On Take Two today, the US has charged five people in the Chinese Army with cyber-spying. We'll find out if it will increase the tension between the US and China, AT&T says it will buy DirecTV, plus, psychedelic drugs are back and they're in the hands of scientists. And we'll get the latest news from Hollywood with our regular segment, On The Lot with Rebecca Keegan. That and a whole lot more.
US charges Chinese military operatives with economic cyber-espionage
This morning,t he US charged five members of the Chinese military with cyber economic espionage and computer hacking. US Attorney General Eric Holder made the announcement at a press conference in Washington, "Today we are announcing an indictment against five officers of the Chinese People's Liberation Army for serious cyber security breaches against six American victim companies."
They're accused of hacking into the systems of American companies in an effort to steal trade secrets. The companies affected include Alcoa, Westinghouse Electric, Allegheny Technologies, Solar World and the United Steelworkers Union.
This marks the first time the US has brought such criminal charges against a foreign nation.
Siobhan Gorman writes about the case for the Wall Street Journal and joined Take Two to talk about it. For more, please click on the "listen now" button when the audio is posted.
AT&T moves to buy DirecTV for nearly $50 billion
In the latest major media deal, AT&T says it will buy DirecTV. It's a move that could affect millions of customers and pose a challenge to other media giants in the industry.
AT&T announced the nearly $50 billion deal Sunday.
Bloomberg reporter Jeffrey McCracken told Take Two that the deal has to be approved by federal regulators, which could take up to a year.
Please click on the "listen" button for more when audio is posted.
Psychiatric research turns to psychedelic drugs to treat ailments
This is Part One of our Psychedelic Science series. Click here for Part Two, here forPartThree, and here for Part Four.
Psychedelic drugs are back and they're in the hands of scientists. Researchers are studying their use in treating everything from anxiety disorders and PTSD to alcoholism and adult autism.
This week, KPCC's Stephanie O'Neill has a series of reports on the therapeutic potential of various illegal drugs. The first installments of Psychedelic Science, the resurgence in psychedelics research in the U.S.
KPCC launches new health blog, 'Impatient'
Many people across the country have a lot of questions every time they visit their doctor
Is this procedure covered?
How much is this going to cost?
Well for those questions and more, KPCC has just the right medicine.
The station has launched a new health blog called ... Impatient.
KPCC healthcare reporter Rebecca Plevin sat down with Take Two to talk about the blog and what people will be able to glean from it.
For more, please click on the "listen now" button.
Former lifers discuss hopes, fears after winning parole
For decades, California inmates serving long sentences such as 25-years-to-life had very little chance of being released. Parole was routinely denied by the Board of Parole Hearings or blocked by the governor.
But in the past few years, there's been a dramatic change. Since a key Supreme Court ruling in 2008, the number of so-called "lifers" winning parole has steadily climbed. Since then, more than 1,700 lifers have been released
VIDEO: After 17 years in prison, a second chance
The California Report's Scott Shafer has the story.
Preventing sexual assault in prison
More than a decade ago, Congress unanimously passed legislation aimed at preventing rape behind bars, but implementing the legislation has proved to be a challenge.
In fact, at least one governor said he'd rather lose federal funding than comply with the regulations.
Joaquin Sapien wrote about the topic for ProPublica and sat down to talk to Take Two. For more, click the "listen now" link.
Wealth gap among racial groups remains wide, report finds
While we continue to see signs of economic recovery in the U.S., some experts point to a persistent wealth gap among different groups as a troubling sign in the economy. That gap is especially stark among racial groups, according to a new study out from the Center for Global Policy Solutions.
The authors of the report also say closing that wealth gap is fundamental to the country's national security.
Dr. William Darity, one of the authors and professor of public policy at Duke University, joins Take Two to explain the findings of the report.
Key highlights from the report include:
- More than 40 percent of Asian and Hispanic homeowners lived in one of the states hardest hit by the housing crisis (which include Arizona, California and Nevada).
- Latino homeowners experienced the largest drop in net worth following the recession.
- For most African Americans and Latinos, checking accounts are their only liquid asset.
- For every dollar in wealth held by whites, African Americans and Latinos held only 5 and 6 cents respectively. Even in the recovery period, that disparity remains nearly unchanged.
The full report, Beyond Broke: Why Closing the Racial Wealth Gap is a Priority for National Security, is available online.
What do you think of Disneyland's price hike?
Disneyland announced Sunday that it's raising its ticket prices.
The admission fee for a one-day pass for those 10 years and older jumped four dollars — to 96 bucks. Four dollars might not seem like a lot, but single-day ticket prices have more than doubled in the last decade.
Officials at Disneyland issued a statement saying: "Like any business, we periodically evaluate our pricing and make adjustments based on a variety of factors."
On KPCC's Facebook page, we had more than a 100 responses to this story, with one listener, Starr Bales posting: "I couldn't afford it before this increase. 500 dollars-plus for a family of 4 for the day just to spend an hour waiting for each ride. Ferrrrrget it."
But not everyone is angry. Vince Pena, a Southern California annual pass holder says this price hike isn't going to halt his trips to the Magic Kingdom.
For more on this we spoke with Lisa Robertson, she's the author of the blog "Babes in Disneyland," which offers travel tips for families visiting the park. You can listen to the full segment by clicking "Listen Now" in the upper left.
What do you think of the price hike?
Study finds e-cigarettes increase superbug resistance
The effects of e-cigarettes on users' health have been up for debate for some time now. Now a new study from UC San Diego and researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs suggests e-cigarette vapor makes drug-resistant bacteria, like MRSA, harder to kill. Another worrisome finding of the study is that e-cigarette vapor could also impair the immune system's ability to fight infection.
The results of the study were released yesterday at the American Thoracic Society's international conference in San Diego.
Dr. Laura Crotty Alexander is a UC San Diego assistant clinical professor of medicine and staff physician at VA San Diego Healthcare System. She led the study and joined Take Two to discuss the findings.
For more, please click on the "listen now" button when the audio is posted.
California's biggest auto employer is now Tesla
The sales of Tesla's all-electric cars continue to climb, and so does the size of its workforce.
Tesla is now the biggest auto-industry employer in California -- employing even more people than Toyota. It's a gap that's set to grow when Toyota moves many positions to Texas by 2017.
Alan Ohnsman, reporter for Bloomberg News, explains to Take Two what kind of jobs it's creating, and why it's not following the path of other car manufacturers to places in the South.
Los Angeles studies its tiniest residents — insects
While they may buzz around your head, being a nuisance, bugs can be a goldmine of information for scientists. Now researchers are trying to count all of the ants, bed bugs, bees, cockroaches and mosquitoes in big cities like Los Angeles.
The California Report's Alex Schmidt has more on a large urban insect study now underway.
On a sloping hillside yard in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, entomologist Lisa Gonzalez kneels to get to work. She's securing the stakes of a 5-foot-tall insect-catching trap made of netting. Homeowner Natalie Brejcha and her daughter, Tenny, look on.
"Insects are basically just randomly flying by," explains Gonzalez. "It's open on two sides. The insects get intercepted by this trap. If you notice, it's darker on the bottom and lighter on the top. Well, if insects are trying to escape, they're going to go towards the light, and toward the apex of the trap. There's a little hole at the top of the bottle, so they fall in and they get collected in the ethanol."
The setup is part of a groundbreaking study being conducted by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. It will be one of the most sustained looks at insects in an urban environment ever, and it's happening with the help of 30 property owners across the city. For the next three years, they'll all host traps like these in different parts of the city. The idea, in a nutshell, is to understand the effects of urbanization on living creatures.
"What we're really interested in doing is understand the effect of urbanization on organismal biodiversity," says study manager Dean Pentcheff. "So how is it that we, as we civilized this city — paved it over, diked it, dammed it and channelized it — how have we affected the biodiversity here? The tool we're using to study that is insects. So if you want to study biodiversity, you pick the most biodiverse species on the planet."
Indeed, the stats on insects are impressive: Scientists know of roughly 1 million insect species now, but they estimate there are probably closer to 10 million on earth. Every week, each site participating in the study is collecting hundreds of bugs. Most participants found out about the study through the Natural History Museum, and they do have some responsibilities. They're all expected to change the jars once a week and keep an eye on the trap. But to Natalie Brejcha, it’s no problem.
"I know this sounds corny, but we feel really special to get to be a part of this,” Brejcha says. “It's just amazing for our city to get to see what's really here, and I'm just really tickled to be a part of it. So the three-year commitment wasn't that big of a deal to us.”
In Brejcha's kitchen, entomologist Gonzalez pulls out a multicolored specimen to show Tenny.
"This is one of my favorite groups of flies — they're called flower flies, or syrphid flies."
"It kinda looks like a bee," Tenny interjects.
"Yes, I'm glad you brought that up," Gonzalez says. "A lot of flies are mimics of bees and wasps, which means they look just like a bee or like a wasp, but they're not. They're a fly."
For some participants, this experience is the best part of the study — having a personal insect consultant stop by to explain what's really going on in their own backyards. Gonzalez explains to Tenny and her mother that they've collected only three or four flower fly specimens, and the one found in their own backyard was particularly beautiful.
All of the specimens collected in the study go back to the museum lab to get sorted and archived forever, and will, possibly, yield exciting discoveries pertaining to adaptation. There's a good reason insects can tell us so much about evolution: their short life spans.
"We think of organisms as living through many years," study manager Dean Pentcheff explains, "but for most organisms, a year is much longer than their life span. If you're dealing with something like a small fly, that has a really rapid life cycle, you watch evolution play out."
Since this is one of the longest studies ever to look at insects in an urban environment, researchers all over the world are waiting to get their hands on the data collected in Los Angeles. Geneticists, specialists in bacteria and many others could make new discoveries. New species, cures for disease — with so much unknown in the insect world, anything is possible.
California honey production dwindles as drought continues
The drought continues to affect residents and businesses throughout the state. This time it's California's honey producers that are being impacted.
Here to explain how the drought is affecting honey production is Gene Brandi, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.
Shrimp shells could make the green plastic of the future
To paraphrase the famous line from the film, The Graduate, "Two words: Shrimp plastics."
Maybe not what the screenwriters had envisioned, but if scientists at Harvard University have their way, there may be a great future in shrimp plastics. They're made from a polymer called chitin found in shrimp shells and common in the natural world in everything from exoskeletons to butterfly wings.
Unlike other forms of bioplastic, like those made from potatoes or corn, chitin plastic does not simply replace the carbon source for the polymer, it actually replaces the carbon-based plastic polymer, making it a totally biodegradable and sustainable material.
Researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute used chitin from discarded shrimp shells from a shrimp processing plant to make plastic materials from egg cartons to chess pieces.
Lead researcher Javier Fernandez joined the show to explain how chitin works. For more, please click on the "listen now" link.