Alexis Madrigal

California's blueprint for slashing greenhouse-gas emissions could transform the world's seventh-largest economy -- and be a model for a nationwide plan in 2009.

A new paper published appearing Thursday in the prestigious scientific journal Nature presents the worst-case scenario for runaway climate change that could leave the Earth entirely ice-free within a generation.

Scientists have built the first synthetic genome by stringing together 147 pages of letters representing the building blocks of DNA.