Television

Until recently, very few people had ever heard of raspberry ketones, the aromatic compounds that give the berries their distinctive smell. Today, health food stores have trouble keeping the capsules or drops of the stuff on their shelves. Almost overnight, an obscure plant compound became the next big thing in weight loss - and all it took was a few words from Dr. Oz. In a February episode of "The Dr. Oz Show," Mehmet Oz told viewers that raspberry ketones were "the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat. " Once Oz calls something a "miracle," it doesn't remain obscure for long.

"The View" 10 a.m. Thursday, ABC: performance from “Jesus Christ Superstar.” “Open Call” 9 p.m. Thursday, KCET: Fine Cut Festival of Student Films: Hosted by mezzo-soprano opera singer Suzanna Guzman, “Goat Rodeo Live: Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile” 10 p.m. Friday, KOCE: The four string virtuosos combine bluegrass and classical music at a concert at Boston's House of Blues. “Burt Wolf: Travels & Traditions” 5:30 p.m. Saturday, KLCS: The Great Rivers of Europe: Cologne to Zell: A museum dedicated to mechanical musical instruments; Lorelei Rock; the city of Zell.

In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring "the kitchen is closed" seems a quaint relic of an earlier era. It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence. A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation's epidemic of obesity - and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it. Just eat your cake - or better yet, an apple - earlier.

NASA will provide periodic televised coverage of the SpaceX mission to the International Space Station on the Internet. Coverage can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv, now scheduled for: Thursday at 11:30 p.m. PT: Live coverage from NASA's Johnson Space Center mission control in Houston as the Dragon spacecraft performs its flyby of the space station. Friday at 11 p.m. PT: Live coverage of the rendezvous and berthing of the Dragon spacecraft to the space stationcontinuing through the capture and berthing of the Dragon to the station's Harmony node.

The biggest home in Los Angeles County is ready for a new nickname: The 56,500-square-foot Manor, dubbed Candyland after owner Candy Spelling, has been sold to another wealthy socialite, British heiress Petra Ecclestone, in an all-cash deal for $85 million. As steep as that price is, it's not a record or even close to what Spelling was asking. The priciest Southland home transaction was the 2000 sale of an 8-acre estate in Bel-Air to financial executive Gary Winnick in a deal that included the trade of other land, for a total value of about $94 million.

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

Robert Culp, the veteran actor best known for starring with Bill Cosby in the classic 1960s espionage-adventure series "I Spy" and for playing Bob in the 1969 movie "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," died Wednesday morning. He was 79. Culp fell and hit his head while taking a walk outside his Hollywood Hills home. He was found by a jogger who called 911 and was pronounced dead at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, said Lt. Bob Binder of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Redbox is hooking up with Verizon Communications Inc. as part of a major step forward to compete with Netflix Inc. in both the digital and physical worlds. The company famous for its ubiquitous red DVD rentals kiosks announced Monday that it would form a joint venture with telecom giant Verizon to create an online movie subscription service. Redbox also agreed to spend up to $100 million to acquire the Blockbuster-branded DVD kiosks operated by NCR Corp., its largest competitor in that business, adding about 9,000 machines to its existing base of 35,400.

Most writers can only daydream about meeting - in the flesh - the characters they've imagined. But for Ernest Hemingway, one afternoon in Key West, Fla., it came close to actually happening. One day when the writer was in his mid-30s, hanging out at a local fisherman's bar, he spotted a woman uncannily similar to the strong-willed, sexually liberated heartbreaker from his first novel. "It's as if, borne on the sea foam, she emerged - out of his own mind," says director Phil Kaufman.

'Life is short. Have an affair." That's the slogan of the Ashley Madison dating service, a website for people who want to cheat on their partners. That's right, unlike traditional Internet dating sites -- where you're expected to say you're unattached no matter what the truth is -- Ashley Madison is honest about its duplicity. Unlike match.

Half a century ago, Walt Disney leased a horse ranch in Placerita Canyon to shoot episodes of "The Adventures of Spin and Marty" from the classic ABC series "The Mickey Mouse Club. " Disney liked the property so much, with its rich variety of meadows, oak groves and mountains, that his production company began buying up land, eventually accumulating 890 acres. Over the decades, the storied Golden Oak Ranch, located in an unincorporated area of northeast Los Angeles County, has been used as backdrop for countless Disney TV shows and movies, including "Old Yeller" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. " Now Walt Disney Co. is moving closer to transforming part of the historic movie ranch into one of the largest high-tech production developments in Los Angeles in the last decade -- and the public will soon get its first say on the project.

Amid all the ballyhoo over what a bold visionary Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is, let's pause for a moment to appreciate the work of Eugene Polley, inventor of the TV remote control, who has died at age 96. Think about it. Before Polley's brainstorm, people actually had to get up out of their seats and cross the room to change TV channels. Simply put, there would be no couch potatoes without this man. I don't mean to be snarky.

BOSTON - Recognizing that many viewers want to watch key events live, in prime time, rather than tape-delayed, NBCUniversal plans to bolster its coverage of the Summer Olympics in London in August by putting 3,000 hours of programming online. The company, which is paying a record $1.18 billion for the rights to broadcast the London Olympics, is challenged to keep the up with the times. The long time zone difference between Britain and the U.S. means that key events will be broadcast when most Americans are not in front of their TVs. And increasingly, consumers are watching programming online, prompting NBC to make changes to its playbook.

Michelle Reiter lost $4,000 in cash, a 32-inch TV and a laptop computer when her Glendale home was burglarized. But also stolen that day was something far more valuable — her 11-year-old teacup Yorkshire terrier, Sophie. Since that time, she has been frantically searching for Sophie, not only because the dog is her greatest love, but because Sophie needs periodic medication for her bowels. Sophie was reported stolen after burglars entered Reiter's home on May 7 in the 600 block of Beulah Street through a rear bathroom window and ransacked the inside, according to Glendale Police Department reports.

LAS VEGAS -- Dana White was upset and wanted to make something clear. Last Friday night, as White attempted to lounge inside his office building where cable network FX films live fights for the Ultimate Fighting Championship's reality show, "The Ultimate Fighter," he wanted to return to the topic of mixed-martial-arts journalism. As president and chief promoter of the UFC, White seeks as much attention as possible for his organization, but occasionally — if not often — he is chafed by the accuracy of online reporting by MMA writers.

I was a pioneer of childhood obesity. By the time I was a junior in high school, I weighed more than 200 pounds. I was a fat kid before being a fat kid made you the topic of a national conversation and the first lady's pet project, back when Gatorade still tasted gross and no one knew how many calories there were in anything. For most of my childhood, I was the only fat girl in my class - I can still name the other two fat girls in my grade. Now, fat kids fill the playground and the high school bleachers, including a whole new breed of fat girl who wears skin tight jeans and mid-riffs and dares anyone to say anything.

BEIJING - "Beijing power struggle heralds end of China Communist Party," screams one headline. More sensational headlines purport to reveal how the wife of recently sacked Politburo member Bo Xilai poisoned an Englishman, who may have been her lover. And if that weren't enough, other stories claim that "Bo planned airline crash" and "slept with more than 100 women. " It's payback time for Chinese exiles, especially those with a printing press, television station or just a computer at their disposal.

In ABC's new thriller "Missing," a former CIA agent whose child has been kidnapped springs out of retirement with guns, martial-arts skills and primal parental passion blazing. If that sounds familiar, well, it was also the plot of the 2008 film "Taken," which had Liam Neeson tearing through Paris to extricate his daughter from the clutches of a sex-trafficking ring. In "Missing," the gender roles are reversed. When Michael (Nick Eversman), a student studying abroad in Rome, goes missing, his mother, Becca Winstone (Ashley Judd)

SAN FRANCISCO - In 1958, the Gallup Poll asked Americans whether they approved or disapproved of marriage between blacks and whites. The response was overwhelming: 94% were opposed, a sentiment that held for decades. It took nearly 40 years until a majority of those surveyed said marriage between people of different skin colors was acceptable. By contrast, attitudes toward gays and lesbians have changed so much in just the last 10 years that, as Gallup reported last week, "half or more now agree that being gay is morally acceptable, that gay relations ought to be legal and that gay or lesbian couples should have the right to legally marry.

Most writers can only daydream about meeting - in the flesh - the characters they've imagined. But for Ernest Hemingway, one afternoon in Key West, Fla., it came close to actually happening. One day when the writer was in his mid-30s, hanging out at a local fisherman's bar, he spotted a woman uncannily similar to the strong-willed, sexually liberated heartbreaker from his first novel. "It's as if, borne on the sea foam, she emerged - out of his own mind," says director Phil Kaufman.