Today Take Two discusses officer-involved shootings in light of the death of Michael Brown in St. Louis. We look at legislation that could institute tougher penalties on assisted living facilities. We look at the candidates vying to replace Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig. All this and more.
Lack of details of officer involved in shootings frustrates Ferguson protestors
Demonstrators spent their fifth day protesting the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
The 18 year old African American was shot by a police officer Saturday afternoon while walking with a friend.
The Ferguson police department has not released the name of the officer involved, although many in the neighborhood say they know who the cop was.
That anonymity has frustrated locals who are taking their anger to the streets.
David Harris, professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh, joined Take Two to talk about the policy by law enforcement to keep the names of officers involved in shootings private.
In addition, David Klinger explains the training that officers receive to prevent incidents like this. He's an associate professor of criminology at the University of Missouri - St Louis, and author of, "Into the Kill Zone: A Cop's Eye View of Deadly Force."
Firefighters turn to new technologies to combat wildfires
Southern California has been hit with a series of major fires that burned thousands of acres and devastated many home owners. And as wildfires become more frequent, fire crews are turning to new technologies to help them try to keep them under control.
Santa Barbara County Fire Chief Michael Dyer has been working with some of this new fire tech and joins Take Two to talk more about them.
Laugh Factory offers psychiatrist in residence to comedians
Robin Williams's death by suicide earlier this week has highlighted the mental health challenges facing many comedians. One Los Angeles comedy club, the venerable Laugh Factory, has come up with an unusual way to help: they have psychiatrist in residence.
Southern California Public Radio's Rebecca Plevin has more on the story.
Vintage autos, cutting edge supercars, and even a personal spacecraft: Pebble Beach Concours
Starting this Sunday, it's officially the Concours d'Elegance, the annual gathering of the rich and motor-minded along California's Monterey coast. There are rallies, races, auctions where cars sell for millions, and this year, even a personal two-person spacecraft is on display.
Auto critic Susan Carpenter says it's also a bit of a fashion show. Vintage racers dress in period costume, complete with waxed facial hair, and at auctions and other events, attendees dress to the nines.
Carpenter also loves some of the oddball events, including the Concours d'Lemon, which celebrates some of the automotive world's less successful efforts and which includes categories such as "Needlessly Complex Italian," and "Soul-Sucking Japanese Appliance."
Carpenter is auto and motorcycle critic for the LA Register, and a regular contributor to Take Two.
Lab Notes: How anti-anxiety drugs can make fish live longer, how celebrities can ruin charities and more
Today, Take Two features our Lab Notes with KPCC's science reporter, Sanden Totten. Every other week we have him in the studio to talk about studies that he may not have had time to get to during his regular schedule, but that still blow his mind.
This week it's all about the animals... and celebrities.
1) Scientists wanted to determine whether animals other than humans felt empathy. So how did they go about testing that? Well, just so you know, empathy is the ability to feel another’s emotion — or to experience an emotional contagion — in the emotionally challenged language of science.
If I frown, you frown.
Scientists thought studying whether yawns were contagious would count as studying a sort of emotion. While it's up for debate whether a yawn actually counts as an emotion, yawns do convey a state. Furthermore, yawns are found in both humans and apes — specifically bonobos, close evolutionary cousins of humans.
So scientists from the Natural History Museum of Pisa monitored groups of people and bonobos for five years, recording 1,375 yawns.
They learned that yawns are contagious in both humans and bonobos, and, here’s the interesting part: Both species were more likely to share a yawn with someone else if that person was a close friend, family or a mate. If the ape or person were not that important to the subject, they were less likely to spread yawns between them.
That suggests that humans are not the only creatures to form close bonds and share our emotions with those we hold dear. Scientists think mirror neurons in the pre-frontal cortex — the part of the brain involved in social behavior — are triggered when certain expressions are seen in others, prompting us to copy them instinctively.
Thus, the more you like someone, the more likely they’ll make you yawn.
2) A new study found that anti-anxiety drugs are helping fish in the wild live longer. The fish end up with these drugs in their systems after humans take them and expel them or flush them down the toilet. They then make their way into the natural environment where they're sometimes absorbed by fish. It's hard to say the exact effect that they have, but past studies have shown it makes them bolder — maybe less fearful, meaning they take more chances and explore more.
Swedish scientists wanted to see how this would affect the fish over the long term, so they studied Eurasian Perch caught in the wild and exposed them to different levels of a common anti-anxiety drug. As it turns out, the drug helped the perch live significantly longer than those who were clean of any pharmaceuticals.
Which is actually a bad thing.
Fish like the perch are an important part of the ecosystem, but they typically have a high mortality rate. Many die while growing up. Too many perch — or other fish — can throw an ecosystem off balance.
3) Lastly, a new study claims that celebrities aren’t actually very useful at promoting charities. According to surveys conducted at the Universities of Manchester and Sussex, researchers asked people about charities and celebrities and they found that 75 percent of people said that they didn’t respond in anyway to a celebrity appeal to help a cause. Almost 66 percent could not name a single celebrity linked with high-profile charities such as Action Aid, Amnesty International or Oxfam.
Some celebrities do seem to be able to buck this trend — say a Bono or a Angelina Jolie — but for the most part these celebrity charity campaigns don’t improve chances someone will help that charity.
So, celebrities might boost their own profile by backing a worthy cause, but science shows that the charity won't benefit nearly as much.
It takes two: How creativity and conflict thrive in pairs
Partnerships can bring out the best in people — or the worst. Creativity and conflict thrive when two people with just the right chemistry come together.
Writer Joshua Wolf Shenk spent five years looking at creative pairs for his new book, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. He joined Take Two on Thursday to talk about it.
Read an excerpt of the book here.
State of Affairs: weekly politics roundup
Southern California Public Radio reporters Alice Walton and Frank Stoltze join Take Two for a weekly roundup of politics news in California.
This week: a $7.5 billion water bond will be on the November ballot, L.A. Police Chief Charlie Beck is reappointed for another five-year term, and the DWP fight at Los Angeles City hall may be settled.
Freeways act as fences, trapping threatened Santa Monica mountain lions
A small population of cougars lives at the margin of metropolitan Los Angeles in the Santa Monica Mountains. But the isolation of the group, surrounded by freeways and development, has threatened their genetic diversity according to research published this week in the journal Current Biology.
Lead author and National Park Service biologist, Seth Riley, said over the 12 years of the study only one individual has crossed a freeway from outside the region to join the group and inject diversity into the gene pool.
Similarly only one male member has left the group, P-22, who made his way out of the Santa Monica Mountains and into Griffith Park. However, his new habitat is an even smaller and more isolated one with no opportunity for mating.
Under normal circumstances almost all of the young members of a population would leave their home range to seek mating opportunities elsewhere. But the danger of crossing major freeways has made that almost impossible for the cougars in the Santa Monica Mountains.
The isolation of the Santa Monica Mountain group has amplified the effect of behaviors that are rare in other more diverse groups of animals like inbreeding, and intraspecial killing of siblings, mates or young.
Riley and his team propose building wildlife "overpasses" that could connect natural habitats across freeways and provide a throughway for cougars to leave and enter the Santa Monica Mountains.
Assisted living facilities face challenges as senior population grows
Over the last few year, California has seen substantial growth in the number of assisted living facilities. While they were originally intended to care for relatively independent, healthy seniors, many of these facilities are having to deal with elders with complex medical conditions.
It's a population for which facilities are often unprepared, and allegations of neglect and abuse have been on the rise. The penalties for their mistakes are little more than a parking fine, however. Senior writer for the Center for Health Reporting joins Take Two with more.
LA 'Cholo' subculture thrives in São Paulo, Brazil
While journalist Phuong-Cac Nguyen was living in São Paulo, she happened upon a group of men dressed in classic Los Angeles “cholo” style — Dickies, tattoos, white socks pulled up to their knees.
She wrongly assumed they were Mexican-American tourists visiting from L.A. until they spoke Portuguese to her and led her to discover a thriving Chicano, low-rider culture in Brazil. Her short documentary "South American Cholo" examines this Brazilian subculture, and she joined Take Two on Thursday to talk about it.
For more information on attending a screening of the film Thursday night in Los Angeles, click here.