On Wednesday, Take Two discusses how NASA is working to end its reliance on Russia by 2017, technology behind driverless cars, and how new CA groundwater regulations could help conserve water. We'll also look at the history of drought and its affect on wildflowers.
Aid organizations respond to new U.S. Ebola response plan
President Barack Obama announced Tuesday that the U.S. would commit 3,000 military personnel to coordinate operations to combat the Ebola outbreak that has killed more than 2,400 people in West Africa.
It's a ramped up plan that includes building 17 treatment centers and training for thousands of healthcare workers.
"Our forces are going to bring their expertise in command-and-control, in logistics, in engineering. And our Department of Defense is better at that, our armed services are better at that than any organization on earth," President Obama said, speaking from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
The announcement came as welcomed news for aid organizations that have been on the ground working to stop the spread of the disease in West Africa.
"There's no question this will save lives," says Michael Stulman with Catholic Relief Services in Dakar, Senegal.
But, he added that other nations would need to step in to make up for a massive shortfall in funding.
"We also have to bear in mind that the U.S. is earmarking the majority of the support to Liberia, but of the 4,800 cases across the region, there is also a significant number that are in Sierra Leone and Guinea."
And one of the particular challenges for the U.S. military, according to Stulman, will be gaining the trust of local populations.
"People are scared of Ebola and some people don't trust the governments," Stulman says. "So we need to be cautious as the military is deployed; they have to be aware of these types of dynamics. And they have to work very closely with some of the key stakeholders that have already been on the ground for months... that's absolutely critical."
Role of SpaceX in NASA deal marks shift in space contracts
Astronauts will soon be flying to space from crafts launched from American soil. At least, that's the idea from NASA, which yesterday awarded contracts to two US firms to develop, test and fly space taxis to the international space station.
Why are they called "space taxis"?
Partly because unlike most space programs in the past, both companies will own and operate the equipment. That raises a host of questions, says Andy Pasztor, senior special writer with the Wall Street Journal. For example, how will federal oversight work? What kind of safety measures will be put in place? And will the rockets be used to ferry space tourists as well as astronauts?
RELATED: NASA picks Boeing and SpaceX to ferry astronauts
In the announcement Tuesday, NASA chief Charles Bolden called it "the most ambitious and exciting chapter in the history of NASA and human space flight." The agency expects the first trip to take place by 2017.
Boeing, a giant in the industry, has been around for nearly a century, but Hawthorne-based SpaceX is relatively new to the scene. The company, headed by Elon Musk, represents the new, entrepreneurial spirit in space travel, said Pasztor.
“SpaceX is deeply honored by the trust NASA has placed in us," Musk, the CEO & Chief Designer of SpaceX said in a statement to KPCC. "It is a vital step in a journey that will ultimately take us to the stars and make humanity a multi-planet species."
Mars: We're talking about you.
Fall TV preview: The Flash, Madam Secretary, Black-ish and more
While it doesn't feel like summer is over, fall officially starts next week and that means the new TV season is getting under way.
Brian Lowry, TV critic for Variety, says that while this isn't a great fall for new shows, "The Flash" (CW, Oct. 4) will be one to look out for.
"This is fun, and if they can maintain the level of special effects...I think this could have a real chance of being a success for the CW," Lowry says.
"The Flash" isn't the only new show based on a comic book character this season. "Gotham" (Fox, Sept. 22) is a "Batman" prequel, starring Ben McKenzie as Detective James Gordon.
"Gotham" has already won some advance praise — the Television Critic's Association has declared it the year's most promising new show. Lowry says it's "a very gritty, dark, beautifully made pilot."
But, it may not play so well with die-hard comic book fans because "none of the characters that you know from the 'Batman' mythology can be those characters during the show, so you're going to have to buy into it as a straight cop detective show."
Then there are a couple of shows that seem to have similar stories: Katherine Heigl as a CIA analyst and Alfre Woodard as the president in "State of Affairs" (NBC, Nov. 17) and Tea Leoni playing the secretary of state in "Madam Secretary" (CBS, Sept. 21).
Lowry says there isn't much to distinguish "State of Affairs" and "Madam Secretary" from one another.
"The fact that they developed two shows that were so similar, there's a little bit of the Hillary Clinton factor, there's a little bit of 'Zero Dark Thirty,' and so it shows what was in the zeitgeist coming into the development season," Lowry says.
And ABC is one network that people will be paying attention to because of their very diverse line-up of shows: "Cristela" (Oct. 10), "Fresh Off the Boat," and "Blackish" (Sept. 24).
But whether the shows will be successful remains to be seen, Lowry says.
"The problem that's happened at times with that in the past is that networks have paid lip service to [diversity], and then haven't done it," Lowry says. "Or, they've done it and the show fails, as most shows do, and they get skittish and they back away from it... I think everybody's going to be watching very closely to see if any of these shows get any traction."
Attention cord-cutters: Big cable may give you more ways to watch
Television as we know it may soon become obsolete as more and more people cut the cord and watch their favorite shows online.
There's been "an escalation of rhetoric in recent weeks," says Andrew Wallenstein, editor-in-chief for digital at Variety.
He pointed to remarks from the CEOs of some big pay-TV networks — HBO, Showtime, Stars — who are talking publicly more than ever about a future where it will possible for people to watch some of their favorite channels without a traditional TV package.
"There's just a glimmer of hope at this point," Wallenstein says, cautioning that you shouldn't be quick to cut the cord just yet.
Sports Roundup: The NFL's continuing problems and dysfunction on the Dodgers
The NFL gets called to the carpet and are the Dodgers winning despite dysfunction? It's what we're talking about on our regular sports chat with Andy and Brian Kamenetzky.
The NFL
In the span of 5 days, Minnesota Vikings RB Adrian Peterson went from being deactivated, to activated...and now exempt. That means he can't play or practice but he will get paid. Peterson has been accused of child abuse for beating his 4-year-old son with a tree branch. The Vikings were praised Friday for moving quickly, then they were ripped for bringing him back... how do they look today?
The NFL players union is appealing the Ray Rice suspension and they are asking everyone to avoid rushing to judgement on all of these cases. Does the public want to hear that right now?
And right before this past Sunday's slate of games began, ESPN anchor Hannah Storm delivered a monologue questioning the NFL's integrity:
Dysfunctional Dodgers
The Dodgers hold a 3 game on the Giants and are looking good as the playoffs approach...that is, as long as you don't look in the dugout. On Monday, outfielders Matt Kemp and Yasiel Puig had a heated discussion that no one on the team seems to want to talk about. Despite their solid season so far, some have called the team "dysfunctional"....manager Don Mattingly compared the team to the early 70s Oakland A's who at times literally fought each other but won 3 straight World Series.
Exploring California’s coast for lost ships
A team of government scientists recently explored the bottom of the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco for a unique prize … sunken ships. Experts estimate that over the years, more than 300 ships have been lost at sea in a place called the Gulf of the Farallones, an area of more than 1,000 square miles in the Pacific just west of San Francisco.
Here to tell us more is James Delgado, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Maritime Heritage Program.
How new Calif. groundwater regulations could help save water
California Gov. Jerry Brown signed landmark groundwater regulation into law on Tuesday.
It requires local agencies to manage groundwater supplies in their region and intervene if aquifers get too low. Until this law passed, California was the only western state not to regulate its groundwater.
Lester Snow of the California Water Foundation explains the law's significance and how it might combat the problems caused by the drought.
LA County Probation Dept. investigates injury claims
Officials have taken stabs at reforming California worker's compensation system many times over the years, but as anyone involved in it will tell you, it's still in need of fixing.
KPCC’s Rina Palta reports on one Los Angeles County agency’s campaign to weed out the bad apples and get people back to work — and it's not without controversy.
Read the full story: Questionable injury claims spur investigations at LA County Probation Dept.
Study: Megadrought a possibility in Southwest
If you've been enjoying the extremely dry, hot, uncomfortable weather we've been having here in Southern California, then good news: We could be having more of it — like several decades more of it.
The odds of experiencing future megadroughts in the Southwest are pretty high, according to a new study by Cornell, University of Arizona and U.S. Geological Survey researchers.
Toby Ault is a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University and lead author on the paper, and he joins A Martinez on the line to talk about why, even if we experience El Niño this year, it probably won't make much of a dent.
History of drought in the West
The idea of a megadrought may sound alarming, but it's nothing new to the West. So, how does this drought compare to those of the past?
"If you're looking at single year droughts, it ranks pretty high over the last 500 years; it's about the third worst drought over the last 500," says Professor Lynn Ingram, a paleoclimatologist at UC Berkeley and the author of the "West Without Water."
However, there have been times when California has been dry for decades to even more than century if you look back 5,000 years.
"If you picture what we have this year extending a century long, that's what happened during the medieval period," Ingram says.
On average, California has been getting drier, but the 20th century has been relatively wetter compared to the last 2,000 years.
"It sort of gave people a false sense of what to expect in terms of precipitation," Ingram says. "Our population grew, we developed a huge agricultural industry, built reservoirs on almost every river" — essentially building a water system dependent on a level of precipitation the West may not always have.
"The region has extremely variable climate," Ingram says. "So, for the future, I think we really have to prepare for, perhaps, returning to a drier period."
The 'pretty side of climate change': Rocky Mountains see longer wildflower seasons
Think of global warming doomsday and you might imagine massive wildfires, ice sheets melting and breaking apart and sea levels rising to engulf major cities.
But, how about fields full of beautiful wild flowers? That's what's happening in the Rocky Mountains as the climate has changed over the past decades.
Reporter Krista Langlois wrote about this for High Country News.
Read the full story: Zen and the art of wildflower science
Over the Summer, Langlois met with Dr. David Inouye of the University of Maryland. He's been studying a patch of meadow high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado for four decades. Langlois describes Inouye as a devoted and patient man.
Ever since the early 1970s, Inouye has spent every single Summer meticulously studying the flowers and plants surrounding the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado.
And now, with more than 2 million wildflower samples recorded over the last four decades, Inouye's research shows that the bloom season has extended an average of 35 days — evidence of big changes to the climate.
“Oh! This is good news for a change, this is, kind of, the pretty side of climate change,” Langlois said to herself when she first heard of the study.
But, it turns out this seemingly pleasant side effect of climate change has some negative repercussions as well.
For example, the extended bloom can be confusing for flower-dependent creatures in the area, like hummingbirds and bumble bees. To explain, Langlois borrowed an analogy from one of Inouye’s graduate students:
Imagine “you’ve been going to the same grocery store for fifty years, and you know where everything is, everything’s in the same place. And then you go back one year and all of a sudden, everything’s screwed up. It’s just a little more effort. You can’t find what you’re looking for,” she said.
California issues first permits for self driving cars
California is one step closer this week to making the 1980s Hollywood fantasy of Knight Rider a 21st century reality because permits for self-driving cars issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles officially went into effect Tuesday. Now a handful of companies can test automated cars on public roads.
Buckle up — it's gonna be a wild ride.
John O'Dell is a Senior Editor at Edmunds.com, and he joins Alex Cohen to talk about what this means for the future of the driverless car industry.
Fart sounds woke up her comatose brother: How Margaret Nagle's experience helped her write "Red Band Society"
Fox executive producer Margaret Nagle says she doesn't find hospitals to be scary.
"I've grown up in that world, so it's not a depressing world to me," says Nagle, who used her personal experiences to write the "Red Band Society." It's a new Fox TV show, which tells the story of several teenagers dealing with long-term or terminal illnesses — forcing them to live together in a hospital.
"I know what it is for someone to be in a coma," she says. When she was younger, her brother was comatose following a car accident. "My very earliest memory are the walls of the hospital."
Hospitals can actually be a place for unexpected surprises and joy, she says. Shortly before hospital staff moved her brother to a long-term facility, their mother became desperate to wake him up.
"She would bring ice cream and hold it up to his nose — he loved coffee ice cream," Nagle says, explaining that her mother hoped the smell would wake him up.
However, it was when her mother tried inflating a balloon that she got a surprise.
"It slipped out of her hands and it made sort of this pffffttt sound as it went through the air."
He smiled.
Her mother told the doctors, and around the clock she and the staff spent more than 12 hours making fart noises for him.
That's how he came out of his coma.
"I know how to portray this world," she says.
The hospital in the series — which is pristine and beautiful — is based on the real-life Daltrey/Townshend Teen and Young Adult Cancer Program at UCLA.
Nagle says teenagers have different needs than many other patients, and she wanted to depict what facilities look like when they make adjustments for them.
"They have a lounge that is open 24 hours a day because teenagers live on a different time clock and they have different sleep patterns," she says.
Nagle says this series will be a tool that Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, both from The Who, can use to convince hospitals around the country to create similar facilities which they will help fund through Teen Cancer America.
"I hope that this pilot will help everyone move the ball forward in that way," says Nagle.
"Red Band Society" debuts tonight at 9 p.m. on Fox.