Posts tagged with "UCLA"

Scientists are working on a gene-hacking drug that could treat baldness

September 15, 2022

Using gene modification techniques, a team of researchers has come up with a new treatment for balding, Wired reports — a condition experienced to varying degrees by two-thirds of American men by age 35.

The team members—associated with the University of California-Irvine and a biotech company called Amplifica—believe they’ve identified the signaling pathway that drives hair growth to find new ways to stop stem cells from giving up on producing hair follicles.

Experiments with mice—as detailed in a new paper published in the journal Developmental Cell last month—have been promising. The mice were genetically modified to have the hair growth signaling pathway turned on permanently.

The result, according to a report in Futurism:The mice rapidly grew hair, in a promising first step towards a potentially groundbreaking treatment for an incredibly common condition—especially considering that current treatment options like hair transplants and hair growth drugs are invasive and expensive.

Using RNA sequencing, the team found that a molecule called SCUBE3, which appears to hack follicles into producing hair again, was being expressed by the mice that had their genes modified.

In an especially promising twist, the technique even worked in mice that had human hair follicles grafted to their skins.

There’s much work to do before the treatment could be used on people. But UCLA professor and Amplifica chief scientific officer Maksim Plikus has no problems envisioning a future in which SCUBE3 is a simple, Botox injection-like treatment for balding patients.

“You have a patient sitting in a dentist-like chair, they close their eyes, and then you go tch, tch, tch, tch,” Plikus told Wired.

The molecule would simply be injected into the scalp less than a millimeter into the skin, a procedure that would take less than 20 minutes, according to Plikus.

The system does have one major flaw: what if patients don’t have hair follicles to begin with? In that case, they’ll be stuck with the option of having new follicles transplanted.

Despite that limitation, scientists are investigating new ways of addressing an issue faced by the majority of the male population—and a large chunk of the female population as well—with options that are far less invasive and potentially much cheaper.

Research contact: @futurism

U.S. President Donald Trump (right) on Telemundo with news anchor José Díaz-Balart. (Photo source: Screen grab from Telemundo)

Trump tells ‘tall tales’ on Telemundo about his relationship with Hispanics

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June 25, 2019

As of June 7—869 days into his term of office—President Donald Trump had told, 10,796 lies and misstatements to the American people, according to The Washington Post

That number undoubtedly has increased over the past few weeks. And, CNN reports, it grew by at least three after the president spoke exclusively with Noticiero Telemundo anchor José Díaz Balart on June 20 for his Spanish-language news update.

During that television face-to-face, Donald Trump made three glaringly inaccurate statements about the Hispanic population, alone. He also made false representations about Chinese immigration to the United States; and about the Veterans Choice healthcare program—saying he had passed that legislation, which was, in fact, signed into law by former President Barack Obama.

Family separations

But that was far from Trump’s only fabrication concerning Obama. According to CNN, during the interview, Trump claimed that the former president had created—and then left him with—a family separation policy.

“When I became president, President Obama had a separation policy,” Trump said. “I didn’t have it. He had it. I brought the families together. I’m the one that put ’em together.”

Interviewer José Díaz-Balart challenged Trump on the assertion, pointing out that thousands of children were reunited with their parents in the last year after his administration’s zero-tolerance policy had separated them. But Trump pushed back, wrongly insisting that he “inherited separation, and I changed the plan, and I brought people together.”

CNN Facts First: Trump did not inherit an Obama policy of routinely separating migrant children from their parents. Separations were rare under Obama. Trump made them standard.

In March 2017, John Kelly, then the secretary of Homeland Security, told CNN that he was thinking about implementing a separation program “to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network.” (In May, Kelly joined the board of Caliburn International. A conglomerate that operates the largest facility for migrant children in the country, according to a report by The Chicago Tribune.)

In April 2018, Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, announced a new “zero tolerance” policy in which everybody caught crossing the border illegally would be criminally prosecuted — a change he explicitly noted would result in regular separations.

“If you’re smuggling a child, we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you don’t want your child to be separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally,” Sessions said.

Separations did sometimes occur under Obama, but they were non-routine and much less frequent, according to immigration experts and former Obama officials. They occurred in exceptional cases, such as those where the parent was being criminally prosecuted for carrying drugs across the border or other serious crimes.

It is technically true, CNN notes, that Trump is the one who ended the separation policy: in June 2018, he signed an executive order to detain families together. But he was ending his own policy, not Obama’s, and he only signed the order after a furious public outcry.

Popularity among Hispanics

During the same interview, much to the incredulity of  Díaz-Balart, CNN reports, Trump claimed he had seen a significant increase in his popularity with Hispanics—a 17-point spike that had brought him to 50% approval.

Trump: “And you know my poll numbers with Hispanics went up 17 points?” Díaz-Balart: “Well…” Trump: “Okay, explain that. I’ve been tough…” Díaz-Balart: “You’ve been tough, but…” Trump: “…and yet my poll numbers with Hispanics have gone way up.”

Trump: “Well, right now I’m at 50%…for a Republican, I’m at 50%. I went up 17 points. You know why? The Hispanics…” Díaz-Balart: “I have not seen any poll that says…” Trump: “Well, we’ll show it to you.” Díaz-Balart : “With all due respect, that you have…” Trump: “We’ll show it to you.” Díaz-Balart: “50% of the Latino support…” Trump: “No, no. We’ll show it to you. But let me tell you. We went up 17 points. You saw that. I went up 17 points because I’m tough at the border. Because the Hispanics want toughness at the border. They don’t want people coming and taking their jobs. They don’t want criminals to come because they understand the border better than anybody.”

CNN Facts First: Trump does not have a 50%t approval rating among Hispanics, according to the latest public polling.

According to the cable news network, there was one January poll, by Marist/NPR/PBS, that showed that his approval rating with Latinos had indeed increased to 50 %. Trump immediately began touting this poll upon its release, and it might have been what he was referring to in the Telemundo interview five months later.

But polls conducted after January, including polls from the same pollster, have not shown an approval rating even close to 50%.

In fact, in the Marist/NPR/PBS poll in June, Trump’s approval among Latinos was just 24%.

Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions and a political science professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, told CNN that the recent data suggest “Trump has NOT made any inroads with Latinos.”

Hispanic wealth

Trump also claimed in the Telemundo interview that Hispanics were losing wealth under Obama.

“Hispanics today are—have the average net wealth—the wealthiest they’ve ever been, under Trump. Not under Obama. ‘Cause under Obama they were going the wrong way.”

CNN Facts First: Hispanic wealth and income were increasing under Obama—not “going the wrong way.”

Between 2013 and 2016, Latino median household wealth rose from $13,700 to $20,600, the Hispanic Wealth Project noted in its 2019 State of Hispanic Wealth report.

Separate Census Bureau data on household income cited by CNN also showed a steady increase for Hispanics during the Obama era. In 2017 dollars, mean income for Hispanics increased from $59,818 in 2009, Obama’s first year, to $68,252 in 2016, his last full year.

The 2017 figure, under Trump, was a record: $68,319. But this was a continuation of the Obama-era trend, and it was an increase of a mere 0.001%.

Research contact: @CNN

Photo source: Wikihow

Class-action lawsuit filed against eight colleges snared in admissions bribery scandal

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March 15, 2019

As if top U.S. colleges are not charging enough, parents are bribing industry officials to get their kids into the “right”schools.

Among the high-profile moms and dads who now are being hit with federal criminal charges for providing monetary inducements—some of them, six figures high—to college advisers, test proctors, admissions officers, or athletics coaches to admit their children are actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, as well as top business and legal executives nationwide.

Now, a class-action civil lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by two Stanford University students, Erica Olsen and Kalea Woods, against eight top universities in connection with the massive college admissions bribery scandal, which hit the news on March 12,

The defendants in the lawsuit are Yale University, the University of Southern California, Stanford University, UCLA, the University of San Diego, the University of Texas, Wake Forest University, and Georgetown University. Federal prosecutors have said the schools, themselves, were victims of the scam,l according to a report by CNBC.

Indeed, the suit accuses each of the universities of being “negligent in failing to maintain adequate protocols and security measures in places to guarantee the sanctity of the college admissions process.”

And the suit, which claims more than $5 million in damages, alleges that, as a result of the payoffs, “unqualified students found their way into the admissions rolls of highly selective universities, while those students who played by the rules and did not have college-bribing parents were denied admission.”

Although the only two named plaintiffs to date are Olsen and Woods, the action would ultimately include potentially thousands of students as complainants—if not more, if the case is granted class-action status by a judge.

Also named as a defendant, according to The New York Times, is William “Rick” Singer, 59, the owner of a  college preparatory business, the Edge College & Career Network, who masterminded and profited from the scheme.

The suit claims that the universities named as defendants “knew or should have known of these corrupt practices because the funds” that were being used as bribes to gain admittance for the children of wealthy parents “were often going into university accounts; and to prominent figures, such as coaches and directors in charge of university accounts.”

The suit alleges that the plaintiff, “Olsen has also been damaged because she is a student at Stanford University, another one of the universities plagued by the fraud scandal. Her degree is now not worth as much as it was before, because prospective employers may now question whether she was admitted to the university on her own merits, versus having parents who were willing to bribe school officials.”

And it says that her co-plaintiff, Woods, at the time she applied to USC for admission, “similarly was never informed that the process of admission at USC was an unfair, rigged process, in which parents could buy their way into the university through bribery and dishonest schemes.”

Wake Forest’s president, Nathan Hatch, in a letter made public said that “the university has cooperated fully with the investigation.”

Hatch said he “to make abundantly clear that Wake Forest is considered by the U.S. Department of Justice to be a victim of this fraud. In no way has it been suggested that the university was involved in the deceitful practices, nor were any employees, other than [Wake Forest volleyball coach Bill] Ferguson, accused of wrongdoing.”

Ferguson has reportedly been placed on administrative leave by the institution.

Lawyers for Olsen and Woods, as well as spokesmen for the other universities, did not immediately respond to requests for comment from CNBC.

Research contact: @_DanMangan