Water

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.

With a last round of roster cuts looming ahead of this summer's London Olympics, U.S. Water Polo Coach Terry Schroeder will get one final look at his team in action when it plays a series of exhibitions in Southern California against Croatia and Hungary, the defending Olympic champion, beginning Saturday at Newport Harbor High School. Schroeder needs to trim three players from a 16-man roster that includes 11 former Olympians, among them three-time Olympians Tony Azevedo, the team captain, and Ryan Bailey.

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.

Imagine inner tubing down a water slide only to realize you've been riding along the back of a hissing 250-foot-long snake and are about to plunge into the gaping mouth of the fang-bearing and venom-spewing King Cobra. The new racing slide debuting in early July at Six Flags Great Adventure's Hurricane Harbor in New Jersey sounds more like a terrifying psychotic nightmare than a fun-filled day at the water park. PHOTOS: King Cobra water slide at Six Flags Great Adventure With King Cobra installations already in place in Turkey and Russia, the new Hurricane Harbor water park attraction marks the United States debut of the snake-themed water slide.

When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

It was evidently good enough for Gilligan and Robinson Crusoe. But is coconut water a healthy choice for people who aren't stranded on a deserted island? A longstanding treat in tropical regions across the globe, coconut water hit U.S. supermarkets a few years back and is now being marketed with a vengeance. Sometimes billed as nature's sports drink, the slightly sour beverage has also acquired a reputation for being able to improve circulation, slow aging, fight viruses, boost immunity, and reduce the risk of cancer, heart disease and stroke.

Rats fed fructose-laced drinking water for six weeks performed more slowly in a maze-navigating task, UCLA researchers have found. (Read this L.A. Times opinion article .) They think the effect is due to changes in the way the brain responds to insulin as a result of exposure to fructose. “Our study shows that a high fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body,” study senior author and UCLA professor Fernando Gomez-Pinilla said in a release about the finding, which was published in the Journal of Physiology (postdoc Rahul Agrawal was first author)

Easter is Sunday, which means many people need to learn how to properly hard-boil an egg. Emphasis on " properly . " You probably already know how to make hard-boiled eggs the wrong way: Boil the eggs until the kitchen gets stinky with that sulfur-y, rotten-egg smell and you're left with rubbery whites and a distasteful green ring around the yolk. But fear not. This is the Easter when you learn how to properly make hard-boiled eggs, courtesy of the L.A. Times Test Kitchen and Food Editor Russ Parsons.

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.

Tropical Storm Fay brought some good news to the state's parched Everglades and Lake Okeechobee -- lots of water. The lake rose more than 2 feet in a single week. That's about 288 billion gallons, equivalent to about 84 days' worth of water for South Florida.

Last summer, when the snowpack in the Sierra was twice its normal depth, rivers raged well into July. That meant many rafting outfitters were forced to turn away, for safety reasons, families with children younger than 8 until it was almost August. This year, if you're looking for a major white-water adrenaline rush, your options will be limited. With the Sierra snowpack at about 50%, rivers will peak for a short time in late May or early June. After that, moderate dam releases from streams mean flows will be mellow enough for parents who want to take their kids rafting, said Steve Merkle of rafting outfitter OARS.

CHELAN, Wash. - Just say the words "summer at the lake" in certain company, and you'll get a wistful smile, possibly followed by stories about fishing contests, belly-flops, mosquito bites, campfire songs, sexual awakening, lingering regret, family feuds, winterizing expenses and the prospect that the mortgage interest tax deductions for second homes might someday be disallowed. Now, say "summer at the lake" to a room full of Seattleites, and talk will likely turn to Lake Chelan.

Re "Firm wants to tap liquid gold in the Mojave Desert," May 16 The Cadiz Inc.project will drain an aquifer in the eastern Mojave Desert and pipe it to the lawns of Orange County, reaping billions for the company. Conspicuously absent from the debate is the government of San Bernardino County, which was required to produce an environmental review but punted it to a water district nearly 200 miles away. Now it has moved to exempt the Cadiz project from the local groundwater law, signing away its enforcement authority for the laughably weak provisions of the exemption agreement, which, among other things, waits an entire decade before even calculating harm to the aquifer.

Water Grill After a $1.5-million redo, Water Grill reopens as the seafood house it was always meant to be, with straightforward cooking from Brit Damon Gordon. Location: 544 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 891-0900, http://www.watergrill.com. Price: Raw bar, $2.25 to $145; dinner appetizers, $6 to $27; salads and sandwiches, $9 to $32; main courses, $26 to $44; whole fish, $28 to $44 per pound; sides, $6 to $9; desserts, $9. Details: Open 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday to Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday, 5 to 11 p.m. Saturday and 4 to 10 p.m. Sunday.

When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

MUSIC Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters reprises what's been a massive project of recent years — his live incarnation of his band's seminal album, "The Wall. " Fans loved it at Coachella in 2008, and he returns for a triumphant take on the record's dystopian worldview and experimental rock. Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, 3939 S. Figueroa St., L.A. 8 p.m. Sat. $30.50-$248. ticketmaster.com.

Every year around this time millions of eggs are hard-boiled, artistically decorated and then thrown into the garbage. Frankly, that's probably just as well. Because most hard-boiled eggs are pretty terrible. The whites are rubbery, the yolks are pale and mealy and, even worse, surrounded by that sulfur-green ring of shame. Cooking hard-boiled eggs is easy; cooking them right is not. Unless you know what you're doing. Then it's as close to a foolproof no-brainer as you can get in the kitchen.

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

U.S. National Water Polo Coach Adam Krikorian named his 13-woman roster for this summer's London Games on Thursday, and not surprisingly he selected a group heavy on Olympic experience. Attackers Brenda Villa and Heather Petri will be taking part in their fourth Olympics in London while five others will be playing in the Summer Games for the second time. The U.S. is the only country to have medaled in all three previous women's Olympic tournaments, winning two silvers and a bronze.

This post has been corrected. See note at the bottom for details. Last summer, when the snowpack in the Sierra was twice its normal depth, rivers raged well into July. That meant many rafting outfitters were forced to turn away, for safety reasons, families with children younger than 8 until it was almost August. This year, if you're looking for a major white-water adrenaline rush, your options will be limited. With the Sierra snowpack at about 50%, rivers will peak for a short time in late May or early June.