In California, where I live, climate change helped kill nearly 62 million trees in 2016 alone, and last year, 4.2 million acres of our state burned.

The resulting “urchin barrens,” as divers call them, can stretch hundreds of miles, with scientists reporting earlier this year that some Northern California kelp forests have suffered 95 percent loss since 2012.Kelp are key to much of the West Coast’s marine biodiversity.

But if you’re wondering why we don’t often hear about catastrophic fires in the plains states, like we do in California, Oregon, and Colorado, that’s because “fire weather” just means the conditions are right for a blaze—it doesn’t mean they necessarily happen.

On Friday, after a contentious legal battle over Apple’s alleged monopoly power over the iOS ecosystem, a California judge snipped the tug-of-war rope between Apple and Epic Games.And Apple must change its App Store rules to allow developers to use other payment systems⁠—a blow to Apple’s iron grip on the iOS ecosystem.

Not long after, Barrera was written up by a different manager for too much “Time Off Task,” Amazon’s system for tracking employee productivity.More than five minutes without scanning a barcode set the TOT clock ticking, regardless of whether that time was spent using the bathroom, wiping down a workstation, goofing off, or simply taking a breather.

Razer said it's going to vix the vulnerability, but it speaks to broader concerns around similar software that relies on the Windows "plug-and-play" set-up.📩 The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters !When the next animal plague hits, can this lab stop it.

“It's a really pretty and kind of understated shrub,” says Bryant Baker, conservation director of the Los Padres ForestWatch, which advocates for the protection of California’s habitats.

“By covering canals with solar panels, we can reduce evaporation and avoid disturbing natural and working lands, while providing renewable energy and other co-benefits,” says environmental engineer Brandi McKuin of the University of California, Merced, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, lead author on the paper.

California can start enforcing the net neutrality law it enacted over two years ago, a federal judge ruled Tuesday in a loss for internet service providers.

When researchers following in the boots of biologist Joseph Grinnell, who a century ago created a pioneering survey of California wildlife, began sampling birds and small mammals in the Mojave Desert, they expected the harsh conditions would magnify population changes driven by the climate crisis.

In 2018, Aayush Jain, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, traveled to Japan to give a talk about a powerful cryptographic tool he and his colleagues were developing.

For several years, Apple has been naming its annual software releases after California locales, and this year we're treated to Big Sur. If you want to be technical, it's macOS 11.You get a fresh look, widgets, and a whole lot more.

A ballot measure would create a new legal classification for Uber drivers, Instacart shoppers, and DoorDash deliverers—not quite employees, but not the independent contractors they’ve been until now.

The idea is to create a technical specification that qualifies as a universal opt-out under the CCPA, so that exercising rights under the law would flip from being hopelessly complex to extremely easy.“This would provide a key component that’s called for in the California law, which is a simple way for consumers to invoke their right without having to go to each website and find the button,” said Ashkan Soltani, a privacy researcher who helped lead the effort.

Here's everything you need to know about what humans can do to stop wrecking the planet.“This is really significant, because it sends a clear signal about where California is going in terms of its vehicle fleet,” says Ethan Elkind, who directs the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at UC Berkeley.

What happens when you load more than 200 Tesla shareholders—increasingly rich shareholders—into a Fremont, California, parking lot, and set CEO Elon Musk loose in front of them to talk about the company’s upcoming battery tech?

When state senator Bob Hertzberg learned that an ambitious privacy initiative had gotten enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in California, he knew he had to act quickly.

At Google, for example 42 percent of the US workforce is Asian, but only 30 percent of people in leadership roles.“I am not going to sit back and allow companies to make an excuse that the talent is not there,” says Thomas, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group CEO.

The cataclysm cut off telegraph communication with the East Coast, swamped the state’s new capital, and submerged the entire Central Valley under as much as 15 feet of water.

That was 130 years ago—now the observatory is plopped right above one of the most densely populated areas of the US!” How could Lick compete with the likes of the Hubble Space Telescope , which orbits far above both light pollution and smog?

The FTC demanded responses to written questions and required Uber to designate an officer to provide testimony under oath," US attorney for the Northern District of California David Anderson Sullivan said in remarks about the indictment.

“Even though the surface winds were pretty weak, there was a low-level jet above the mountains,” says Craig Clements, a fire weather researcher (and fire chaser ) at San Jose State University.

And to make matters even worse, in the middle of a heat wave, they can’t open their windows because air quality is now astonishingly bad as smoke continues to pour into the Bay Area.

If they can’t get the ruling overturned or delayed, Uber and Lyft say they will stop operating in California, where both companies began.The week after Uber and Lyft left Austin in spring 2016 was confusing, drivers from the city say.

Proactive earthquake alerts will only be in California for now (which already has ShakeAlert and an established data set), and Google says that "over the coming year, you can expect to see the earthquake alerts coming to more states and countries using Android’s phone-based earthquake detection.".

Writing in the journal PNAS, researchers from several California universities describe how they used anonymized cell phone location data and census info to show a dramatic reversal in how mobile Americans have been this year.

Nathaniel Gabor, a physicist at the University of California, Riverside, and his colleagues have developed a model for light collection in photosynthetic organisms that optimizes the reduction of “noise” over efficiency.

To hit that 60 percent target, the air board estimates that one-third of ride-hail vehicles will have to be electric, and that the companies will need to push their highest-mileage drivers to switch to EVs. The companies would also have to bring back their shared pooling services, which have been suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic .

When a company buys carbon offsets , it funds projects elsewhere to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as planting trees in Indonesia or installing giant machines inside California dairies that suck up the methane produced by burping and farting cows and turn it into a usable biofuel.

But the Twilight Zone specimens that Rocha and his colleagues bring back to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, including unique corals and fishes, are helping them piece together a snapshot of one of the weirdest habitats on Earth.