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Searching for magnetic fields produced by plants may sound as wacky as trying to prove the existence of telekinesis or extrasensory perception, but physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, are seriously looking for biomagnetism in plants using some of the most sensitive magnetic detectors available.

It's a horrible paradox that bad things are generally cheaper: Like Big Macs. Or H&M. Top of this list, of course, is coal power, which is really quite horrible for the planet but is also deliciously cheap to produce

When an earthquake strikes, the shaking doesn't start instantaneously. Instead, the most violent energy spreads out from the epicenter at a relatively modest 3.5 kilometers per second

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It (University of California Press, April 4, 2011). Elena Githeko was normally energetic and chatty. But on a Tuesday morning in 2003, Elena's mother, Anne Mwangi, found her daughter quiet and listless, her forehead warm with fever

Radiation from hampered Japanese plant found in California, Washington milk; Dr. Jennifer Ashton on why you shouldn't worry

Only half of new small businesses survive beyond their fifth anniversary.

On the whole , Inc. 500|5000 CEOs are upbeat. More than 80 percent reported that their businesses are in strong or very strong shape and are poised to grow in the months ahead.

In 2003, Laura Ching left a marketing job at Walmart.com to co-found Tiny Prints , a Sunnyvale, California, business that sells invitations, announcements, and other customized stationery online. The business is a perfect fit for Ching, a stickler for proper etiquette. Here are two of her favorite things.

The "Aha" Moment: Crystal Martin's daughter received plenty of cards when she turned 4 in January 2010, but her favorite played "Happy Birthday" when she opened it. That inspired Martin, a political consultant for congressional candidate Jim Reed in California, to create a talking direct-mail brochure that would help her boss stand out

Rashmi Sinha seemed destined for a career in academia. Born and raised in India, she earned her Ph.D. in psychology at Brown University and did her postdoctoral work in cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley

Erika Anderson has something of a Silicon Valley pedigree. She graduated from MIT and Cornell Law School before bringing her socially conscious business plan to the Bay Area's Singularity University

%excerpt% See original here: Elevator Pitch: StorageByMail

Architecture and ambience have long played critical roles in marketing the world’s great wine regions. In past centuries, the denizens of Bordeaux, for instance, erected neoclassical ch

Charging sales tax on Internet purchases can be a messy, nebulous issue. Case in point: You can buy the latest Stieg Larsson novel on Amazon.com without paying any tax. But order the same book from Barnes & Noble’s website, and you'll still pay the 9.5 percent tax you would have paid at a store location in San Francisco, because any company with brick-and-mortar operations in California must collect sales tax online.

As I came through airport security in Connecticut, upon presentation of my California driver's license, the TSA officer asked me, "Aren't you folks worried about how that big Japan quake is going to hit you next?" I was glad to be able to tell him that we're not any more worried than we were before, and that a writer had just made that up.