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UCLA faculty voice: Body mass index perpetuates stigmas and indicates little about health

You’ve just returned from your morning run and you’re rustling through your snail mail when you receive some shocking news — an official memo from your employer informing you that your health insurance premium is increasing by 30 percent.

UCLA IoES fundraiser honors champions of the environment

At its recent annual gala, UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability raised a record $1.75 million for UCLA’s environmental research, education and community projects and honored four individuals who’ve made major contributions to that effort.

UCLA senior has a new flight plan

Anyadike made national headlines in summer 2009, at age 15, by piloting a single-engine, four-seater Cessna 172 from Compton, California, to Newport News, Virginia, and back, making scheduled stops in a dozen cities along the way.

Antarctica could be headed for major meltdown

In the early Miocene Epoch, temperatures were 10 degrees warmer and ocean levels were 50 feet higher — well above the ground level of modern-day New York, Tokyo and Berlin. It was more than 16 million years ago, so times were different.

Uphill battle for California’s native plant species

Invasive species have moved faster than native species, colonizing and competing in new territories. But endemic species — those unique to California — have largely stayed put. Endemics currently occupy spaces where they can successfully compete against invasive species and other disturbances – but climate change could prove too challenging.

Q&A: UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork on the science of learning

Robert Bjork, Distinguished Research Professor in the UCLA Department of Psychology, will share insights from his work as a renowned expert on human learning in the 120th Faculty Research Lecture, “How We Learn Versus How We Think We Learn.”

Don’t use body mass index to determine whether people are healthy, UCLA-led study says

Over the past few years, body mass index, a ratio of a person’s height and weight, has effectively become a proxy for whether a person is considered healthy. Many U.S. companies use their employees’ BMIs as a factor in determining workers’ health care costs.

Paul Terasaki, 86, transplant medicine pioneer, philanthropist, UCLA faculty member and alumnus

Paul Ichiro Terasaki, who spent three years with his family in a Japanese–American internment camp during World War II before becoming a three-time UCLA graduate, a pioneer in organ transplant medicine and a long-time supporter of the campus, died January 25. He was 86.

Dog domestication may have increased harmful genetic changes, UCLA biologists report

Domesticating dogs from gray wolves more than 15,000 years ago involved artificial selection and inbreeding, but the effects of these processes on dog genomes have been little-studied.

Is seeing believing? People are surprisingly bad at identifying where sights and sounds originate

“We tend to view our senses as flawless and think that to see is to believe,” she said. “So it’s eye-opening to learn that our perceptions are flawed.”