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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 on whether the companies meet state and federal laws. Under state law, California residents must submit a doctor's order to have a genetic test run. And the laboratories are required to have state and federal certification.

The companies have two weeks to demonstrate compliance. Navigenics, according to the report, has issued a statement that it is already in state and federal compliance.

Consumer complaints, meanwhile, center around the accuracy and cost of the DNA tests, which can range upward of a couple thousand dollars.

A number of self-administered consumer-focused DNA testing services have sprung up over the past few years, which offer to scan the DNA samples to determine ancestry or potential health risks.

According to the report, the federal Food and Drug Administration does not evaluate the accuracy of the tests but has recently considered extending its oversight on this area.

Chevy Equinox fuel cell vehicle

(Credit: Donovan R. Unks)

Chevrolet is in the midst of launching "Project Driveway," an ambitious program where more than 100 fuel cell electric vehicles will be put in the hands of select consumers for the largest market test ever of its kind.

Fuel cell power train

(Credit: Donovan R. Unks)

Testing will take place over the next several months in the Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., metro areas. Drivers range from average consumers to business owners to policy makers. Chevy reps also promise that some cars will go into the hands of "celebrities," but no names have been dropped yet.

The cars are modified Chevy Equinox crossover SUVs that draw hydrogen from three on-board, carbon fiber tanks to power an electric motor. In addition, a nickel-metal hydride battery pack captures and stores energy from a regenerative braking system to provide extra power when needed. The fuel cell Equinoxes get a range of about 150 miles on a single fill-up with 700-bar hydrogen.

The Equinox fuel cell cars run solely on hydrogen, which, at this point in time, is a drawback for the average consumer. Although we produce 40 billion kilograms of hydrogen globally every year--enough to power 130 million fuel cell-powered cars--hydrogen fueling stations are still scarce.

Interior display

(Credit: Donovan R. Unks)

The three test metro areas were chosen, in part, because drivers have access to hydrogen filling stations within a reasonable radius of their homes and/or places of business. General Motors reps say building a hydrogen fueling station infrastructure wouldn't be as difficult as some might think; they say the initial investment of about $10 billion to $15 billion required to put 12,000 stations within two miles of the top 100 urban areas is close to the amount of money being currently spent on maintaining existing oil pipelines and gasoline manufacturing equipment.

The specs for the vehicle aren't overwhelming--it goes zero to 60 in 12 seconds and has a top speed of about 100 miles per hour. But that's still impressive considering the only thing that comes out of the quad exhaust is water vapor.

Carbon fiber quad exhaust

(Credit: Donovan R. Unks)

Features include antilock brakes (ABS), driver and passenger front air bags, roof rail side-impact air bags, and StabiliTrak stability system. The cars are also equipped with the OnStar navigation system, which testers are encouraged to use to ask questions and provide feedback as they drive.

But don't get in line at the local Chevy dealership just yet; the test fleet won't be available for sale to the public. However, the information gleaned from this market test will help shape the next generation of fuel cell vehicles, which GM is working on now.

For a further look at the Equinox vehicles, see "Photos: GM's Chevrolet Equinox Fuel Cell."

The government will spend $26 million on high-end computers to cut costs and standardize systems among the three U.S. labs charged with ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation's aging nuclear stockpile.

The Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) awarded the multimillion-dollar contract to Milpitas, Calif.-based Appro to supply Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories with 438 teraflop high-performance computing clusters based on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. To date, each of these labs had used its own combination of computer systems, which were not always compatible with the others.

(Credit: Appro)

"This is the first time NNSA has awarded a single contract for all three laboratories," agency official Martin Schoenbauer in a press release. "Combining the contract for each of the three laboratories not only saves money, but continues to move NNSA towards a smaller more efficient nuclear weapons complex."

The new equipment will provide crunch power to NNSA's Stockpile Stewardship program, under which the labs perform advanced nuclear weapons simulations meant to replace underground testing and extend the life of existing weapons. The computers are expected to be deployed in eight Linux clusters across the "tri-Lab" sites starting later this year.

The Appro systems are composed of modular, scalable units that can be rapidly configured "Lego-style" into clusters of varying sizes and computing power, according to NNSA. Each unit represents about 20 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops) of computing power and feature the latest Mellanox Technologies ConnectX IB 20 GB/s dual-port InfiniBand adapters and ConnectX EN dual port 10 Gigabit Ethernet NICs for storage connectivity.

The government relies increasingly on science and technology to extend the life of existing warheads, given the untenability of continuing the Cold War practice of replacing weapons every 15 to 20 years, NNSA's Thomas P. D'Agostino told the House Armed Services Committee (PDF). This was the genesis of the science-based Stockpile Stewardship program whose major focus is predicting the effect of changes in an aging stockpile, he said.

There has been no mention of hooking up the other sites that constitute the nation's nuclear weapons research and production base, namely the Nevada Test Site, Savannah River Site, Pantex Plant and Kansas City Plant. The video below shows what an underground test looks like.