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles, [Aydogan] Ozcan trained a custom deep-learning model to stain a tissue section computationally by presenting it with tens of thousands of examples of both unstained and stained versions of the same section, and letting the model work out how they differed.

— September 19, 2022 —

Star Track: A laser-powered mini-rocket could find humans a new home
by UCLA Newsroom

UCLA materials engineer Aaswath Raman is part of a global team that’s designing the first interstellar sailing ship — a tiny but mighty probe designed to photograph faraway stars up close.

— September 14, 2022 —

As the Colorado River Shrinks, Water Managers See Promise in Recycling Sewage
by Wyoming Public Radio

David Jassby is an associate professor of civil environmental engineering at UCLA. He explained that treated wastewater already flows through streams and rivers across the country, and pointed to major utilities’ track record of very few water-borne disease outbreaks as a treatment to the capacity of treatment technology.

NPR for Colorado logo
As the Colorado River Shrinks, water managers See Promise in Recycling Sewage
by NPR Colorado

— September 13, 2022 —

Experts Discuss Innovation-entrepreneurship Role in Developing Desalination
by Saudi Gazette

On the other side, Prof. Yoram Cohen, Distinguished Professor at the University of California, mentioned that past experiences are the key factor in making future plans and creating new solutions for desalination.

— September 9, 2022 —

dot.LA
Businesses in Los Angeles Are Working to Lessen Burden on Strained Power Grid
by dot.LA

“I was actually delighted to see that people are willing to have a little bit of inconvenience. Rolling blackouts are bad for everyone, and everybody pitched in,” said Rajit Gadh, professor of mechanical engineering and director of UCLA’s Smart Grid Energy Research Center. But Gadh noted that long term, a more sustainable solution is needed, including making the city smarter and pipelines for electric vehicles to give back to the grid.

— September 8, 2022 —

UCLA Expert on the Relationship Between Electric Vehicles and California’s Energy Grid
by Spectrum News1

Some energy scholars say California would have more than enough capacity if it harnessed its resources better. But outdated energy market rules make it tough for power providers to tap into all the potential resources.
“For more than a decade, Rajit Gadh, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has studied how electric vehicles affect the supply and demand of the electric grid.

— September 7, 2022 —

California Scrambles to Avoid blackouts as it Pursues a Green Energy Future
by Washington Post

Some energy scholars say California would have more than enough capacity if it harnessed its resources better. But outdated energy market rules make it tough for power providers to tap into all the potential resources.
“There is more power out there than we need to stabilize the grid on these few days a year it is under stress,” said Rajit Gadh, director of the Smart Grid Energy Research Center at UCLA. “We just need to get the control systems and the infrastructure in place, and give people incentives.”

— September 2, 2022 —

From the Lab to the Battery Start-up
by Chemical & Engineering News

Entrepreneurial researchers tell their stories about how they developed a lab discovery and turned it into a commercial battery

“The story of UCLA-based start-up Nanotech Energy unfolded somewhat differently than those of Xerion and SES. The company did not evolve from a single puff of magic, per se, but the idea underpinning its main technology sort of did.

— August 28, 2022 —

Chemical-free Re-staining of Tissue Using Deep Learning
by Phys.org

This research was led by Dr. Aydogan Ozcan, Chancellor’s Professor and Volgenau Chair for Engineering Innovation at UCLA Electrical & Computer Engineering and Bioengineering.

— August 23, 2022 —

AI-created Lenses Let Camera Ignore Some Objects When Taking Pictures
by New Scientist

Aydogan Ozcan at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues trained a deep-learning AI model to recognise images of numbers from a huge online repository of handwritten digits

NASA Engineer’s Quantum Dot Instrument Enables Spacecraft-as-Sensor Concept
by Space Ref

The sail concept is being developed by co-investigator Artur Davoyan, a professor at UCLA.

A Self-Powered HMI That’s Also Waterproof
by IEEE Spectrum

The researchers, lead by Jun Chen of UCLA’s Wearable Bioelectronics Research Group, used what is known as the magnetoelastic effect (also known as inverse magnetorestriction), discovered in the 1860s, describing the variation in magnetization of a material under mechanical stress. In fact, the current study expands upon the group’s earlier work demonstrating the magnetoelastic effect in a soft polymer system.

— August 22, 2022 —

Innovation Could Change Lives of People Taking Mental Health Meds
by MSN

Principal investigator Dr. Sam Emaminejad, of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said: “Through a single touch, our new device can obtain clinically useful molecular-level information about what is circulating in the body.

— August 21, 2022 —

Sensor Could Help Patients Stay on Top of Their Meds
by American Chemical Society

“Through a single touch, our new device can obtain clinically useful molecular-level information about what is circulating in the body,” says Sam Emaminejad, Ph.D., the project’s principal investigator, who is at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “We already interact with a lot of touch-based electronics, such as smart phones and keyboards, so this sensor could integrate seamlessly into daily life.”

— August 17, 2022 —

Bats, Bugs and Bionic Super 3D Cameras
by WIRED Middle East

“While the idea itself has been tried, seeing across a range of distances and around occlusions has been a major hurdle,” said study leader Liang Gao, an associate professor of bioengineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “To address that, we developed a novel computational imaging framework, which for the first time enables the acquisition of a wide and deep panoramic view with simple optics and a small array of sensors.”

— August 16, 2022 —

City of the Future: Can London Adapt to Survive the Soaring Temperatures?
by Evening Standard

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, Professor Aaswath Raman has engineered a type of film, made from glass and hafnium dioxide, which cools down when the sun is shining on it. His and his colleague’s company SkyCool recently used panels coated in the film to pump water into a supermarket’s air conditioners, minimising the amount of electricity they used by around 20 per cent.

Super Phase Recovery and Hologram Reconstruction Using a Deep Neural Network
by Tech Xplore

This research was led by Dr. Aydogan Ozcan, Chancellor’s Professor and Volgenau Chair for Engineering Innovation at UCLA and HHMI Professor with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The other authors of this work include Hanlong Chen, Luzhe Huang, and Tairan Liu, all from the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at UCLA. Prof. Ozcan also has UCLA faculty appointments in the bioengineering and surgery departments and is an associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute

— August 15, 2022 —

This High-Tech Camera May Help Protect Our Identities -– Here is How it Works
by Inverse

To protect our data in the nick of time, UCLA bioengineer Aydogan Ozcan and his team envisioned a smart camera that can focus on what matters, as they report in a new study. For example, the camera could spot someone walking through a security line and at the same time obscure uninvolved onlookers’ faces.

— August 5, 2022 —

Los Angeles Times logo
Saltwater Toilets, Desperate Wildlife: Water-starved Catalina Island Battles Against Drought
by Los Angeles Times

Yoram Cohen, a desalination expert and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCLA who is not affiliated with the Avalon plant, said size can be a factor when it comes to the impact of the brine.

— August 2, 2022 —

UCLA’s High-Tech NanoLab Is Open to All
by Semiconductor Digest

UCLA’s Nanofabrication Laboratory, known as the UCLA NanoLab for short, combines resources from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI).

— August 1, 2022 —

dot.LA

A New Design Out of UCLA Aims to Revolutionize Batteries
by dot.LA

The battery design was first conceived at UCLA by a team of researchers including Bruce Dunn and Sarah Tolbert.

Los Angeles Times logo

Little Robots Show a Big Leap in Design; At UCLA, Engineers Create a One-step 3-D Process for Units That Move, Sense Environs.
by LA Times

“Traditional robots you see today rely on multiple different components,” said Rayne Zheng, a mechanical engineer and leader of the project. The robot’s body, its moving parts and its electronics have to be built separately and then assembled together. “With 3-D-printed materials that can be robotized, we don’t need any of that.”

— July 29, 2022 —

UCLA-led Study Develops Method for Predictive design of Pt Catalysts for Fuel Cells
By Green Car Congress

Co-corresponding author Yu Huang, a professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, said that the method could be applied to potential catalysts mixing platinum with a subset of metals beyond nickel and cobalt.

— July 28, 2022 —

The World Needs to Start Planning for the Fire Age
By The Atlantic

““There is momentum,” Ali Mosleh, the director of the B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences at UCLA, told me. “But wildfire is far behind other natural disasters, unfortunately, in terms of fundamental understanding and best practices.” Mosleh proposes that standards could be broken out by type of community—having, say, 10 different models depending on the characteristics of a city. Community A might need four hours, while Community B might need six. They might need different numbers of evacuation routes, and different sorts of community-warning systems. Existing tools and simulations, like the one run on Camp Fire data, can help guide policy makers.”

— July 27, 2022 —

No quick fix: How OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 Illustrated the Challenges of Bias in AI
By NBC News

“This is not just a technical problem. This is a problem that involves the social sciences,” said Kai-Wei Chang, an associate professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering who studies artificial intelligence. There will be a future in which systems better guard against certain biased notions, but as long as society has biases, AI will reflect that, Chang said.

No quick fix: How OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 Illustrated the Challenges of Bias in AI
By Yahoo! News

— July 26, 2022 —

Department Of Defense Names Nine University Faculty To Receive Vannevar Bush Fellowships
By Forbes

Kunihiko Taira, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles

— July 22, 2022 —

Introducing ARTEMIS: The Next-generation Humanoid Robot Platform to Serve us for the Next 10 years
By IEEE Spectrum

Possible Step Toward Cheaper Hydrogen-based Energy: Predicting Performance of Catalysts in Fuel Cells
By Tech Xplore

“For the sustainability of our planet, we can’t keep living the way we do, and reinventing energy is one major way to change our path,” said corresponding author Yu Huang, a professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. “We have fuel cell cars, but we need to make them cheaper. In this study, we came up with an approach to allow researchers to identify the right catalysts much faster.”

— July 19, 2022 —

Giving Back the Sense of Touch to Amputees
by Think

“In a robotics laboratory at UCLA is a robotics scientist who became a great pal in all of this stuff named Veronica Santos [professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and bioengineering]. This was part of a series of experiments that Case Western and UCLA were running to see whether they could make a business meeting gain a component of physical touch. The idea was: Can we get people to do a virtual handshake?”

— July 18, 2022 —

Artificial Muscles are Stronger and More Flexible than Real Muscle
by Medgadget

“Creating an artificial muscle to enable work and detect force and touch has been one of the grand challenges of science and engineering,” said Qibing Pei, a researcher involved in the study.

— July 15, 2022 —

New Material Could Lead to Big Leap in Artificial Muscles
by Materials Today

“Creating an artificial muscle to enable work and detect force and touch has been one of the grand challenges of science and engineering,” said Qibing Pei, a professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and corresponding author of a paper on this work in Science.

— July 14, 2022 —

Scientists Create New Artificial Muscle That’s Stronger Than Human Muscle
by WebMD

“We’re really excited about this new material,” says Qibing Pei, PhD, an author of the study and a UCLA professor of materials science and engineering. “At its maximum performance, this artificial muscle is way more powerful than a human muscle.”

Paul Revere Williams’ UCLA Building Gets a Refresh and Retrofit from CO Architects
by The Architects Newspaper

UCLA’s Engineering Department conducted earthquake simulations on a model of the hall and designed custom viscous dampers with project engineers KPFF and fabricator Taylor Devices.

— July 14, 2022 —

The Economist Logo

The Changing Story of Human Revolution
by The Economist

“I recently had the chance to speak about this with Sriram Sankararam, who is a computational biologist at UCLA. He’s working on understanding human evolution using both genetic data and really complicated statistical models to try and untangle these subtle signals in the human genome.”

— July 13, 2022 —

IEEE Top 2022 Medal of Honor Awardee, Dr. Madni Shares Deep Lessons
by Forbes

The IEEE Medal of Honor, established in 1917, is the highest IEEE award. Dr. Asad M. Madni is the 2022 recipient for Dr. Madni’s decades of global outstanding contributions and innovations.

Los Angeles Times logo
First Image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Thousands of Galaxies in Stunning Detail
by LA Times

For Jonathan Arenberg, Webb’s lead engineer at Northrop Grumman from 2012 to 2017, the experience of seeing the first image was one of “overwhelming emotion,” he said.
Reprinted in Yahoo News, MSN, and Atlanta Business Journal among others.

— July 12, 2022 —

KNX NEWS logo
UCLA Scientists Have Created a New Kind of Artificial Muscle for Machines That’s Even Stronger and More Flexible Than the Real Thing
by KNX-AM (Los Angeles) – Radio

“UCLA scientists have created a new kind of artificial muscle for machines that’s even stronger and more flexible than the real thing. Researchers used dielectric elastomers, lightweight acrylic-based materials with high elasticity. They’re flexible but tough enough to keep their shape.”

An Artificial Muscle for Machines, Even Stronger and More Flexible than the Real Thing, UCLA Scientists Using a Lightweight Acrylic Based Materials with High Elasticity, Tough Enough to Keep its Shape
by KBOI (Boise, ID) – News at 10

“UCLA scientists, using lightweight, acrylic-based materials with high elasticity tough enough to keep its shape. The technology could be used to create robots with better mobility and more endurance than us.”

KOVR logo
UCLA Scientists Have Created a New Kind of Artificial Muscle for Machines That’s Even Stronger and More Flexible Than the Real Thing
by KOVR-TV (Sacramento, CA) – CBS 13 News at 5:30pm

“UCLA scientists have created a new kind of artificial muscle for machines. It’s even stronger and more flexible than the real thing. Researchers used lightweight and flexible, acrylic-based materials that are tough enough to keep their shape.”

UCLA Scientists Have Created a New Kind of Artificial Muscle
by Action News at 6am

“UCLA scientists have created a new kind of artificial muscle for machines that even stronger and more flexible than the real thing. Researchers used lightweight, acrylic-based materials with high elasticity. They are flexible but tough enough to keep their shape.”

New material for Artificial Muscles Called Stronger, More Flexible Than What’s in Body
by United Press International

Qibing Pei, a professor of materials science and engineering at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and the study’s corresponding author, told UPI in a phone interview that he envisions numerous potential medical applications for the new material, as well as its use in small robotics.

Also carried in Space Daily

— July 08, 2022 —

It Works Like a Dish Sponge’: a New Way to Capture Carbon from the Oceans
by Eco-Business

Gaurav Sant, a professor at the University of California, has another idea for capturing carbon — sucking it out of the ocean.

— July 06, 2022 —

Deep Learning Accelerates the Detection of Live Bacteria Using Thin-film Transistor Arrays
by News8 Plus

In an article not too long ago revealed in ACS Photonics, a journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS), a group of scientists, led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan from the Electrical and Pc Engineering Division on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and colleagues have developed an AI-powered sensible bacterial colony detection system utilizing a thin-film transistor (TFT) array, which is a extensively used know-how in cell phones and different shows.

RE2 Achieves Technical Milestone with Robotic Gripper for US Navy
by Naval Technology

University of California (UCLA) Biomechatronics Laboratory director Dr Veronica Santos, who is supporting the development of STARFISH, said: “When visual feedback is limited, complementary senses such as touch play a critical role in completing dexterous tasks.

Flawed Oxygen Readings May be Behind Covid-19’s Toll on People of Color
by POLITICO

Experts say the flawed readings are the result of how light is absorbed on different skin shades. Pulse oximeters work by shooting light onto a person’s skin and observing how much bounces back, said Achuta Kadambi, an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

— June 29, 2022 —

Climate-friendly Cement? California Takes on a High-carbon Industry
by CalMatters

Meeting those climate targets will require heavy investments, according to Gaurav Sant, director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management. The industry will need to switch to more environmentally-friendly fuels, increase energy-efficiency, invest in new carbon capture technologies and produce low-carbon cement blends, he said.

— June 27, 2022 —

Modern Diplomacy logo

Artificial Intelligence and Moral Issues: AI Between War and Self-consciousness
by Modern Diplomacy

Los Angeles, May 2018: at the University of California, Professor Veronica Santos was working on the development of a project to create increasingly human-like robots capable of sensing physical contact and reacting to it. She was also testing different ways of robot tactile sensitivity.

Emergent Properties as By-products of Prebiotic Evolution of Aminoacylation Ribozymes
by Nature Communications

Systems of catalytic RNAs presumably gave rise to important evolutionary innovations, such as the genetic code. Such systems may exhibit particular tolerance to errors (error minimization) as well as coding specificity.

Scientists Have Created a Method To Prevent Deadly Infections Without Antibiotics
by SciTech Daily

“The modified surfaces exhibited robust resistance against microorganisms and proteins, which is precisely what we sought to achieve,” said Richard Kaner, UCLA’s Dr. Myung Ki Hong Professor of Materials Innovation and senior author of the research.

— June 24, 2022 —

OUT OF GAS: A Shortage of Tritium Fuel May Leave Fusion Energy with an Empty Tank
by Science Daily

In a recent simulation, nuclear engineer Mohamed Abdou of the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues found that in a best-case scenario, a power-producing reactor could only produce slightly more tritium than it needs to fuel itself. Tritium leakages or prolonged maintenance shutdowns will eat away at that narrow margin.

— June 22, 2022 —

Advance Shows Promise For ‘Meta-Bots’ Designed To Deliver Drugs Or Aid Rescue Missions
by Science Daily

“We envision that this design and printing methodology of smart robotic materials will help realize a class of autonomous materials that could replace the current complex assembly process for making a robot,” said the study’s principal investigator Xiaoyu (Rayne) Zheng, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “With complex motions, multiple modes of sensing and programmable decision-making abilities all tightly integrated, it’s similar to a biological system with the nerves, bones and tendons working in tandem to execute controlled motions.”

— June 17, 2022 —

New 3D Printing Tech Spits Out Whole Robots All at Once
by Daily Beast

— June 17, 2022 —

Researchers at UCLA Are Able to Use 3D Printing to Create Tiny Robots
by KATU-TV

Portland, OR news station KATU-TV highlighted the research of Xiaoyu (Rayne) Zheng, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and of mechanical and aerospace engineering, that demonstrates how tiny robots the size of a fingernail can be entirely 3D-printed.

— June 8, 2022 —

Driving Toward Justice: Transportation and Equity, with Regan Patterson
by Resources Magazine

In this week’s episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Regan Patterson, an incoming assistant professor at UCLA who recently completed a fellowship as a Transportation Equity Research Fellow at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

Tesla Monitored its Employees on Facebook with Help of PR Firm During 2017 Union Push.
by CNBC

There are justifiable reasons why companies keep an eye on what their employees post publicly online, according to John Villasenor, a professor at UCLA and fellow at Brookings Institute whose research focuses on the impact of technology on society, law and public policy.

— June 1, 2022 —

The Audacious Science Pushing the Boundaries of Human Touch

by National Geographic

It’s the first sensation we feel, our most primal connection to others. Can implants and electrical signaling replicate the experience of touch? Research teams are exploring the possibilities—with startling results. (subscription required)

India Times News

Smartphone-Sized Spaceships Could Hold Key To Space Exploration, Study Finds
by India Times

The new study published in Nano Letters claims that a ground-based laser array (1-10 metres wide) with powers of 100 kilowatts to 10 megawatts could outpace rocket engines. “Such lasers can be built already today with a relatively small investment… We do not need to wait till a 100-gigawatt laser becomes available,” study’s senior author Artur Davoyan from University of California, Los Angeles, told Space.com.

cleantechnica

UCI Researchers: Autonomous Vehicles Can Be Tricked Into Dangerous Driving Behavior
By Clean Technica

Joining Chen and Wan on this project, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, were Junjie Shen, UCI Ph.D. student in computer science; Jalen Chuang, UCI undergraduate student in computer science; Xin Xia, UCLA postdoctoral scholar in civil and environmental engineering; Joshua Garcia, UCI assistant professor of informatics; and Jiaqi Ma, UCLA associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Also carried in Green Car Congress

— May 28, 2022 —

Carbon-Removal Tech Grabs Elon Musk’s Check
by IEEE Spectrum

That immense scale, as well as what happens to the CO2, will decide whether an approach can make a dent in the world’s nearly 36 billion tonnes of annual carbon emissions, says Gaurav Sant, director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, who has two entries in the competition (SeaChange and BeyonDAC), neither of which was among the 15 milestone awardees. Any meaningful approach needs to convert the gas into something stable and not just bury it in the ground from where it could leak.

— May 26, 2022 —

Teaching robots to touch
by Marcus Woo

Fork in hand, a robot arm skewers a strawberry from above and delivers it to Tyler Schrenk’s mouth. Sitting in his wheelchair, Schrenk nudges his neck forward to take a bite. Next, the arm goes for a slice of banana, then a carrot. Each motion it performs by itself, on Schrenk’s spoken command.

All-optical computation of a group of transformations using a polarization-encoded diffractive network
by UCLA Engineering Institute for Technology Advancement

Implementing large-scale linear transformations or matrix computations plays a pivotal role in modern information processing systems. Digital computer systems need to complete up to billions of matrix operations per second to perform complex computational tasks, such as training and inference for deep neural networks. As a result, the throughput of linear transform computations can directly influence the performance and capacity of the underlying computing systems. These linear transformations are computed using digital processors in computers, which can face bottlenecks as the size of the data to be processed gets larger and larger. This is where all-optical computing methods can potentially provide a remedy through their parallelism and speed.

— May 19, 2022 —

UCLA: Scientists Devise Method to Prevent Deadly Hospital Infections
by City News Service

A new surface treatment developed by a UCLA-led team of scientists could help improve the safety of medical devices like catheters, stents, heart valves and pacemakers — whose surfaces often become covered with harmful bacterial films that can cause deadly hospital “superbug” infections, according to findings published Thursday.

— May 12, 2022 —

Focused ultrasound: a potential treatment for type 2 diabetes?
by Cynthia E Keen

Ultrasound neuromodulation can prevent the onset of hyperglycaemia or reverse type 2 diabetes in laboratory mice, rats and pigs, according to new research published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

— May 11, 2022 —

rfi logo

The 1997 chess game that thrust AI into spotlight
by Paris (AFP)

With his hand pushed firmly into his cheek and his eyes fixed on the table, Garry Kasparov shot a final dark glance at the chessboard before storming out of the room: the king of chess had just been beaten by a computer.

— May 2, 2022 —

Can Nano Robots Help Treat Hard-to-Reach Cancers?
by Howard Fine

Los Angeles County has produced a series of revolutionary delivery devices for drugs – from the first asthma inhaler in the 1960s to the insulin pump and nicotine patch in the 1980s to inhaled insulin in the last decade.

— April 29, 2022 —

Researchers look at how biofilters can protect waterways
by Chace Beech UCLA

Onja Davidson Raoelison, a doctoral candidate in environmental engineering at UCLA, has been working to keep waterways safe.

Her research and studies focus on green infrastructure and how wildfires impact water systems.

“I think we all hear about air quality all the time,” she said. “Even at UCLA, we receive a lot [of news] about the air quality being bad when you’re not supposed to go outside. I never knew that the impact of wildfires on water quality would be an issue and how it impacts aquatic ecosystems and human health.”

— April 27, 2022 —

Big Macs! Barbies! Rocket Ships! Porn Stars! 60 Ways L.A. Changed the World
by Los Angeles magazine

For everything, there is a season—a time for Grammys, a time for Emmys, and especially a time for Oscars. But precisely when awards season begins and ends is hard to say, since every year, the cycle seems to start sooner and finish later. Suffice to say, it’s somewhere between New Year’s and Christmas. And even though the rest of the world may be over awards shows—with ratings sinking to record lows—they remain vital to the L.A. economy, pumping millions of dollars into the city.

— April 20, 2022 —

Fight climate change through how and what you eat
by Jada Montemarano

“Studies show that if the population ate one less meat meal a week, we could reduce the carbon footprint by one-third. Local chef Jason Francisco and UCLA engineering professor Jennifer Jay explain how we can fight climate change by altering how we shop for food and what we eat.

TO WATCH

— April 6, 2022 —

Amped Up: How smart technology is changing the face of the country’s infrastructure system
by Amy Meadows

Whether you’re turning on a lamp in your house or plugging your electric vehicle into a designated charging outlet, you are interacting with one of the most significant developments of the 19th century: the power grid.

— March 23, 2022 —

KABC 7
Concerns over Russian cyberattacks against U.S.
by KABC-TV

“After the defenses, you still have to have resilience. Let’s say we have two power plants and one goes down — can the other one take the load of this one, and what does it need to do?” said UCLA’s Rajit Gadh (approx. 0:30 mark).

TO WATCH

— March 15, 2022 —

Simulations shed light on interactions that help spiders fly
by Michael Allen

Simulations using a computer graphics algorithm have given fresh insight into the interactions between the silk threads of a spider and the atmosphere. This novel numerical model, focusing on multiple silk threads, helps explain how spiders can exploit the positive electric potential of Earth’s atmosphere to fly and disperse.

— March 11, 2022 —

EE Times
Conversation with IEEE Medal of Honor Recipient Asad Madn
by Brian Santo

The greatest recognition for engineers is the IEEE Medal of Honor. This year, it was bestowed upon Asad Madni, who developed a MEMS device for positional stability that became a critical component in motor vehicles, aircraft, and even the Hubble Telescope. Madni is our guest this week; we talk about sensor technology, and the marvelous things that might be possible combining sensors with artificial intelligence.

TO LISTEN

— March 6, 2022 —

Tiny laser-propelled spaceships could travel to the far reaches of the solar system and beyond
by Charles Q. Choi

Miniature spaceships the size of cellphones could fly across the solar system using sails propelled by lasers, which would allow the tiny spacecraft to reach much faster speeds — and, potentially, much more distant destinations — than conventionally powered rockets, a new study finds.

— February 25, 2022 —

KABC 7
UCLA research project proposes removal of carbon dioxide from the ocean to help fight climate change
by Phillip Palmer

No matter how effective we become in reducing carbon emissions, there remains the need to remove carbon from the atmosphere in order to reverse the effects of climate change.

“When you think about the scale of what we’re talking about, it’s essentially the largest industry that’s never been created,” Gaurav Sant, Director of the UCLA Institute for Carbon Management said.

TO WATCH

— February 24, 2022 —

Highly stretchable van der Waals thin films for adaptable and breathable electronic membranes
by MSL

Rigid materials become more flexible when cast as thin sheets, but they will still bump and buckle when subjected to in-plane rotation or twisting motions and thus cannot conformally cover a curved and mobile surface. Yan et al. formed roughly 10-nanometer-thick freestanding sheets by spin coating films containing flakes of semiconducting materials. The flakes attract each other through bond-free van der Waals interfaces to enable mechanical stretchability and malleability as well as permeability and breathability. These properties make them suitable for bioelectronic membranes that can monitor and amplify a range of electrophysiological signals, including demonstrations of electrocardiography and electroencephalography.

KRIS 6 News Corpus Christi
UCLA fellowship preparing flight surgeons for Mars and beyond
by Amanda Brandeis

More than a half-century since man stepped on the moon, a new era of space exploration is here. The advancements are paving the way for a new frontier in medicine.

“We’ve never been in a situation where we’ve sent someone to a different planet. We’ve never been in a situation where the human body is going to undergo years of significant changes,” said Haig Aintablian, MD, a fourth-year emergency medicine resident at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

The U.S. Sun
SAIL ORDER ‘Interstellar sails’ that propel spacecraft to speed of light using LASERS could take us to distant planets, experts say
by Charlotte Edwards

SPACECRAFT with sails could be propelled by lasers to the closest habitable planet to Earth.

That’s according to new calculations from researchers who think small spacecraft could be our best chance of exploring another habitable planet without it taking thousands of years to reach.

— February 23, 2022 —

Tiny probes could sail to outer planets with the help of low-power lasers
Source: American Chemical Society

Space travel can be agonizingly slow: For example, the New Horizons probe took almost 10 years to reach Pluto. Traveling to Proxima Centauri b, the closest habitable planet to Earth, would require thousands of years with even the biggest rockets. Now, researchers calculate in ACS’ Nano Letters that low-power lasers on Earth could launch and maneuver small probes equipped with silicon or boron nitride sails, propelling them to much faster speeds than rocket engines.

Tech uses sweat to show stress levels
by LJ Rich

A device which measures how stressed the wearer is by monitoring the cortisol levels in their sweat is developed by the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

TO VIEW (starts at 00:48)

— February 18, 2022 —

‘Climatarians’ support the planet through food choices
by Chace Beech

When Cindy Villaseñor shops for groceries, she thinks about future meals, what she wants to cook for dinner, lunch and breakfast in the coming days, but she also thinks further ahead–to the future of the planet.

— February 14, 2022 —

How to Weaponize Our Dying Oceans Against Climate Change
by Thor Benson

The ocean covers more than 70 percent of the planet. And unfortunately it’s acidifying fast thanks to noxious carbon dioxide emissions spewed from industrial smoke stacks, tail pipes from gasoline-guzzling vehicles, and other modern technologies—and then absorbed by seawater. Roughly 22 million tons of carbon dioxide find their way into the ocean every day. The resulting acidification threatens countless marine species that are part of an ecosystem that humans rely on.

Hyperion Sewage Spill Caused By Systems Failure, Human Error, Official Report Says
by Lisa Jacobs

“It would have been better for (Hyperion) if that had happened,” said Michael K. Stenstrom, the main author of the report, “because that would be more defensible.”… Stenstrom — a UCLA civil and environmental engineering professor who has worked primarily on wastewater treatment plants since 1977 — said he also initially assumed the cause of the spill was outside debris.

— February 7, 2022 —

UCLA Carbon Removal Technology on Podcast
by Adam McKay

Writer-Director Adam McKay (“Don’t Look Up”) mentions UCLA carbon removal technology on podcast (13:57)

TO LISTEN

— January 25, 2022 —

U.S. News Ranks Its Best Online College Programs For 2022
by Michael T. Nietzel

U.S. News published its 2022 rankings of online college programs today. This year’s rankings include more than 1,700 online bachelor’s and master’s degree programs, an increase from the approximately 1600 rated last year.

— January 20, 2022 —

Novel microscopic picoshell particles developed
by UCLA

Production of high-energy fats by microalgae may provide a sustainable, renewable energy source that can help tackle climate change. However, microalgae engineered to produce lipids rapidly usually grow slowly themselves, making it difficult to increase overall yields.

— January 18, 2022 —

Computer Scientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty
by Wired

Computer scientist Amit Sahai, PhD, is asked to explain the concept of zero-knowledge proofs to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert. Using a variety of techniques, Amit breaks down what zero-knowledge proofs are and why it’s so exciting in the world of cryptography.

— November 30, 2021 —

Common Household Materials Can Cool Outdoor Temperatures
By Photonics.com

Using “Scotch tape” and aluminum foil, engineers at UCLA built a passive radiative cooler that lowers outdoor temperatures without electricity or refrigerants. The team’s cooler design exhibits solar reflectance, long wavelength infrared (LWIR) emittance, and optical selectivity that is comparable to leading radiative coolers, the engineers said.

— November 23, 2021 —

Helmets on before surf’s up: Concussions an increasing concern in a growing sport
By Mark Mester

Derek Dunfee, a former professional big wave surfer and photographer, said he used to ride 50-foot waves. However, the San Diego surfer’s career ended after more than 20 concussions and with him being almost blind in one eye. “There’s a lot of stuff I did that I prepared for these wipeouts, but when you get hit by a 50-foot wave, especially in terms of head trauma and concussions, there’s not much you can do to prepare for that,” Dunfee said.

— November 21, 2021 —

From oximeters to AI, where bias in medical devices may lurk
By Nicola Davis

Dr Achuta Kadambi, an electrical engineer and computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles said Black or Asian people are assumed to have lower lung capacity than white people – a belief he noted may be based on inaccuracies in earlier studies. As a result, “correction” factors are applied to the interpretation of spirometer data – a situation that can affect the order in which patients are treated.

— November 18, 2021 —

New imaging technology may reduce need for skin biopsies
By Science Daily

A new ‘virtual histology’ technology shows promise by analyzing images of suspicious-looking lesions and quickly producing a detailed, microscopic image of the skin, bypassing several standard steps typically used for diagnosis — including skin biopsy, tissue fixation, processing, sectioning and histochemical staining.

— November 17, 2021 —

DIY radiative cooler developed to serve as a research standard
By SPIE

The term “greenhouse effect” became part of public lexicon decades ago, thanks to the ongoing discourse on climate change. A natural phenomenon, the greenhouse effect describes how heat from the sun, in the form of radiation, is trapped by gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. But a large amount of radiation is still lost to outer space, because these wavelengths are poorly absorbed by atmospheric gases. These wavelengths constitute long wavelength infrared (LWIR) radiation.

— October 29, 2021 —

UCLA, Amazon Team Up For Science Research Center
By CBSLA Staff

The University of California, Los Angeles has partnered up with Amazon to institute what they will call the “Science Hub for Humanity and Artificial Intelligence.”

— October 13, 2021 —

How Cytovale Is Set To Transform The Fight Against Sepsis
By David Prosser

Sepsis is the leading cause of death worldwide according to the World Health Organization, killing 11 million people each year, many of them children, and disabling many more. But while speedy diagnosis and treatment is crucial in combating sepsis, the medical profession has no reliable and speedy test for the condition.

Magnetoelastic material sustainably powers health monitors using body movement
By Dan O’Brien

The future of bioelectronics – including wearables, implantable devices and smart technologies – hinges on the ability to sustainably power devices. A number of approaches for converting biomechanical energy into electricity have been introduced, including piezoelectrics and triboelectrics, which function by deriving charge from compressing or contacting materials. Unfortunately, these techniques’ suboptimal electronic properties and vulnerability to ambient humidity limit their effectiveness.

— October 8, 2021 —

The Hot And Cold Past Of The Air Conditioner
By NPR Podcast

In the Northeast, the leaves have started changing colors, heralding the season of pumpkins, sweaters, and the smell of woodsmoke. But in some parts of the country, the heat hasn’t let up. In cities like Dallas, Phoenix, and Miami, temperatures were up in the high 80s and low 90s this week—and with climate change, the U.S. is only getting hotter.
(Timestamp: 15:31:04 – 15:434:49)

Coast Guard: Pipeline damage that caused California oil spill likely happened months ago
By Associated Press

A Southern California underwater oil pipeline was likely struck by an anchor several months to a year before a leak spilled tens of thousands of gallons of crude, the U.S. Coast Guard announced Friday. A large vessel of some kind may have struck the massive pipeline, shattering the concrete casing but not necessarily causing the slender crack from which oil spewed last weekend, said Capt. Jason Neubauer, chief of the Coast Guard’s office of investigation and analysis.

Associated Press logo
California pipeline likely damaged up to a year before spill
By Michael R. Blood, Matthew Brown and Amy Taxin

An underwater oil pipeline off the Southern California coast was likely damaged by a ship’s anchor several months to a year before it ruptured and sent oil spewing into the ocean and then onto some of the area’s best-known beaches, investigators said Friday.

— October 7, 2021 —

Small crack in pipeline may have delayed oil spill detection
By Matthew Brown, Brian Melley and Stefanie Dazio

Video of the ruptured pipeline that spilled tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil off Southern California shows a thin crack along the top of the pipe that could indicate a slow leak that initially was difficult to detect, experts said Thursday.

El vertido de crudo revitaliza la lucha contra combustibles fósiles en EE.UU.
By Agencia EFE

Los más de 570.000 litros de petróleo vertidos en la costa sur de California han dado nuevos argumentos a la lucha en EE.UU. de numerosas organizaciones, activistas y políticos contra la perforación en alta mar y la dependencia energética de los combustibles fósiles.

— September 30, 2021 —

Bioengineers develop new class of human-powered bioelectronics
By Science Daily

A team of bioengineers has invented a novel soft and flexible self-powered bioelectronic device. The technology converts human body motions — from bending an elbow to subtle movements such as a pulse on one’s wrist — into electricity that could be used to power wearable and implantable diagnostic sensors.

— September 24, 2021 —

Discover
Statisticians Reveal the Number of Serial Killers That Were Never Caught During The 20th Century
By The Physics arXiv Blog

The most prolific modern serial killer, according to Wikipedia, is probably Harold Shipman, a British doctor who probably killed as many as 250 people.

Shipman’s crimes went unnoticed because his victims were mostly elderly and whose deaths were unlikely to raise suspicions. However, researchers have since pointed out that Shipman’s murderous tendencies stick out like a sore thumb if they are viewed through the lens of statistics. Too many of his patients died unexpectedly and this statistical signature could have raised the alarm earlier.

— September 24, 2021 —

Light computes any linear transformation without a digital processor
By katewinslet

Various forms of linear transforms, such as the Fourier transform, are widely used for information processing in different applications. These transformations are typically implemented in the digital domain using an electronic processor, and the computational speed is limited by the capacity of the electronic chip used, which becomes a bottleneck for large data and image sizes. The solution to this problem is to replace the digital processor with a compatible optical processor and use light to process the information.

— September 20, 2021 —

SoCal company faces e-waste problem head-on
By Chace Beech

For many years, Jeanette Felix was focused on putting the pieces of her life back together. “I was in a gang, I was an addict, I went to prison and I repeated that quite often,” said Felix, now 43. But things began to turn around for the Los Angeles native when she got involved with Homeboy Industries, an organization that supports former gang members and formerly incarcerated people by helping them find jobs and adjust to life outside of the carceral system.

— September 13, 2021 —

AZO Nano
Silver Nanoparticles Enhance Efficiency of Microbial-Based Fuel Cells
Reviewed by Megan Craig

A team of engineers and chemists from UCLA has achieved significant progress in the development of microbial fuel cells. This is a technology that employs natural bacteria to extract electrons from organic matter in wastewater to produce electrical currents.

— September 13, 2021 —

LA Companies Give Renters More Ways to Charge EVs
by Elijah Chiland

Electric vehicles are touted as the future, especially in Los Angeles where the city’s climate goals call for 80% of vehicles sold to be electric by 2028 — seven years ahead of the state’s 2035 cutoff for gasoline-powered auto sales.

— August 24, 2021 —

Behind The Florida Condo Collapse: Rampant Corner-Cutting
by Konrad Putzier, Scott Calvert and Rachael Levy

A startling discovery awaited an engineer who drilled into the ground-level concrete slab at Champlain Towers South last year. He could find no waterproofing in two separate sections, the engineer wrote in a letter to the condominium board.

— August 11, 2021 —

Stretchy hydrogel mimics motion of living organisms
by Cordelia Sealy

A new heat- and light-responsive polymeric material could prove useful for soft robots that mimic the function and movement of living organisms, according to researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Arizona State University, and University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix [Lo et al., Materials Today (2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mattod.2021.05.008].

— August 9, 2021 —

This company uses technology and nature to cut your air conditioning bill
by Rishi Iyengar

Heat waves are becoming more common in parts of the United States — and that means more people running their air conditioners for longer. But those air conditioners can make the problem worse, emitting greenhouse gases as they work that contribute heavily to climate change.

— August 5, 2021 —

This New Technology Could Help Cool People Down—Without Electricity
by Tim Folger

When Rebecca Sunenshine moved to Phoenix, Arizona, her first electric bill shocked her. “I called the utility and said, ‘You must have made a mistake.’ Because I think it was a $400 or $500 bill,” says Sunenshine, who is the medical director for Disease Control with the Maricopa County Health Department. “And they said, ‘Did you just move here?’”

— July 30, 2021 —

Engineers bend light to enhance wavelength conversion
by University of California, Los Angeles

Electrical engineers from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have developed a more efficient way of converting light from one wavelength to another, opening the door for improvements in the performance of imaging, sensing and communication systems. Mona Jarrahi, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UCLA Samueli, led the Nature Communications-published research.

— July 29, 2021 —

Deep learning improves image reconstruction in optical coherence tomography using less data
by UCLA Engineering Institute for Technology Advancement

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging method that can provide 3D information of biological samples. The first generation of OCT systems were based on time-domain imaging, using a mechanical scanning set-up. However, the relatively slow data acquisition speed of these earlier time-domain OCT systems partially limited their use for imaging live specimen.

— July 27, 2021 —

This California company wants to make modern AC obsolete
by Andrew Zaleski

They look like mirrors: 32 rectangles neatly arranged in eight rows on the rooftop of a supermarket called Grocery Outlet in Stockton, California. Shimmering beneath a bright sky, at first glance they could be solar panels, but the job of this rig is quite different. It keeps the store from overheating.

— July 24, 2021 —

Universe Today
Forget About Interstellar Flights. Tiny Light Sails Could be Used to Explore the Solar System Today
by Andy Tomaswick

Solar sails have been receiving a lot of attention lately. In part that is due to a series of high profile missions that have successfully proven the concept. It’s also in part due to the high profile Breakthrough Starshot project, which is designing a solar sail powered mission to reach Alpha Centauri. But this versatile third propulsion system isn’t only useful for far flung adventures – it has advantages closer to home as well. A new paper by engineers at UCLA defines what those advantages are, and how we might be able to best utilize them.

— July 22, 2021 —

Aljazeera News
Prof. Richard Wirz interviewed by Al Jazeera regarding Jeff Bezos’ Sub-Orbital Flight
by Al Jazeera News

Prof. Richard Wirz of UCLA MAE was recently interviewed by Al Jazeera regarding Jeff Bezos’ sub-orbital flight. Prof. Wirz discussed the difference between orbital and sub-orbital launches as well as the importance of rigorous launch vehicle testing over high-profile launches.

TO WATCH

— July 14, 2021 —

KCBS Radio News
Scientists are hoping to fight climate change by turning carbon-dioxide into rock
by Liz Saint John

In an effort to combat climate change, scientists have figured out how to take carbon dioxide out of the ocean and possibly turn it into rock. For more on this, KCBS news anchor Liz Saint John spoke with Camly Tran, executive director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management.

TO LISTEN

— July 1, 2021 —

Concrete makers face heavy lift on climate pledges
by Cassandra Garrison

Cemex, North America’s biggest concrete producer, has vowed to slash carbon dioxide emissions by 40% before 2030 and to eliminate them by 2050, ambitious goals reflecting growing pressure on the industry from regulators and investors.

— June 29, 2021 —

Miami-Area Condo Failure: Years of Warnings, but Mixed Signals
by Jon Kamp, Scott Calvert and Deborah Acosta

When warning signs flashed about structural and maintenance problems at Champlain Towers South, the information was muted and confusing, signaling that the condo owners didn’t need to remedy the situation urgently, according to a preliminary review by The Wall Street Journal of historical documents, eyewitness accounts and expert assessments.

— June 27, 2021 —

Building collapse in Miami: Multiple factors could have contributed, experts say
by Kyle Bagenstose, Elizabeth Weise, Erin Mansfield, Aleszu Bajak USA TODAY

“It’s almost always a series of things that build up,” said John Wallace, a professor of structural engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles who has participated in multiple forensic analyses of building failures. “Each item adds additional demands upon the building. These things cascade and then it reaches a tipping point where there is this type of collapse.”

— June 26, 2021 —

Inspection reports for collapsed Miami-area condo detail ‘major structural damage’ over garage
by Elizabeth Weise, Kyle Bagenstose USA TODAY

What caused the cracking isn’t known, said John Wallace, a professor of structural engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It could be slow degradation over time, maybe the concrete wasn’t placed properly, it could be that the ground had moved somewhat causing it,” he said. ”It could be multiple different things.”

— June 24, 2021 —

The desperate search for survivors of Florida’s deadly condo collapse nearly a 100 people are missing experts trying to figure out how it happened.
by KTLA-TV

The search is on tonight for survivors and answers after a 12 story condominium complex collapses without warning nearly 100 people still unaccounted for somewhere beneath the mounds of concrete and debris. search teams aren’t giving up hope looking for any signs of life tonight.

WATCH

Could It Happen Here? Expert Weighs In On California Building Codes In Wake Of Condo Collapse In Florida
by CBSLA Staff

With the deadly collapse Thursday of a 12-story high-rise condo building in Surfside, a Miami-Dade County, in which 55 of the 136 units crumbled, some residents of the southland wonder whether a similar catastrophe could happen here.

WATCH

The Hill
Summer heat brings new challenge to electric grid
by Rachel Frazin

After this year’s winter storm in Texas resulted in power outages that ultimately killed dozens, grid issues there and elsewhere are flaring up again in the summer heat.

Experts told The Hill that more needs to be done to prepare the grid in both the summer and the winter as climate change will continue to exacerbate extreme weather conditions and lead to more issues.

— June 23, 2021 —

Cloud spraying and hurricane slaying: how ocean geoengineering became the frontier of the climate crisis
by Amy Fleming

Tom Green has a plan to tackle climate change. The British biologist and director of the charity Project Vesta wants to turn a trillion tonnes of CO2 into rock, and sink it to the bottom of the sea.

Green admits the idea is “audacious”. It would involve locking away atmospheric carbon by dropping pea-coloured sand into the ocean. The sand is made of ground olivine – an abundant volcanic rock, known to jewellers as peridot – and, if Green’s calculations are correct, depositing it offshore on 2% of the world’s coastlines would capture 100% of total global annual carbon emissions.

— June 3, 2021 —

This Carbon-Capture Tech Removes CO2 From the Ocean By Making Seashells
by Adele Peters

Even as renewable energy and zero-emissions transportation scale up and the rest of the global economy slowly decarbonizes, it’s likely that the world will still need to suck an enormous amount of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to tackle climate change—10 billion metric tons per year by the middle of the century, by one estimate. Some startups are turning to machines that suck CO2 directly from the air. Others are betting on trees. But a team of scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, is turning to the ocean instead.

Giving Robots a Sense of Touch
by Mission Unstoppable

Some people said robots don’t have feelings. But, our next guest is figuring out how to give them feelings.

TO WATCH

— June 1, 2021 —

Soft Focus: A Flexible Future for Robots
by UCLA Newsroom

Picture a robot. In your mind’s eye, do you see a shiny protocol droid from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away? Perhaps a large, moving steel arm from our industrial present? Or even an ambassador from the future, such as the mighty THOR (tactical hazardous operations robot), UCLA’s own walking, talking, soccer-kicking bot from the lab of engineering professor Dennis Hong?

— May 21, 2021 —

Is This Concrete’s Breakthrough Moment?
by Paola Rosa-Aquino

The blue planet is becoming grayer by the day, as Earth is paved over with concrete. The world churns out about 4 billion tons of cement, the glue that holds concrete together, every year, and the appetite for concrete is expected to balloon as humanity continues to move from rural areas into cities.

— May 20, 2021 —

The Rise of the Climatarian
by Danielle Braff

Torben Lonne, a 34-year-old scuba diver in Copenhagen, never eats without considering the carbon footprint and the emission level of the food he’s about to consume. For that reason, his diet revolves around locally sourced fruits and vegetables, and pizza. He avoids avocados, however.

— April 22, 2021 —

UCLA Engineering Team Wins $7.5M Prize For Developing Eco-Friendly Concrete That Absorbs Carbon Dioxide
by CBSLA Staff

A group of UCLA engineers were awarded the $7.5 million NRG COSIA Carbon XPrize for creating a near carbon dioxide-neutral version of concrete.

— April 19, 2021 —

Inside the $20 Million Prize That’s Saving the World
by WIRED

In 2015, Carbon XPRIZE sponsors NRG and COSIA put up 20 rocks to jumpstart the carbontech economy and tackle global warming. The results are in, and they are thrilling.

A Big Step Towards Decarbonization – The Carbon XPRIZE
by James Conca

Extracting CO₂ from the air is one of the best ways to reverse climate change without resorting to expensive technologies, convoluted tax schemes or preventing billions of people from getting the energy they need to have a good life.

Team Led by UCLA Professor Wins $7.5M Engineering Prize
by KFI AM 640

A group of UCLA engineers has become the first university team to win the $7.5 million grand prize in the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE global competition, it was announced today. The UCLA CarbonBuilt team, led by Gaurav Sant, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, won the prize in the competition’s track for technologies related to coal-fired power generation.

— April 12, 2021 —

Startup Creates Concrete That Reduces Carbon Emissions
by Howard Fine

Westwood-based startup CarbonBuilt Inc. has a concrete plan for reducing carbon emissions. The company, which was spun off in late 2019 from a UCLA research team led by civil engineer professor Gaurav Sant, has developed a process for injecting concrete with carbon dioxide emissions from power plants or other industrial facilities.

— April 10, 2021 —

Guggenheim Fellows For 2021 Announced. Here Are The Universities With The Most Winners.
by Michael T. Nietzel

The Guggenheim Fellows for 2021 were announced this week. This year’s winners include 184 scholars, artists, scientists and writers selected via a rigorous peer review process from more than 3,000 initial candidates. The full list of winners can be found here.

— April 9, 2021 —

NASA Teases A Mars Base Made Of Mushrooms, A Swarm Of Spacecraft To Venus And A Giant Dish On The Moon
by Jamie Carter

CubeSat solar sails for exploring deep space

Space missions take decades of development, years of flight and cost billions. So why not explore the solar system and interstellar space using CubeSat solar sails? Proposed by Artur Davoyan, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, this research project will study ultra-lightweight metamaterials that could withstand extreme environments.

It’s thought that super-light CubeSat solar sails could travel 60 times the Earth-Sun distance in a year, which is 20 times the velocity of Voyager 1—currently the farthest spacecraft of all—and could reach Jupiter in five months. That journey currently takes five years.

— April 5, 2021 —

UCLA prof says racial bias in medical devices is based in physics
by Nancy Crotti

The laws of physics may be making medical devices biased against people of color, according to a UCLA engineering professor.

Achuta Kadambi, an assistant professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, published a column in the journal Science about how dataset representation is not the only factor leading to bias in medtech.

— March 22, 2021 —

BBC Radio 4
Conspiracies: The Secret Knowledge
by BBC Radio

Electrical Computer Engineering Prof. Vwani Roy Chowdhury’s latest interview re conspiracy theories on BBC Radio 4. 11:54-18:45 mark.

Phil Tinline explores what conspiracy theory – and conspiracy fiction – claim to tell us about how power really works, and how that compares with reality.

TO LISTEN

— March 14, 2021 —

Breakthrough in electronic display fabrics could help pave the way for smart clothing
by Charles Q. Choi | INSIDE SCIENCE

A wearable interactive display made of a flexible, breathable electronic fabric can display simple maps and text messages, potentially for use in future smart clothing, a research group reports in its latest paper.

— March 12, 2021 —

Wyoming Public Media
New Technology Captures Carbon To Create Cement
by Ashley Piccone

Cement production makes up eight percent of man-made carbon emissions. But a new technology developed by the University of California, Los Angeles might change that.

READ MORE | TO LISTEN

— March 11, 2021 —

Newswise
Tough, yet tender: Scientists firm up research on durable hydrogels
by Mutian Hua

A research team led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has developed a new method to make synthetic biomaterials that mimic the internal structure, stretchiness, strength and durability of tendons and other biological tissues.

— March 10, 2021 —

This Chip for AI Works Usig Light, Not Electrons
by Will Knight

Aydogan Ozcan, a professor at UCLA who works on photonic computing, believes the rise of AI could bring technology like Lightmatter’s to the fore. He suggests that a shift toward new forms of photonic computing might even unlock new ways of doing AI. “We might see major advances in computing speed, power and parallelism, which will further feed into and accelerate the success of AI,” he says.

—March 9, 2021 —

Let’s Redesign the Laptop for a Work-From-Home Era
by Dan Weil

With remote work here to stay, a lot of focus has turned toward the key work-from-home technology tool: the laptop. But relying so heavily on the laptop has raised all sorts of issues—from camera and sound quality to security and privacy.

— February 23, 2021 —

KNX In Depth: A California variant of COVID-19 worries scientists—Wealthy people find a new way to skip vaccine lines—The pandemic creates a shortage of research monkeys
by KNX 1070 NEWSRADIO

Doctors and scientists have talked a lot about the coronavirus variants we’re dealing with. Researchers at U.C. San Francisco have been tracking one of the California variants. They say it spreads more easily and evades antibodies generated by vaccines. So how worried should we be? It seems the wealthy have found a new way to game the system and get a vaccine before others. Researchers are having trouble finding monkeys.

TO LISTEN at 16:52-20:47

— February 22, 2021 —

Dr. Dennis Hong on Achieving the Impossible With Robotic Inventions
by LA Stories Staff

When Dr. Dennis Hong was 7 years old, he saw a movie that shaped the rest of his life. The movie was Star Wars: A New Hope, and it was the robots — or “droids” in the film — that caught his eye. “The humanoid robot and the R2-D2 that looks like a trash can just captivated me,” he said. “I thought it was so cool.”

— February 17, 2021 —

CAL-ISO Urges Residents To Help Conserve Power After Historic Storm Hits Texas, Midwest
by News, KCBSTV, Top Story

The California Independent System Operator (CAL-ISO) is urging residents to conserve energy to help ease stressed grid conditions in Texas, the Midwest and other parts of the country.

Sloan Research Fellows For 2021 Announced
by Michael T. Nietzel

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced on Tuesday the 128 researchers who’ve been selected for a 2021 Sloan Research Fellowship. The highly prestigious fellowships have been awarded annually since 1955 to early-career, scientific scholars who appear destined to become leaders in their academic fields.

— February 9, 2021 —

50 years ago, the Sylmar earthquake shook L.A., and nothing’s been the same since
by Doug Smith

How close Los Angeles came to what would have been — many times over— the deadliest disaster in U.S. history remains a matter of historical conjecture.

— January 11, 2021 —

Diffractive networks improve optical image classification accuracy
by UCLA Engineering Institute for Technology Advancement

Recently, there has been a reemergence of interest in optical computing platforms for artificial intelligence-related applications. Optics is ideally suited for realizing neural network models because of the high speed, large bandwidth and high interconnectivity of optical information processing.

— January 7, 2021—

Optical network shapes pulses of light
by UCLA Engineering Institute for Technology Advancement

A team of UCLA engineers and researchers has developed a new method to shape light pulses by creating physical networks that are composed specially engineered layers. These layers are designed using deep learning and then fabricated using 3-D printing and stacked together, one following another, forming an optical network that is capable of performing various computational tasks using optical waves and diffraction of light.

— December 24, 2020 —

Artificial Intelligence Separates Conspiracy Theory From Conspiracy Fact
by Dave Stoelk UCLA

George Boris has some interesting opinions about the origin of the COVID-19 virus. It was, he said, a conspiracy between the World Health Organization and a foreign power to undermine the Unites States by weaponizing the Corona virus.

— December 23, 2020 —

Experts say SolarWinds hack could impact Kern County businesses
by Kallyn Hobmann, 23 ABC News Bakersfield

“It has the ability to attack thousands of corporations all at once, so it’s very powerful,” said UCLA Samueli School of Engineering professor Carey Nachenberg, describing a fictional cyberattack in his book “The Florentine Deception.”

— December 17, 2020 —

This Tech Can Cool the Planet Without Electricity
by Now This

UCLA Professor Aaswath Raman and his team developed a thin, mirror-like film that can lower the temperature of objects by more than 10 degrees without using any energy.

— December 15, 2020 —

Cryptographers Unveil Breakthrough In Achieving Indistinguishability Obfuscation
by Tony Bradley

Is it possible to encrypt a computer program such that the code is completely unintelligible while retaining all of its intended functionality? The concept of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) was theorized in 2001—but over nearly two decades cryptographers have failed to actually achieve it. Earlier this year, however, that changed with the publication of a paper titled, “Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Founded Assumptions.”

— December 2, 2020 —

30 Under 30 – Science, Yuzhang Li
Forbes Profile

Li’s lab is dedicated to finding new materials to enable portable and reliable sources of electricity using next-generation batteries. His research captured the first atomic photos of growths in batteries which can lead to fires, which helped guide ways to make safer and better batteries. He has also developed a patent pending way to use graphene to improve battery stability, which has been commercially licensed.

— December 1, 2020 —

Start Spreading The (Good) News About Cybersecurity
by Kazuhiro Gomi

Bad news in cybersecurity gets a lot of attention. Headlines about data breaches and new forms of malware tend to outweigh any good news that comes from the field of cryptography.

— November 19, 2020 —

A Bedsore Solution. Provizio SEM Scanner by Bruin Biometrics
by Time, The Best Inventions of 2020

Lying in bed for days or weeks is deceptively hard on the body. It places pressure on the skin and underlying tissues, and can result in injuries known as bedsores. Every year, these pressure wounds cost the U.S. medical system roughly $10 billion and contribute to complications like infections that kill about 60,000 Americans.

— November 16, 2020 —

STEPS FORWARD: Math geniuses strive to make a pivotal advance — by obfuscating software code
by Byron V. Acohido

Most of time we take for granted the degree to which fundamental components of civilization are steeped in mathematics.

Everything from science and engineering to poetry and music rely on numeric calculations. Albert Einstein once observed that “pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.”

— November 15, 2020 —

Computer Scientists Achieve the ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography
by Erica Klarreich

In 2018, Aayush Jain, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, traveled to Japan to give a talk about a powerful cryptographic tool he and his colleagues were developing. As he detailed the team’s approach to indistinguishability obfuscation (iO for short), one audience member raised his hand in bewilderment.

— November 13, 2020 —

Researchers create armored emulsions as tiny test tubes for parallel reactions
by University of California, Los Angeles

If you have ever shaken a salad dressing bottle mixed with oil and vinegar, you have temporarily created an emulsion. However, that state is temporary, and the two components soon separate. But, what if you could create a stable emulsion in which all of the tiny droplets stay at a uniform size for a long time? UCLA bioengineers and mathematicians have done just that, inventing the first-ever ‘armored’ emulsions.

— November 10, 2020 —

Computer Scientists Achieve ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography
by Erica Klarreich

Team of Researchers Improves Fuel Cell Technologies to Exceed DOE Targets
by Emily Holbrook

A team of UCLA, Caltech, and Ford Motor Company researchers has improved fuel-cell technologies to exceed the US Department of Energy targets in efficiency, stability, and power. No other reported fuel cells have reached all these milestones simultaneously.

— November 1, 2020 —

The Spark Guide to Civilization, Part Two: Ventilation
by Nora Young

Past pandemics have been a huge influence on the way we design our cities and our homes. So what can the history of this relationship between public health and public spaces teach us during the COVID-19 pandemic? Sara Jensen Carr explores these lessons in an upcoming book, The Topography of Wellness: Health and the American Urban Landscape.

TO LISTEN

— October 21, 2020 —

Superwhite paint can cool buildings even in hot sunlight
by Adam Vaughan

A new superwhite paint is so reflective that it can cool a surface to below the surrounding air temperature, even under sunlight. It could help reduce the use of energy-intensive air conditioning in hot countries.

— October 20, 2020 —

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 20
by Jesse Allen

Computer scientists at the University of California Los Angeles found that current compilers for quantum computers are inhibiting optimal performance and argue that better quantum compilation design could help improve computation speeds up to 45 times.

New Catalyst Makes Ethylene From CO₂
by New Energy and Fuel

UCLA scientists have developed nanoscale copper wires with specially shaped surfaces to catalyze a chemical reaction that reduces CO₂ gas emissions recycling the CO₂ while generating ethylene – a valuable chemical simultaneously.

— October 15, 2020 —

It’s Time To Fix Diversity Training, Part 1
by Ilana Redstone

At this point, it’s clear that traditional diversity training programs are a source of controversy. This is probably both a cause and an effect of the September 2020 Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping. The order states that, “…training that promotes race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating…promote[s] divisiveness in the workplace and distract[s] from the pursuit of excellence and collaborative achievements in public administration.”

— October 12, 2020 —

Weaving earthquake risk into city resiliency plans
by Adina Solomon

The Ridgecrest earthquakes in Southern California shook most of the state, as well as parts of Arizona, Nevada and Mexico, when three initial shocks of magnitudes (M) 6.4, 5.4, and 7.1 reverberated through the Garlock fault area in July 2019.

— October 8, 2020 —

UCLA Health scientists pioneer faster, cheaper COVID-19 testing technology
by Mufid Majnun/Unsplash

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency use authorization for scientists at UCLA Health to begin using a new method of COVID-19 detection using sequencing technology called SwabSeq. The method is capable of testing thousands of samples for coronavirus at the same time, producing accurate, individual results in 12 to 24 hours.

— October 7, 2020 —

Fox News
UCLA’s new $10 COVID test can process thousands of results in a day
by James Laggate

A new COVID-19 testing method could help get results out faster.
The FDA authorized on Wednesday emergency use of the SwabSeq COVID-19 diagnostic platform developed by doctors at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The test can turn around results within 12-24 hours, according to the team that developed it.

SkyCool Energy Efficient Panels In Stockton, CA.
by Sarah Kaplan

Long ago, in lands that were always warm, people got ice from the heavens.
At sunset, they poured water into shallow earthen pits or ceramic trays insulated with reeds. All through the night the water would radiate its heat into the chilly void of space. By morning, it turned to ice — even though the air temperature never dropped below freezing.

— October 1, 2020 —

What Will Cold-and-Flu Season Mean for the Coronavirus Pandemic?
by Carolyn Kormann

The other day, as I was driving across the Brooklyn Bridge, the brakes of my car, a twenty-one-year-old Toyota, stopped working. I pressed the pedal. The car kept rolling. I was going slowly enough that I didn’t hit anyone, or anything, but the feeling was nauseating. The emergency brake, thankfully, still worked, and I inched into Manhattan with my hazards on.

Alder-ene-catalyzing enzymes discovered
by Celia Henry Arnaud

Pericyclic reactions, which involve concerted electron movement and a cyclic transition state, have long been a part of the synthetic chemist’s tool box. But finding enzymes that catalyze such reactions, particularly a class called Alder-ene reactions, has been difficult.

Researchers discover first enzymes to catalyze a classic organic reaction
by Penny Jennings, UCLA

The Tang, Garg, and Houk research groups have discovered nature’s natural protein catalysts (enzymes) that catalyze the Alder-ene reaction.

All groups are part of the UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry. Professor Yi Tang is the Chancellor Professor at the UCLA Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Bioengineering.

In the age of coronavirus, a 95-year-old World War II hero is honored very carefully
by Hailey Branson-Potts

Eldon Knuth was trapped.

It was November 1944, and U.S. forces were fighting to liberate the heavily fortified French city of Metz from the Nazis.

When Knuth’s battalion attacked the German-held Fort Jeanne d’Arc, he and about 30 other soldiers with the Army’s 95th Infantry Division got stuck behind enemy lines, in the bitter cold, with meager supplies.

— September 30, 2020 —

Trapped behind enemy lines: 95-year-old T.O. man receives Bronze Star for WWII actions
by To Kisken

Nearly 76 years after he was trapped behind German lines in World War II in weather so bitter he still feels it, Eldon Knuth was given his long overdue Bronze Star on Tuesday.

Enterprise Times
Can a computer program be unintelligible yet still work?
by Ian Murphy

Is it possible to make a computer program unintelligible to anyone trying to disassemble it yet still retain its functionality? It’s a key question that has been around for decades. Now, three cryptographers say they have solved the problem of Indistinguishability Obfuscation (iO).

— September 29, 2020 —

Common antioxidant enzyme may provide potential treatment for COVID-19
by UCLA

Researchers from UCLA and China have found that catalase, a naturally occurring enzyme, holds potential as a low-cost therapeutic drug to treat COVID-19 symptoms and suppress the replication of coronavirus inside the body. A study detailing the research was published in Advanced Materials.

Medical Life Sciences News
Naturally occurring enzyme holds potential as low-cost therapeutic to treat COVID-19
Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.

— September 22, 2020 —

Using Dirt to Clean Up Construction
by Jackie Rocheleau

The construction industry is one of the world’s largest emitters of carbon dioxide. Whether it can reduce those emissions depends on replacing its most common building material.

— September 14, 2020 —

Life-Saving Smartwatch
by Talk Zone Internet Talk Radio

A prototype smart watch has been developed, that will monitor drug levels in your body, in real time. Sam Emaminejad, PhD, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, says it’s wearable technology that will allow doses to be tailored to individual needs.

TO LISTEN

— August 24, 2020 —

Bridging the gap between biologists and physicists
by Josie Glausiusz

Quantum engineer Clarice Aiello aims to discover how laws of quantum mechanics affect vision and other functions. I work as a laboratory leader in the emerging field of quantum biology, which examines how the laws of quantum mechanics might mediate biological processes such as photosynthesis, respiration and vision. Migrating birds, for example, are thought to use proteins that act as sensors for detecting Earth’s magnetic field, enabling them to navigate by it, and quantum mechanical effects might underlie metabolic regulation in cells.

— August 17, 2020 —

Yang Yang: Challenges and opportunities always go hand-in-hand
by Anna Troeger

Born in Taiwan, Yang Yang was inspired by the challenges of the scientific method from an early age. After pursuing his undergraduate education in physics from the National Cheng-Kung University and serving in the Taiwanese military service for two years, Yang made a huge leap and moved to the United States to pursue his graduate studies in physics at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

— August 11, 2020 —

Models used to predict how coronavirus will spread in San Diego County, statewide
by Brandon Lewis

California is using several forecast models to predict how coronavirus will spread on a state and county level. Six projection models are averaged to look between two and four weeks out including one developed by the University of California – Los Angeles.

UCLA professor receives grant to develop coronavirus vaccine booster
by Priscilla Guerrero and Shruti Iyer

A UCLA professor received a grant to develop a new treatment that could make COVID-19 vaccines more effective. Song Li, the chair of Samueli School of Engineering’s bioengineering department, received a $149,916 grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to create a vaccine booster that could help the body defend against the coronavirus.

Custom smartwatch tracks sweat to personalise mental health treatments
by Staff

The advance could help doctors choose the right drug at the right dose for the right person, paving the way for a more personalised approach to medicine.

Glove developed by UCLA researchers translates American Sign Language to speech
by Noah Danesh

UCLA researchers have developed a smart glove that converts American Sign Language into spoken English. The glove uses stretchable sensors and a circuit board to wirelessly send signals to a smartphone app – also developed by the researchers – which translates hand gestures into English. The glove can analyze up to 660 different gestures, has a recognition rate of over 98% and is able to translate gestures into speech in less than a second.

— August 10, 2020 —

Tracking Medication Levels with a Smartwatch
by MDDI Staff

Can a smartwatch track medication levels help personalize treatments? Researchers from UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and Stanford School of Medicine have demonstrated this in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

— August 7, 2020 —

Custom smartwatch tracks drug levels inside the body in real time
by Emily Henderson

Engineers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and their colleagues at Stanford School of Medicine have demonstrated that drug levels inside the body can be tracked in real time using a custom smartwatch that analyzes the chemicals found in sweat.

— August 3, 2020 —

EV fast charger technology floors it
by Laurence Iliff

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, between Southern California and Las Vegas, lies the future of electric vehicle charging.

— July 22, 2020 —

UCLA team nabs $2.9M grant to turn CO2 into concrete
by Jenn Goodman

Sant, who is also the director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, said the product will have a carbon footprint 50% to 70% lower than that of regular concrete used in construction.

Why Gulf Standard Time is far from standard: the fascinating story behind the time zone’s invention
by Ashleigh Stewart

Gulf Standard Time, in reference to the time zone adopted by the UAE and Oman, is far from standard.

— July 10, 2020 —

Let our international students study in peace; reverse the decision by ICE
by Jayathi Y. Murthy

When I read the new U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement guidance on the Student Exchange and Visitor Program, a familiar feeling of dread washed over me.

— July 9, 2020 —

Ways to keep buildings cool with improved super white paints
by Science Daily

A research team led by UCLA materials scientists has demonstrated ways to make super white paint that reflects as much as 98% of incoming heat from the sun.

High-tech glove to translate sign language into speech in real time
by HappyMag.tv

A breakthrough in the world of sign language is on its way, with the development of a glove that translates sign language into speech in real-time.

— July 2, 2020 —

UCLA Scientist Develops Gloves That Translate Sign Language
by NPR

Jun Chen is an assistant professor of bioengineering at UCLA who just developed a wearable sign language interpreting glove. He hopes it can be used by the deaf community to communicate with anyone.

LISTEN

— July 1, 2020 —

New glove can translate sign language instantly through an app, researchers say
by Katie Camero

California researchers developed a glove embedded with electronic sensors that can translate American Sign Language into English in real time through an app on your smartphone.

— June 30, 2020 —

This new high-tech glove translates sign language into speech in real time
by Rob Picheta

A glove that translates sign language into speech in real time has been developed by scientists — potentially allowing deaf people to communicate directly with anyone, without the need for a translator.

This Glove Can Translate Sign Language into Speech in Real Time
by NBC Colorado

UCLA researchers made a system including a pair of gloves and a smartphone app that’s able to translate American Sign Language (ASL) to English speech about one word per second.

New glove translates American Sign Language into speech in real time
by ABC Washington, D.C.

The glove was created by scientists at UCLA. Sensors running along the glove and read movements to identify letters, words and phrases. The movements are then sent to a corresponding app, and it reads them aloud.

— June 29, 2020 —

How the internet is regulated
by CNBC

The U.S. does not have one agency tasked with regulating the internet in its 21st century form. The Trump administration is calling for a reexamination of Section 230, the law that shields internet companies from being liable for the content posted on their sites.

Sign language helps the hearing impaired communicate
by KNX1070

Sign language helps the hearing impaired communicate. Now researcher at UCLA has found a way for those who don’t read sign language to be a part of the conversion.

PLAY

Wearable-tech glove translates sign language into speech in real time
by KNX1070

Bioengineers have designed a glove-like device that can translate American Sign Language into English speech in real time though a smartphone app.

— June 19, 2020 —

This adhesive film for smartwatch can detect metabolites and nutrients in sweat
by Shane McGlaun

We can thank Apple for bringing the medical and health-related functions of wearables to the forefront with its Apple Watch, which can detect heart arrhythmias in the latest version.

— June 9, 2020 —

These Companies are Turning CO2 into Concrete.. Could it be the Solution to Construction’s Emissions Problem?
by Dean Oliver

Innovative companies and universities are successfully converting CO2 into building products. If the concept can be scaled commercially, emissions produced from concrete production could be drastically reduced.

— May 28, 2020 —

UCLA Engineering Dean Leading Efforts to Address Shortage of PPP, Other Medical Supplies
by India-West Staff Reporter

Jayathi Murthy, dean of the University of California, Los Angeles Samueli School of Engineering, is leading efforts to address the shortage of personal protective equipment and other medical supplies badly needed by frontline health care workers fighting to flatten the curve of COVID-19 globally.

United Against a Common Foe
by Howard Fine

The Covid-19 pandemic has put L.A.’s health care sector in an unprecedented spotlight. The scores of hospitals providing critical care for L.A. County’s 10 million residents are now at the center of a financial storm.

— May 27, 2020 —

New Facility for Bioengineering Research Opens in Los Angeles
by Vanesa Listek

In a world eager to solve the problem of rejection in organ transplantation, a young American scientist developed a breakthrough test in 1964 that would help establish the compatibility of tissue types between organ donors and patients in need of transplants.

— May 26, 2020 —

UCLA researchers develop Breathalyzer-like diagnostic tool to test for COVID-19
by KTLA Digital Staff

A team of researchers from UCLA and other universities is developing a Breathalyzer-like tool that would rapidly test for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

— May 23, 2020 —

UCLA Professor Leading Team to Develop Breathalyzer-Like Tool for Rapid COVID-19 Test
by City News Service

A research team led by a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering won a grant to develop an inexpensive and fast breathalyzer-like diagnostic tool to test for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, according to the university.

— May 22, 2020 —

UCLA team compiles coronavirus-related data, creates statistical modeling tool
by Keaton Larson

A UCLA professor and students created an artificial intelligence-based tool to collect and correlate data related to the COVID-19 pandemic easily.

— May 21, 2020 —

Team to develop breathalyzer-like diagnostic test for COVID-19
by UCLA

Aresearch team led by Pirouz Kavehpour, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, is developing an inexpensive and fast breathalyzer-like diagnostic tool to test for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

— May 12, 2020 —

UCLA Scientists Say They Have Developed More Accurate COVID-19 Test
by Ted Chen

Federal health official announced today that as many as 50 million Americans will be able to get tested for COVID-19 by the fall. But how accurate will those test be and what are the chance for false results.

— May 11, 2020—

Diabetes management: How researchers are looking at new approaches from insulin patches to an artificial pancreas
by Jo Best

For some diabetics, keeping blood sugar at the right level means several injections a day, every day. Injecting insulin is no fun, but for type 1 diabetics, it’s the difference between life and death. Could technology be poised to offer a way to take some of the pain and stress out of managing diabetes?

— April 28, 2020—

A step toward a better way to make gene therapies to attack cancer, genetic disorders
by UCLA

A UCLA-led research team today reports that it has developed a new method for delivering DNA into stem cells and immune cells safely, rapidly and economically. The method, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could give scientists a new tool for manufacturing gene therapies for people with cancer, genetic disorders and blood diseases.

— April 22, 2020 —

A new way to cool down electronic devices, recover waste heat

Using electronic devices for too long can cause them to overheat, which might slow them down, damage their components or even make them explode or catch fire. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Nano Letters have developed a hydrogel that can both cool down electronics, such as cell phone batteries, and convert their waste heat into electricity.

— April 21, 2020 —

Students learn to adapt to wins and woes of online laboratory classes
by Inga Hwang

Christina Gallup was excited to learn common biological lab techniques during her introductory bioengineering lab course because her past lab courses had taught chemistry lab skills.

— April 14, 2020 —

California Set the Tone on Coronavirus Shutdowns. What’s Its Next Move?
by Thomas Fuller and Tim Arango

SAN FRANCISCO — California has been ahead of the rest of America in confronting the coronavirus pandemic, locking down its citizens early and avoiding, so far, the worst-case scenarios predicted for infections and deaths.

— April 10, 2020 —

COBOL, a 60-year-old computer language, is in the COVID-19 spotlight
by Mark Sullivan

Some states have found themselves in need of people who know a 60-year-old programming language called COBOL to retrofit the antiquated government systems now struggling to process the deluge of unemployment claims brought by the coronavirus crisis.”

— April 9, 2020 —

With diving gear and plumbing supplies, California labs fashion Covid-19 masks and ventilators
by Usha Lee McFarling

Glen Meyerowitz, a first-year electrical engineering graduate student at UCLA, had been closely tracking the new coronavirus since January because his brother is an infectious disease fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“He mentioned physicians and clinicians in hard-hit areas were needing to triage care and said he was tremendously worried about physicians having to make those decisions here,” Meyerowitz said. “So I started looking into ventilators and how they work and why they’re so complicated and expensive.”

— April 7, 2020 —

“Like a sneeze guard at the salad bar.”
by David Grossman

Masks aren’t enough. That’s the realization medical workers across the country are starting to realize in their war against Covid-19, an enemy with no need to sleep or eat.

It spurts out of infected patients like pollen from a flower, instituting dry coughs that send microscopic water droplets into the world. Face shields offer the next level of production to medical workers fighting off infection, and Jacob Schmidt, a bioengineering professor at UCLA, is part of a team electronically fabricating these shields.

— April 6, 2020 —

Inventors Are Whipping Up Homemade Ventilators to Fend Off a Shortage. Some Doctors Are Wary
by Jamie Ducharme

A mechanical ventilator can cost a hospital tens of thousands of dollars up front, and even more money each day it’s used to keep oxygen flowing into a sick patient’s lungs. It’s unsurprising, then, that some small U.S. hospitals can count theirs on one hand.

— April 1, 2020 —

Keeping It Cool to Create Power
by Sarah Williams

Aaswath Raman, a UCLA assistant professor of materials science and engineering, was a graduate student when he stumbled across a handful of papers on radiative cooling — the process by which heat radiates upward from objects on Earth all the way to the cold depths of outer space.

— March 31, 2020 —

Grad Student Builds Ventilator Using Home Depot Supplies
by NBC Los Angeles

UCLA Biodesign Fellow Glen Meyerowitz built the device in a few hours and is hoping it can serve as a proof-of-concept for a low-cost ventilator that could help hospitals with ventilator shortages amid the coronavirus pandemic.

— March 29, 2020—

Column: If Trump alone can fix our coronavirus crisis, then why the hell hasn’t he?
by Robin Abcarian | Columnist

In 2016, as Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, he said the “system” was broken. “I alone can fix it,” he darkly proclaimed.

— March 26, 2020 —

Coronavirus: UCLA Engineers Developing Surgical Face Shields For Area Hospitals
by CBSLA

Engineers at the University of California Los Angeles have started using 3D printing and laser cutting equipment to produce surgical face shields in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

UCLA engineers using 3-D printing in race to get coronavirus face shields to hospitals
by City News Service

Engineers at UCLA have begun using 3D printing and laser cutting equipment to produce surgical face shields in an effort to meet the rapidly growing demand for personal protective equipment for health care workers in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

— March 11, 2020 —

Internet Inventor Helps UCLA Celebrate its Centennial
by Ariel Wesler

Inside UCLA’s engineering school, there is a special room that has transformed all of our lives. It’s the birthplace of the internet.

“That’s the main attraction over there. That machine is the first piece of internet equipment ever,” said Dr. Leonard Kleinrock, whose research laid the groundwork for the internet.

— March 9, 2020 —

«Инъекция» углекислого газа
by Смотреть комментарии

Студенты Калифорнийского университета в Лос-Анджелесе придумали, как использовать CO2 в производстве кирпичей

— March 6, 2020 —

This coin-sized insulin patch could improve diabetes treatment
by Chris Newmarker

Could treating diabetes someday be as simple as slapping on a patch? A UCLA-led research team thinks so, and it’s seeking FDA permission to prove it.

A research team led by UCLA bioengineering professor Zhen Gu claims to have overcome some of the technological hurdles around creating a patch that releases insulin based on the level of glucose in a person’s body.

— February 28, 2020 —

A New Study Finds People Prefer Robots That Explain Themselves
by Mark Edmonds and Yixin Zhu

Artificial intelligence is entering our lives in many ways – on our smartphones, in our homes, in our cars. These systems can help people make appointments, drive and even diagnose illnesses. But as AI systems continue to serve important and collaborative roles in people’s lives, a natural question is: Can I trust them? How do I know they will do what I expect?

— February 27, 2020 —

Engineers develop miniaturized ‘warehouse robots’ for biotechnology applications
by UCLA

UCLA engineers have developed minuscule warehouse logistics robots that could help expedite and automate medical diagnostic technologies and other applications that move and manipulate tiny drops of fluid. The study was published in Science Robotics.

— February 20, 2020 —

Mysterious ‘ghost’ populations had multiple trysts with human ancestors
by Ann Gibbons

The story of human evolution is full of ancient trysts. Genes from fossils have shown that the ancestors of many living people mated with Neanderthals and with Denisovans, a mysterious group of extinct humans who lived in Asia. Now, a flurry of papers suggests the ancestors of all three groups mixed at least twice with even older “ghost” lineages of unknown extinct hominins.

— February 13, 2020 —

Mysterious ‘ghost population’ of ancient humans discovered
by Emma Reynolds

A mysterious population of ancient humans lived in West Africa about half a million years ago, and scientists believe their genes still live on in people today.

— February 12, 2020 —

Scientists find evidence of ‘ghost population’ of ancient humans
by Ian Sample

Scientists have found evidence for a mysterious “ghost population” of ancient humans that lived in Africa about half a million years ago and whose genes live on in people today.

Ghost DNA Hints at Africa’s Missing Ancient Humans
by Carl Zimmer

Scientists reported on Wednesday that they had discovered evidence of an extinct branch of humans whose ancestors split from our own a million years ago. The evidence of these humans was not a fossil. Instead, the researchers found pieces of their DNA in the genomes of living people from West Africa.

Bioengineers Testing Smart Insulin Patch
by News Staff

A team of U.S. bioengineers has developed a glucose-responsive insulin patch that could one day monitor and manage glucose levels in people with diabetes. The researchers have successfully tested the patch in insulin-deficient diabetic mice and minipigs, and are now applying for FDA approval of clinical trials in humans.

— February 7, 2020 —

Capture Carbon in Concrete Made With CO2
Caroline Delbert

A team from the University of California, Los Angeles, has developed a system that transforms “waste CO2” into gray blocks of concrete. In March, the researchers will relocate to the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, part of the Dry Fork power plant near the town of Gillette. During a three-month demonstration, the UCLA team plans to siphon half a ton of CO2 per day from the plant’s flue gas and produce 10 tons of concrete daily.

— February 2, 2020 —

New Anti-Ice Coating Could Prevent Frozen Cars and Pipes
Caroline Delbert

Scientists in California and China have collaborated on an anti-ice coating inspired by Antarctic fish. In February in the northern hemisphere, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to understand how useful this could be—but the more important applications include things like de-icing airplanes and preventing engines from freezing up.

— January 31, 2020—

Hydrogel coating is first to prevent ice formation in 3 different ways
by Matthew Chin

Materials scientists at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and colleagues in China have developed a coating that prevents ice from forming. The way it works is inspired by a natural mechanism that keeps blood from freezing in several species of fish that live near Antarctica.

— January 25, 2020—

History Channel logo
The History Channel: Rust Valley Restorers
by History Channel

“They have enlisted UCLA professor of structural engineering, Doctor Henry Burton. ‘I’m a structural engineer, so I think about how to design things to make sure that they move through structures in a way that they’re stable.’”

— January 14, 2020 —

U.S. News Releases Its Rankings Of The Best Online College Programs For 2020
by Michael T. Nietzel

U.S. News & World Report announced its 2020 Best Online Programs rankings today, the ninth edition of these rankings. This year more than 1,600 programs were ranked — up from 1,545 last year and 677 in the first edition in 2012.

— January 16, 2020—

Turning carbon into concrete could win UCLA team a climatevictory — and $7.5 million
by Julia Rosen

Gabe Falzone and his teammates had been up since 5 a.m., anticipating the arrival of theconcrete mixer. When the truck pulled into the alley behind UCLA’s Boelter Hall,hundreds of narrow red cylinders stood ready. The engineers scrambled to fill thecontainers with roughly 8 tons of wet sludge before hustling them into giant ovens in thebasement.

— December 18, 2019—

A Robot That Explains Its Actions Is a First Step Towards AI We Can (Maybe) Trust
by Evan Ackerman

In a paper published in Science Robotics, researchers from UCLA have developed a robotic system that can generate different kinds of real-time, human-readable explanations about its actions, and then did some testing to figure which of the explanations were the most effective at improving a human’s trust in the system. Does this mean we can totally understand and trust robots now? Not yet—but it’s a start.

— November 8, 2019 —

Tiny Solar Collectors That Track The Movement Of The Sun Could Power Your Home One Day
by Kevin Murnane

Imagine your roof covered in tiny sunflower-like solar collectors that provide all the energy you need to run your home. Sound farfetched? Yesterday, maybe; today, not so much. Researchers at UCLA and the California Nanosystems Institute have developed technology that could make a roof of tiny sunflowers a reality.

— November 6, 2019 —

Leonard Kleinrock & Vint Cerf on the Invention of the Web
by Amanpour & Company

Professor Leonard Kleinrock and his former student Vint Cerf – now Vice President of Google – are known as the founding fathers of the internet, after they pioneered the technology that underpins it. It’s changed the world and the very way we live, yet at the time, they had no idea just how big their work would become. Miles O’Brien sits down with them both to reflect on those early days.

Sunlight-Tracking Polymer, Inspired by Sunflowers, Could Maximize Solar Power
by Jason Daley

In recent decades, solar cells have gotten better and cheaper, leading to a boom in the solar energy industry. But most solar panels have one major drawback—they don’t move. That means the sunlight reaching them often comes in at an angle, which hinders maximum power production.

— November 5, 2019 —

The first artificial material that follows sunlight may upgrade solar panels
by Sofie Bates

As the sun moves across the sky, sunflowers continually orient themselves to soak up the most light. Now a type of human-made material can do that, too. This is the first artificial material capable of phototropism, researchers report November 4 in Nature Nanotechnology.

— November 1, 2019 —

The Internet at 50: ‘We Didn’t See the Dark Side Emerging’
by Jill Cowan

On Oct. 29, 1969, in a windowless room at U.C.L.A. a message was sent to the Stanford Research Center from a very large machine. It was supposed to be “login,” but only the first two letters transmitted. So, the message was, simply, “lo.”

The Rising Threat of Digital Nationalism
by Akash Kapur

Fifty years ago this week, at 10:30 on a warm night at the University of California, Los Angeles, the first email was sent. It was a decidedly local affair. A man sat in front of a teleprinter connected to an early precursor of the internet known as Arpanet and transmitted the message “login” to a colleague in Palo Alto.

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