Design

When roasted at 475 degrees, coffee beans are sometimes described as rich and full-bodied. But for the full-bodied person who is not so rich, unroasted coffee beans - green as the day they were picked - may hold the key to cheap and effective weight loss, new research suggests. In a study presented Tuesday at the American Chemical Society's spring national meeting in San Diego, 16 overweight young adults took, by turns, a low dose of green coffee bean extract, a high dose of the supplement, and a placebo.

You can draw a straight line, in terms of architectural history, from William Randolph Hearst'ssprawling estate in San Simeon to the corner of Broadway and 11th Street in downtown Los Angeles. It was at that downtown site in 1913 that Hearst commissioned architect Julia Morgan to design a headquarters for his Los Angeles Examiner newspaper, which he'd founded in 1903. Morgan produced one of the most remarkable designs of her prolific career, a 103,500-square-foot Mission Revival building draped with Italian and Moorish touches, including domes covered in yellow and blue tile.

A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt. This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before - and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms.

State safety regulators have ordered stringent inspections of a downtown Los Angeles rail junction for the newly opened Expo Line because of a serious design flaw that poses an increased risk of train derailments. Officials of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority insist the intersection of the region's newest light rail service and the older Long Beach Blue Line at Washington Boulevard and Flower Street is safe for now because of small modifications to the tracks.

Jeff Andrews had never seen "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" when Khloé Kardashian called and asked: Might he decorate her Mediterranean-style mansion? To prepare for that first meeting two years ago, Andrews turned on E! and, by the grace of the reality-TV gods, found a repeat episode recounting Khloé's wedding to Lakers forward Lamar Odom. Homework completed, Andrews landed the job as interior designer for the youngest Kardashian sister. And then for sister Kourtney. And then perhaps most significantly, for Kris Jenner, the matriarch-manager of the Kardashian empire, which, Twitter-follow it or not, remains an undeniable phenomenon.

Mark and Cindy Evans make the rounds of Southern California flea markets early, before most shoppers have gotten out of bed. Their favorite stops: The Groves Antique Market Held the first Sunday of the month from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Irvine Valley College, 5500 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. Admission and parking are free. Dogs allowed. (949) 786-5277. Pasadena City College Flea Market Also held on the first Sunday of every month, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Due to a scheduling change, the market happens to be open this Sunday.

As warehouses go, there are few like Skechers USA Inc.'s new 1.82-million-square-foot distribution center. This warehouse is so big that it takes half a minute to drive from one end to the other at 60 miles per hour. The setup is so advanced that human hands will hardly touch the cargo as it is unpacked, categorized, stacked and prepared for delivery. The building is so green that it uses prevailing winds for ventilation instead of air conditioning. For its new North American operations warehouse, the nation's No. 2 footwear company chose the Inland Empire's Moreno Valley.

Bob Kahl slips in through a side door of the vast, abandoned hangar and looks at what's left of the assembly plant where he worked for nearly 40 years. He remembers the hum of power tools, the biting aroma of cutting oil, swarms of workers plugging away on a labyrinth of yellow scaffolding. All that's left is a few piles of broken concrete and a sea of colorless dust that coats a Palmdale factory floor the size of two football fields. "Welcome to the birthplace of America's space shuttle fleet," said Kahl, 60, smiling.

Why don't scientists invent something sensible? Wives say it every time they hit their toes on a wastebin and husbands say it whenever a fuse is blown. Why is it the business of no one in particular to stop fitting science for death and to begin fitting it into our lives? --Jacob Bronowski, "The Common Sense of Science," 1951 When NBC-TV consumer reporter David Horowitz was asked last spring by the Human Factors Society to address their 1988 national conference, he had never heard of the organization.

When Fred Levine, a newly divorced clothing retailer, asked architect Frederick Fisher to design a house for him and his two sons in Marina del Rey, his instructions were simple: "I just want you to have a good time." Fisher had a wonderfully inventive time with Levine's new home, completed last summer. On a tight, narrow lot, Fisher contrived an airy three-story home. A central, sky-lit atrium rising through the house's full height floods its interior with light. The bright space is very male and playful, roughly finished with raw concrete block, exposed timber framing and splashes of primary colors.

Cyberspace is a-twitter with the news that Ryan Seacrest is expected to close escrow this week on Ellen Degeneres' Beverly Hills compound, but there's been nary a peep about where she and spouse Portia de Rossi have decamped. Look no further than the Hal Levitt-designed midcentury in Beverly Hills that changed hands in April, according to area real estate agents familiar with that deal. The 8,500-square-foot house, built in 1958, features walls of glass, soaring ceilings, multiple fireplaces, a library, a black-and-stainless-steel kitchen, a sunken living room, four bedrooms and six bathrooms.

Architect Thom Mayne has been chosen to design a new Cornell University building that is to rise on Roosevelt Island in New York. Mayne, head of the Los Angeles architecture firm Morphosis, won a competition to design the first building for the CornellNYC Tech campus. The proposed building is to be approximately 150,000 square feet in size and will feature classrooms, lab space and offices for Cornell's high-tech graduate school campus. The $150-million building is scheduled to be completed by the start of the 2017 academic year.

"Dark Shadows,"which hit theaters on Friday, not only revives long-dormant vampire Barnabas Collins, it also brings back some giggle- and cringe-inducing fashions of the early 1970s. Leisure suits. Mirrored aviator sunglasses. Bell-bottoms, chunky sweaters, macramé jewelry. These all contrast with the stand-up collars, cravats and capes worn by Johnny Depp as Collins. Costume designer Colleen Atwood was more than up to the challenge after numerous previous collaborations with director Tim Burton (her efforts for the director's"Alice in Wonderland" earned her a 2010 Academy Award)

When I discovered I was pregnant with our second child, I pulled out the storage bin containing the maternity clothes from my first pregnancy and was instantly depressed. After nine months of wearing a Diane von Furstenberg maternity wrap dress and Lilly Pulitzer maternity shift in heavy rotation — and I mean heavy in every sense — I couldn't face another pregnancy in these same few outfits. But at $300 for designer maternity dresses I would wear another half a year at most, I wasn't prepared to splurge on an entirely new pregnancy wardrobe.

Fashion jewelry design is in the midst of a renaissance the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1980s. And Alexis Bittar blazed the trail. In the last two decades, the New York-based jewelry designer has gone from selling his signature colorful, hand-carved Lucite pieces on the streets of SoHo to bejeweling leading ladies in Hollywood and beyond, including Lady Gaga, First Lady Michelle Obama, Madonna, Cameron Diaz, Meryl Streep and Rihanna....

Question: Can I be a greener hotel guest? Answer: You can and you should. But, as Kermit the Frog noted, it's not easy being green. The May 6 "On the Spot" column focused on behaviors of hotel guests that are wasteful and harmful to the environment. But, we should note, it's also up to the hotel to practice what the green gods preach. The question for those of us who are environmental novices - and I am one - is what is a best practice? I'd love to know if housekeeping is using environmentally sound products, but I don't have the expertise to assess that.

Cheers to the Pima Air & Space Museum for flying what might be the largest paper airplane ever constructed over the Arizona desert earlier this week. The plane, dubbed Arturo's Desert Eagle, was 45 feet long with a 24-foot wingspan and weighed in at a whopping 800 pounds. It was built as part of the museum's Giant Paper Airplane Project , designed to get kids psyched about aviation and engineering. After a few false starts, the plane was towed into the sky above the Sonoran desert on Wednesday afternoon by a Sikorsky S58T helicopter.

On any given day, in downtown lofts, Santa Monica ateliers and dozens of studios across Los Angeles, dressing rooms are filled with men and women who are slipping into suits, dresses and jeans that fit as if they were made just for them — because they were. They are donning custom-made wedding gowns, dress shirts, even entire wardrobes. Whether they were propelled there by the frustrations of poorly fitting commercial clothes or by a sense of style that isn't part of the trend du jour, they've discovered the rewards of made-to-order clothing.

Pocket doors slide away to connect the indoors and outdoors at this sleek contemporary. Designed for entertaining, the modern house features a massive concrete fireplace, a glass-walled loft and walls of glass looking out onto the swimming pool and deck. Location: 1060 Woodland Drive, Beverly Hills 90210 Asking price: $6.995 million Year built: 2009 House size: Four bedrooms, 41/2 bathrooms, 5,868 square feet Lot size: 20,420 square feet Features: Porcelain tile floors, walnut floors, bar, breakfast bar, office, recessed lighting, media room, service entrance, alarm system About the area: In the first quarter, 60 single-family homes sold in the 90210 ZIP Code at a median price of $2.85 million, according to DataQuick.

Carroll Shelby, the charismatic Texan who parlayed a short-lived racing career into a specialized business building high-performance, street-legal cars, died Thursday. He was 89. Shelby died at Baylor Hospital in Dallas, according to an announcement by his company, Carroll Shelby Licensing. A cause was not disclosed. He led a colorful, outsized life that touched virtually every corner of the automotive world, said Leslie Kendall, curator of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.