The New York Times reported on the LZ Dark Matter Experiment, which detected a particle interaction that researchers say does not fit the profile of other known interactions, though they are not claiming to have detected dark matter. Alvine Kamaha, a UCLA physicist who helped oversee construction of the detector, compared the decades-long effort to identify the elusive substance to “looking for a needle in a haystack.” The detector, located nearly a mile underground to shield it from radiation and other interference, has since collected substantially more data that researchers hope will shed light on the mysterious signal. (Kamaha was also quoted by Reuters.) Read more about UCLA in today’s USA Today, CNN and others.
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More highlights from UCLA in the News: September 1, 2026
Young people want movies and TV shows that reflect their own lives and relatable issues, rather than more stories in the fantasy genre, according to last year’s annual Teens and Screens report from the Center for Scholars and Storytellers at UCLA. They’re also looking for more content that reflects friendships, versus a focus on romantic relationships.
It is tempting to see this enormous crackdown as a distortion of immigration enforcement, a system bent to authoritarian purposes by a president unusually willing to test its limits. UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernández’s new book, “Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control,” offers a more disturbing explanation: Trump did not have to build this apparatus. America built it for him. 
“The more cases get decided without full opinions, the more important it is to get access to the papers,” Stuart Banner, a legal historian at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in an interview. 
A 2025 UCLA Health research study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that the number of planned elective egg freezing cycles nearly quadrupled between 2014 and 2021, increasing from 4,153 to 16,436. By 2023, that number climbed to more than 39,000. 
“I think this case really shines a light on postpartum mental health struggles. We know that 80 percent of women have postpartum blues, right? That’s mild tearfulness, mild irritability, kind of feeling hormonal for the first two weeks. We know that nearly one in five women have postpartum anxiety, so, a really common complication of childbirth,” said UCLA’s Dr. Katie Unverferth. 
(Book review written by UCLA’s Yelena Furman) Echoing themes found throughout Jewish American fiction, Anna Reader, the protagonist of Elaine Elinson’s new novel “Radiant as the Stars,” has moved with her family to Chicago from their native Pavolitch (today Pavoloch), a shtetl in the Russian Empire’s Ukraine, to escape the region’s recent pogroms. 


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