california

More than a dozen companies that market genetic testing directly to consumers have been hit with cease-and-desist notices from California's Department of Public Health, following consumer complaints over the accuracy and cost of the tests, according to an Associated Press report.

The 13 companies that received the cease-and-desist notices include Navigenics and 23andMe, which counts Google and Genentech as its investors, according to the report.

Mountain View, Calif.-based 23andMe has been covered on CNET in the past--most recently last month--primarily because its co-founder Anne Wojcicki is married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Health officials are focused … Read more

MENLO PARK, Calif.--Solar power hasn't swept the nation but it must and will, said members of utilities, clean-tech start-ups, venture capital firms, and academia at the Big Solar conference here Wednesday.

California will literally live up to its "Golden State" nickname and shine as a model for the rest of the country thanks to progressive lawmakers, Silicon Valley dealmakers, and innovators at state and university labs, according to the event's many optimists.

"The time has come in the United States for large-scale solar," said Ed Smeloff, senior manager of utility project sales at … Read more

While some people wonder whether there's too much hot air in the clean-tech sector, the man who has advised California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on environmental matters says the industry is just beginning to reach its potential.

Regardless of who sets up shop in the Oval Office in January, sweeping changes in federal energy and climate policy are expected to give the clean-tech industry a big boost, says Terry Tamminen, former director of the California Environment Protection Agency and now a clean-tech adviser for Pegasus Capital Advisors.

"We need to take California's standards and federalize them," said … Read more

Not to be outdone by Samsung, Hewlett-Packard has joined forces with the state of California to put an end to those that would dare to own non-HP printers that, if unchecked, would annually bombard our landfills with tons and tons of print cartridges.

Similar to the Samsung printerectomy, HP will provide an incentive program to state agencies willing to purchase, guess what, HP printers and HP printers alone. After that, it's all about the green as outdated printers get refreshed with new ones, old cartridges get refilled with new ones, and everyone is happy (especially HP).

This is all … Read more

Southern California Edison (SCE) on Thursday launched a program to build the equivalent of a small power plant on commercial rooftops with thousands of solar panels.

The program calls for SCE to put enough solar photovoltaic panels on commercial buildings to turn out 250 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply about 162,000 homes.

Once completed, the panels will take up 65,000,000 square feet of roofs in Southern California, or 2 square miles.

The total cost would be about $875 million and is projected to take about five years.

The utility, which has the backing of California Gov. … Read more

San Francisco may have shaken some flowers from its hair since hosting the first Earth Day 38 years ago, but the city continues to be named one of America's greenest. Satirists mock its politically correct "smug cloud" of eco-hipness, but many other regions tend to follow the city's environmental lead. For instance, more than a handful of U.S. cities are now mulling a ban on plastic grocery bags, first passed in San Francisco last March.

Fresh into his second term, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newson in January set goals for the city to become carbon-neutral … Read more

INDIAN WELLS, Calif.--Twelve other states are examining ways to implement the strategy adopted by California in getting utilities to separate profits from energy production, according to Terry Tamminen, the Cullinan Senior Fellow at the New America foundation and the former secretary of California's EPA.

California implemented regulations that encourage utilities to conserve energy by tying profits to conservation rather than selling power years ago, he said during a presentation at the Clean Tech Investor Summit taking place here this week.

And the results are fairly dramatic. The average Californian consumes about 6,700 kilowatt hours of electricity a … Read more

With all things touch-screen in an increasingly touch-screen centric world, I was given the "plastic or paper" option for casting my vote in the California primary on this most super of Super Tuesdays. So, not liking the marker fumes and being used to touching everything on the iPhone anyway, I opted to vote "plastic."

The polling place had 10 conventional optical-scan voting stations with real paper ballots, but only 1 digital voting machine. San Francisco uses the Sequoia voting machine and, well, here's my story:

The clerk handed me a plastic card to insert into … Read more

In two consecutive days, The Wall Street Journal presented two different answers. The first is not surprising: Intellectual Ventures, the brainchild of ex-Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. It's now out "to raise as much as $1 billion to help develop and patent inventions, many of them from universities in Asia." I know I will sleep so much more comfortably knowing that IVL will be out plundering Asia so that it can turn around and plunder the rest of the planet.

The second might surprise you: the University of California. The University of California may be especially pernicious because it can sue for patent infringement but has sovereign immunity:… Read more