You've heard of good and bad cholesterol before, right? Fish oil good, Big breakfast with hotcakes bad. Simple enough.
Al Pavangkanan / Flickr
Maybe not. UCLA researchers this week announced that merely breathing some of the air around here could turn your good cholesterol into bad. And that's before you even hit the drive-thru:
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Read L.A. Weekly's "The Battle for Malibu Lagoon." 
L.A. Weekly
Beware state politicians and UCLA professor Mark Gold, surfers and environmentalists are planning to crash your ribbon cutting ceremony at the controversial Malibu Lagoon restoration project on Friday.
"We are not happy with what happened," Ballona Wetlands Institute co-director Marcia Hanscom tells L.A. Weekly. "So we want [opinion leaders and decision-makers] to know we do not want this to ever happen again. Either at Malibu Lagoon, at the Ballona Wetlands, or anywhere for that matter."
The battle over the Malibu Lagoon pitted environmentalists against environmentalists, which includes Mark Gold, former president of Heal the Bay who supported the restoration project.
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So the super rich Annenberg Foundation wants to dump a 46,000-square-foot "interpretive center" on the Ballona Wetlands -- one of the last major wetlands areas in Los Angeles. Some folks think it's a great idea. Ballona Institute co-director Marcia Hanscom, who's been fighting to protect the wetlands for decades, has a far different take.
Jennie Warren Marcia Hanscom at the Ballona Wetlands
"It's kind of a shell game here," Hanscom tells L.A. Weekly. "The thing the Annenberg Foundation really wants is a center for dogs and cats."
Yep, that's right. In Hanscom's well-informed opinion, the Annenberg Foundation wants to build a $50-million glorified pet clinic, but dress it up as something else.
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See also: Black Lung Lofts: Children in hip new housing within 500 feet of L.A. freeways get permanent lung damage.
Trash-Photography / LA Weekly Flickr pool
On some crisp, spring mornings you can almost taste the ocean, even as far inland as downtown. L.A.'s air is magnitudes cleaner than it was in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, when you could cut a slice and serve it with a dollop of whipped cream.
So a revelation this week by UCLA researchers could come as a shock:
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An awesome new electricity use map created by UCLA's California Center for Sustainable Communities shows what you probably already suspect.
UCLA
Those righteous Prius drivers and aficionados of all things "sustainable," a.k.a. rich Westsiders, have some of the highest power usage figures in town:
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By Christina Schoellkopf
Capt' Gorgeous Critics say working-class and poor L.A. Harbor and Long Beach residents would get toxic train in their backyard.
The job-creating $500 million Burlington Northern Santa Fe railway plan is heading to the Los Angeles City Council for a vote on the Environmental Impact Report even as a top environmental group says working-class families and children in polluted Wilmington will be subjected to a new layer of toxic fumes from trains running near their parks and homes.
Some 200 opponents and supporters spoke at a packed L.A. Harbor Commission meeting recently. Union members pushed for the "Southern California International Gateway Project." But Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Morgan Wyenn says the trains would churn out toxins in a long-abused community: "It's literally right there, and it is heartbreaking since these people, who have already been through enough, could have a polluting facility right next door to them." How close would the trains be?
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Update and correction: An upset mayoral aide says they've achieved a lot and were more than willing to talk. See next page.
Freedom to Marry/flickr Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraiogosa has a legacy problem.
Leaving office on June 30 after eight years at the helm, Villaraigosa's highly publicized Million Trees L.A. initiative is something of a bust, with the city nowhere near his 2006 promise of planting one million trees over several years.
A whole bunch of powerful folks are quietly defensive about the embarrassing failure. The Mayor's Office refuses to talk with L.A. Weekly about it, and same goes for Million Trees L.A. executive director Lisa Sarno. TreePeople founder Andy Lipkis is staying mum, too ... hmmm.
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By Matthew Mullins and Jill Stewart
Matthew Mullins Environmentalists say L.A. rain runoff is a sickening soup.
Update: The Board of Supervisors rejected the Clean Water, Clean Beaches plan today in a big upset, thanks to what many say was exceedingly poor outreach on the massive tax plan to pay for it. See next page for details.
Hundreds of angry people today demanded that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors toss a years-in-the-making Clean Water Clean Beaches plan to treat the horrific soup that flows off streets, sidewalks, roofs, lawns and lots -- directly into rivers, the Pacific and beaches -- whenever it rains. But who should pay $270 million to treat the filthy rain runoff?
L.A. County's Department of Public Works for months kept its plan -- to tax the county's landowners only -- all but secret. When County Supervisor Gloria Molina got a tiny notice about it, she mistakenly tossed it as junk mail. Apathetic L.A. voters? Not even! Now, 113,696 people have said No to Public Works on its website. And get this: Public Works management spent $3 million creating this PR mess. Colleges, non-profits, many others are slamming the scheme to charge landowners only -- in a region where half the sidewalk-spitters, dog-poop foulers and crankcase drippers are renters, Orange and Ventura Co. commuters and tourists:
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When many Westsiders woke up yesterday it was to the smell of the aftermath of a really rockin' house party.
sjg310 / Flickr
Or, say Santa Monica authorities, it was a natural release of methane gas from the ocean. Either way, it was a party foul that had folks calling emergency authorities. Because Westsiders don't just sit around and let stuff stink. Unless it's a rare French cheese:
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What appeared to be a meteor screamed over the skies of Los Angeles overnight.
File photo from Ed Sweeney / Flickr
The streak of light in the night sky also lit up Twitter with reported sightings. The Los Angeles Fire Department was inspired to tweet that " .. we are in routine operations. There are no emergencies in Los Angeles related to the sighting of a bright light in our atmosphere."
It happened ...
California has almost 30 advanced bio-fuel companies and refineries, beating out all other states -- but 27 of states are on California's heels, including Illinois, Colorado, Texas and Iowa, with a total of more than 80 advanced bio-fuel companies across the U.S. 
Courtesy of Sam Beebe Plant waste is used to create anhydrous ammonia, the beginning of fuel for the future.
SynGest Inc, in San Francisco, has announced plans to create a commercial facility to convert crop waste, such as corn stalks and cobs, into anhydrous ammonia. That can be used as an advanced bio-fuel and nitrogen fertilizer. Is this real, or just more dreaming from a long-struggling industry?
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Another important study about the impacts of air pollution on children was released last week, but don't expect mayoral frontrunners Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel to say or do anything specific about it.
Fred Harper Mayoral candidates Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel
In 2010, L.A. Weekly exposed in the cover story "Black Lung Lofts" the dangerous side effects of building condos, schools, and low-income apartment buildings near busy freeways, where particulate matter from cars and trucks can seriously damage the health of children, the elderly, and people who are already sick with heart or respiratory problems.
Now researchers at UC-San Francisco and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have come out with a major study connecting air pollution to mothers who give birth to children with low birth weights, which is linked to serious health problems later in life.
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For anyone who has ever fretted about what driving long distances without passengers during rush hour is doing to the environment and to your wallet, there's Lyft. 
Lyft
Launched in San Francisco in 2012, the mobile-app based ride-sharing program allows members to find drivers in their areas who will shuttle them and others nearby for a fee that's reportedly cheaper than most cab rides.
The program hit the Santa Monica area last week.
Not surprisingly, traditional taxi and limo companies are not pleased. The California Public Utilities Commission -- which regulates the state's transportation systems -- has issued fines against the company and even sent it a cease-and-desist.
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How to find a smog-check station that will cheat and pass your rickety ranfla?
Nathan E Photography / Flickr
The brilliant researchers at USC seem to have figured this one out.
In a study of 28 million tests conducted by 11,000 smog check facilities, the Trojan academics came to this conclusion:
By Hillel Aron
Los Angeles's billboard clutter.
Quietly, the L.A. Department of Building and Safety released its long-overdue billboard survey that gets a handle on L.A.'s forest of legal and illegal outdoor advertising. KCET TV has turned the L.A. billboard database into an interactive map and invited the public to add local knowledge.
Of 5,874 billboards found by investigators (owned mostly by Clear Channel Outdoor, CBS Outdoor and Lamar Outdoor), a staggering 1,423 have "observable violations." Mostly graffiti that the multi-billion dollar billboard industry, which has given campaign funds to most Los Angeles elected officials, han't cleaned up. Some billboard violations are troubling:
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See also: "Dirty Beaches? Not in L.A. (Well, for the Most Part)"
Avalon Beach: Bathe if you dare.
Were you chin-deep in scary ocean bacteria all summer long, without ever realizing it? Now, thanks to local environmental org Heal the Bay, your blissful summertime ignorance shall be briskly swiped clean by the hard facts of fall!
Every year, at summer's end, Heal the Bay releases a "Beach Report Card"...
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It was one of the cleanest summers ever, people.
bluewaikiki.com
And we're not just talking about the temporary porn-industry shutdown as a result of a syphilis scare.
No, the water off the coast was cleaning up its act, too, according to Heal the Bay's annual End of Summer Beach Report Card:
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New York and Los Angeles, the nation's two largest cities, are notoriously filthy in their own special ways. New York packs its residents in extra tight for that one-of-a-kind human-density stench, but L.A. does the same with its cars; New York's streets ooze with nasty brown slush in the winter-spring months, but L.A.'s smoggy skyline doesn't look much better in summer.
Bjørn Giesenbauer via Flickr The big crapple.
Readers of Travel + Leisure magazine, however, have deemed our spread-out air filth as the lesser of two evils in 2012:
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The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires that any project which "may have a significant effect on the environment" be prefaced by an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) -- an often lengthy document investigating the project's possible effects on both the natural environment and on the urban environment humans have created.
Which Way LA? via Facebook Sacrificed in the name of science.
So the bulldozing of a 268 full-grown trees in L.A. and Inglewood, to make way for the California Science Center's prized new space shuttle Endeavour, seems an obvious candidate.
Yet the Science Center, obsessed with its setting up its new NASA exhibit as soon as possible...
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"Space exploration events are like the Olympics; everyone just feels good," Inglewood Mayor James Butts said at a triumphant press conference on the September 20 arrival of the space shuttle Endeavour.
The LA Beat A gorgeous old pine on Crenshaw that's tagged for removal.
And the spacecraft's 12-mile trip from LAX to the California Science Center on October 13, added L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, would "be a marvel of wonder and ingenuity."
But one ingenious path-clearing tactic has residents along the shuttle route, as well as local environmentalists, feeling not so good:
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