Throughout the 1990s, biofuels were the environmental rage. Everyone from Vice-President Al Gore to Greenpeace touted them as the replacement for fossil fuels. The future belonged to such renewable energy.

Benefited by a Republican Congress that loved science, President George W. Bush mandated and subsidized biofuel energy, but only the final product. The product used to make this ethanol was left up to growers. 

In California, wildfires happen thousands of times per year, even in non-drought years. They happened long before climate change concerns but not factoring wildfires into simplistic parameter-based models of climate change meant we were not getting an accurate picture of the atmospheric reality.

As a quantum state collapses from a quantum superposition to a classical state or a different superposition, it will follow a path known as a quantum trajectory. For each start and end state there is an optimal or "most likely" path, but it is not as easy to predict the path or track it experimentally as a straight-line between two points would be in our everyday, classical world.

A nasal brush test can rapidly and accurately diagnose Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), an incurable and ultimately fatal neurodegenerative disorder.

Up to now, a definitive CJD diagnosis requires testing brain tissue obtained after death or by biopsy in living patients but a new paper in the New England Journal of Medicine shows it can be done through the nose. 

Your stress levels may be another thing you can blame on your mother. Scientists investigating pregnancies in four generations of rats show that inherited epigenetic effects of stress could affect pregnancies for generations. 

The researchers believe that these changes are due to epigenetics - the arrangement and expression of our genes. In most cases this refers to DNA methylation of the nucleotide base pairs. In this study the researchers believe the epigenetic changes are due to microRNA (miRNA) - non-coding RNA molecules that play a role in regulating gene expression.

Southern California is aghast that cities are now enforcing water usage cutbacks during the ongoing drought - it's because during the mandatory restrictions, while the farming regions of central California have met their targets, water usage in southern California actually went up.

They may not know something that most people in California realize - California is a desert and its water comes from dams and rivers north of them in California, and in Colorado. Rather than being a green paradise, California was mostly sparsely-inhabited desert prior to European colonization - its history has been drought and fire, the boom and bust of nature that gives and takes away.