On Wednesday Take Two discusses the US and China's agreement to combat global warming, the difficulties women veterans face and a new site that shows the science behind why sugar is bad for you.
Climate change plan sets ambitious goals for US, China
China and the U.S. are responsible for about a third of the world's carbon output, making them the top two greenhouse gas emitters. Their reluctance to pledge to serious cuts has been a major stumbling block to global treaties in the past.
Now the two nations have outlined some of the boldest goals yet to cut emissions and spur green technology.
The plan, announced late Tuesday, follows months of talks and a meeting this week between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
This is how the White House put it: "The world’s two largest economies, energy consumers, and carbon emitters are reaching across traditional divides and working together to demonstrate leadership on an issue that affects the entire world."
So far, the proposals have been widely applauded, but observers are cautious.
There is still the question of how it will be put into effect and how domestic policies could hinder reaching the goals.
For more, Take Two is joined by Alex Wang, a professor at UCLA's law school. Wang helped establish the Beijing office for the Natural Resources Defense Council where he was senior attorney.
US and China reach tech trade agreement
Another deal that emerged from President Obama's trip to China is that the two nations reached a breakthrough agreement on tech trade.
Joining Take Two to talk more about it is Jeffrey Wasserstrom, history professor and China specialist at the University of California at Irvine.
Female Navy Vet suffers military sexual trauma, finds comfort in comedy
Allison Gill was just 21 years old when she joined the military. In 1995, she was a Petty Officer in the Navy, stationed at a nuclear-power training command based in Orlando. There were about 600 men. And just four women.
Gill was one of just two of those women who wasn't married, which led to a lot of attention from the male sailors. One night, while at a party with some of these guys, things got pretty ugly.
These days Gill is a stand up comic — a choice some might find surprising given what she endured in the military. She joins Take Two to tell her story of suffering with Military Sexual Trauma (MST), and how she became an advocate for women in the military and a comedian with the nonprofit Veterans of Comedy.
This piece is part of KPCC's ongoing coverage of issues affecting veterans for Veterans Day 2014. See more of our coverage at KPCC.org/vets.
Female veterans have unique, often unmet mental and physical health needs
The number of women serving in the military continues to rise. In fact, they now make up about 15 percent of all active-duty military personnel. Despite this, the military remains a very male-dominated institution.
And female personnel face unique challenges and often have unique mental and physical healthcare needs.
For more on whether those needs are being met, Dr. Kimberley Finney joins Take Two. She's a retired Air Force officer, clinical psychologist and Professor of Social Work at USC. Dr. Finney says that when women transition from "active duty one day, to the next day, you're a vet," they don't often even realize that the Department of Veterans Affairs provides women's health services.
This piece is part of KPCC's ongoing coverage of issues affecting veterans for Veterans Day 2014. See more of our coverage at KPCC.org/veterans.
Sports Roundup: Kobe's minutes played, Cy Young Awards, what an MVP should be
For Kobe Bryant, the number of minutes played - like his age - is just a number.
And Dodgers strikeout artist Clayton Kershaw must remember this, a whiff is just a whiff. A Cy is just a Cy.
This of course means it's time for sports with
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New UC website reveals health risks of hidden sugar
A great way to increase longevity — and stay lean and athletic — is to stay off the sugar, nutritionists have long argued. But obesity and diabetes aren't the only potential drawbacks of the sweet stuff, according to a team of scientists at University of California San Francisco.
They hope to educate the public about all the effects of sugar and have just launched a new website called SugarScience.org.
Laura Schmidt is the lead investigator with SugarScience.org and a professor in the school of medicine at UC San Francisco. She spoke with Take Two for more on why the website was launched and what research has found about sugar.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
How did you and your colleagues come up with this idea?
Sugar science is really about getting what we know out of the medical journals and into the public awareness. As we've seen, rising rates of obesity and metabolic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, the science around sugar and health has really taken off. We're thinking about things in very different ways than we used to. We used to just think about sugar as extra calories, something that was making us fat.
And more and more scientists are starting to realize that sugar in the kind of quantities that Americans are consuming it on average is making us sick. And no one had really surveyed the literature. And nobody for sure had taken that information and tried to share it with the American public.
You looked through 8,000 research papers?
Eight-thousand scientific papers form the base, and we have a team of 12 scientists from all different disciplines, three different universities, who have gone through these papers, including papers funded by industry to find out the answer to how much sugar are we consuming, how much is too much and exactly how is it impacting our health?
Besides diabetes and obesity, what else should we be worried about?
What's really important is to think about the effects of, say, consuming a large can of soda or sports drink, and the impact that has when it hits your body. If you’re Kobe and running around the basketball court shooting hoops as soon as that sports drink hits your system, it's going to get burned right off as energy. But if you're kicking back in your ... recliner like most of us, watching the game on a wide screen, your body is going to lay that sugar down as fat.
What we're really starting to appreciate is the different kinds of sugar that we're consuming get processed in our bodies differently. There's a lot of research going on right now about a particular kind of sugar: fructose. It’s a sugar that makes fruit taste sweet, but also half of table sugar is fructose, and half or more of high fructose corn syrup is fructose. This particular sugar, what we've learned in the last five to 10 years, is it is primarily processed in the liver, which is also the place that processes alcohol, and fructose has similar effects on liver as alcohol does. So when that can of soda or sports drink hits your liver and isn’t burned off as energy, your liver turns that sugar into fat globules, and it will lay those fats down in the liver, causing fatty liver disease, just like what people who drink too much get.
You said fructose is found in apples. What is the difference between eating an apple and downing a can of soda in terms of how the body processes the sugar?
The apple is not going to cause fatty liver disease. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is a condition we didn’t even see 30 years ago and is now affecting 31 percent of adult Americans and 13 percent of our kids. If left unchecked, it will lead to cirrhosis of the liver and require a liver transplant. When you consume the sugar in an apple, it’s a totally different story. It comes surrounded by nutrients and fiber and is totally fine.
You talk on the site about how hard it is to avoid added sugar these days.
Added sugar is hiding in 74 percent of packaged foods in your grocery store. Even things that taste savory or are marketed as healthy may have sugar to increase shelf life or palatability. And it becomes hard for people to navigate food labels and know how much sugar they are consuming. And something we do on the site is help people understand how they can lower their consumption of added sugar and especially those hidden sugars that we really don’t even get to enjoy as sweet treats.
What are your recommendations for normal healthy sugar consumption?
We recommend women should stick to six teaspoons (25 grams) a day. Men should stick to nine teaspoons or less (38 grams).
Second, you need to read those labels. You need to know what you're eating. If you log on to SugarScience.org you can see all 60 names for sugar that currently appear on those ingredient labels. People can also write our science team. We have 12 experts standing by willing to answer specific questions. You can download helpful tools and get lots of information.
Rosetta space probe lands on comet, making history
On Wednesday morning the European Space Agency landed a spacecraft on a comet for the first time in human history.
The Philae lander completed its hours-long approach after detaching from the Rosetta space probe and landed shortly after 8 a.m. PST.
RELATED: Video: Rosetta space probe lands on comet
Claudia Alexander, the project manager of the U.S. Rosetta project, shares more.
California drought leads to more smog, water theft
We may not be able to perfectly predict earthquakes, but we can expect more smog here in California.
That's thanks to the ongoing drought.
Scientists say prolonged dry spells have brought more temperature inversions, with the warmer air trapping cooler air below and concentrating pollution.
The ongoing drought has also lead to an uptick in water theft.
Reporter
, who writes about environmental issues for the Contra Costa Times, shares more.
Ending veteran homelessness: Is LA making progress?
Tuesday was a day of parades and remembrances for veterans. Wednesday it's back to work for hundreds of counselors tasked with ending veteran homelessness in the United States.
They have just over a year to make good on a promise by the current administration to get every last vet off Los Angeles' streets and into long-term housing.
Deep in L.A.'s Skid Row, on San Julian Street, Mark Meeker and Gilbert Jimenez wander the street offering assistance and first aid to anyone who needs it.
KPCC's Eric Zassenhaus reports.
California could help threatened coffee crop
The second most commonly traded commodity in the world - after oil - is coffee.
It's been grown and loved since at least the 13th century in places like Indonesia, Ethiopia and Central and South America.
But as drought and a fungus disease threaten the crop world-wide, scientists are mapping the coffee genome to learn more about this plant - and to see where else it might grow.
And California just might play a bigger role in its future.
Santa Barbara is a far cry from the tropics, where the world's most respected coffee is grown. But Good Land Organics farm owner Jay Ruskey is an experimental farmer, like a long line of Californians. Since the late 1800s, agricultural explorers have roamed the world and brought back crops that ultimately did succeed here — avocados came from Mexico and Guatemala, dates from Morocco and navel oranges from Brazil.
For the California Report, Lisa Morehouse has more.
Apple shipments may be delayed due to West Coast port slowdown
Washington state grows the most apples in the nation. This year, they're looking at a record crop of about 155 million 40-pound boxes. That's the good news.
The bad news? Many of those apples might not be able to reach their intended destination on time thanks to labor issues at West Coast sea ports. For more on this, Take Two is joined by Rebecca Lyons, the international marketing director for the Washington Apple Commission.
Touring Pacoima's Mural Mile
Recently the small San Fernando neighborhood of Pacoima was named the best place in the LA area to view a unique form of public art … the mural.
It’s something local leaders are hoping is just a small part of a new image of Pacoima.
So A Martinez took a tour of a stretch of Van Nuys Boulevard, known as Mural Mile, with a couple of experts - City Councilman Felipe Fuentes and muralist Manny Velazquez.
World's largest corn maze is so big that some call 911 to get out
Along with apple picking and pumpkin carving, corn mazes are a time-honored fall tradition.
The corn maze at the Cool Patch Pumpkin farm in Dixon, California won the distinction of world's largest corn maze back in 2007. Since then it's gotten bigger and better each year and this year, it's maybe become too good.
A few people who were lost in the maze got so worried that they called 911, even though the map they're given when they start the maze says not to call the police.
Matt Cooley, who operates the maze, says the 63-acre maze is designed to be difficult, "but if you take your time, and follow the map, you can do it."
Cooley says that on average, it usually takes people two hours to make their way through. Without any wrong turns, it's about 3 miles long.
But because the maze was so big this year, some patrons couldn't finish. A few got so frustrated that they called 911. When that happens, Cooley says, the police call him and then someone will either head in to help the people out or talk them through it over the phone.
Cooley says they keep an eye on the parking lot to make sure that everyone has made it out. On a few occasions, people have been in the maze until 3 a.m.
"Most of the time the people that are out there that late are just messing around. They're having fun," Cooley says.
But he says next year they may have to scale back.
"My brother [Mark] is the one that designs it," Cooley says, "and he always wants bigger bigger bigger. But this year he finally admitted that you know what, it might be too big."