California is home to some of the nation’s most ambitious climate, housing, and social policy experiments. This archive tracks the progress stories and milestones emerging from the state — from clean energy breakthroughs to community health wins.
California will now require corporations to offer access to repair resources like parts, tools, documentation, and software for three years for products priced between $50 and $99.99 and seven years for those priced at $100 or higher. The act applies to gadgets and appliances made after July 1, 2021.
Seeing just two humpbacks in Puget Sound was noteworthy in the 1980s. Today, the number of humpbacks has grown by an order of magnitude from about 500 on the West Coast to more than 5,000, including about 2,000 in Washington and southern B.C. waters.
The Fossil Fuel Treaty proposal is gaining significant momentum across the world and across sectors of society, being supported by the World Health Organization, near 100 cities, 2,500+ civil society organizations, and over half a million individuals.
A digital avatar has given a paralyzed woman her voice back — speaking at 78 words per minute, more than five times faster than the eye-tracking system she relied on before. Ann, who had a brainstem stroke 18 years ago, worked with UCSF researchers to train an AI to read brain signals from electrodes resting on her brain’s surface. The avatar speaks in a voice reconstructed from her wedding video, complete with facial expressions like smiles and frowns. There are real limits — the system still misreads words about a quarter of the time — but for millions living with ALS, locked-in syndrome, or severe stroke, this points toward a future where losing a voice no longer means losing a self.
Klamath River restoration is now the largest dam removal effort in U.S. history, reopening more than 400 miles of river to salmon once the last three dams come down. But the real story is what comes next: members of the Karuk, Yurok, and other tribal nations spent five years hand-gathering seeds from nearly 100 native plant species, and roughly 17 billion of those seeds will be sown along the freed riverbanks over the coming decade. Tribal ecological knowledge is shaping every phase, woven together with western science. For Indigenous communities worldwide fighting to restore ancestral waters, the Klamath offers a powerful template — proof that rivers, and the cultures rooted in them, can be brought back to life.
State law does not provide “a sweeping immunity for any and all acts police officers may perform within the scope of their employment,” Justice Leondra Kruger said in the 7-0 ruling.
The current estimates suggest that as many as 2,000 blue whales travel up from Mexico to Southern California waters every year, a large chunk of a global population that may be topping 25,000.
Psilocybin-assisted therapy helped 13 people who had struggled with heavy drinking reach the root of what they were drinking to escape, according to new interviews published in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors. Participants described years of self-blame and isolation quieting after their sessions, replaced by something many had never felt toward themselves: compassion. They credited the trained therapists and carefully held setting as much as the medicine itself, calling both essential to feeling safe enough to face old pain. The researchers are honest about the study’s limits, including a mostly white, higher-income participant group. Still, as Oregon and Colorado open legal pathways, these first-person accounts offer a hopeful glimpse of how psychedelic care might one day reach the communities who need healing most.
With this expansion, all California children under 5 will be eligible to receive a free book in the mail every month, as the program scales over the next several years.
Space-based solar power just crossed from theory into reality: a Caltech team has, for the first time, beamed energy from orbit down to a receiver on Earth. The signal arrived at a rooftop in Pasadena exactly when, where, and at the frequency engineers predicted — proof that the precision needed for a future full-scale array is achievable. The demonstrator weighed just 50 kilograms and used flexible, lightweight arrays never before flown for this purpose. The eventual vision is enormous and far from cheap, but the appeal is simple: panels in space see no night and no clouds. If this technology matures, clean power could one day reach communities far beyond the grid’s reach.
