Latinos and African Americans make up a disproportionately high percentage of the population of California ZIP Codes most burdened by pollution, according to a report released Friday by state environmental officials.

Latinos account for nearly two-thirds of residents in the top 10% most polluted ZIP Codes despite making up only 38% of the state’s population, the analysis by the California Environmental Protection Agency shows.

Nearly 10% of residents of the most polluted ZIP Codes are black, though they make up only 6% of the population statewide, according to the report. Whites, in...

What happens to our DNA, RNA and proteins if we spend a long time in space? A pair of 50-year-old twins will help NASA find out.

Identical twins Mark and Scott Kelly have signed up to be part of the first-ever twin study that takes place, at least partially, in space.

In March 2015, veteran astronaut Scott Kelly will begin a one-year stint living aboard the International Space Station. It will be the longest amount of consecutive time that any American astronaut has spent in space. 

ISS: International Space Station crews and images from space

His brother Mark Kelly, who is married to former...

In a young, nearby solar system, scientists have discovered giant clouds of poison gas -- the smoking gun from a violent encounter, astronomers say. Based on massive amounts of carbon monoxide gas around the star Beta Pictoris, either two Mars-sized planets slammed into each other with catastrophic results, or hordes of comets are crashing into one another at an astounding rate.

The findings, published by the journal Science, could help provide an up-close look at how stars and their planetary systems form and evolve.

Beta Pictoris lies about 63 light years away and is only about 20 million...

Everyone dislikes some kind of music, but are there people out there who don’t respond to musical pathos?

Apparently, yes, and they weren’t lying when they said so, according to a study published online Thursday in Current Biology.

A team of researchers from Spain and Canada was trying to develop an accurate questionnaire to gauge people’s sense of reward from music when they found that roughly 5% of their study subjects reported getting no pleasure at all from music.

So they followed up by testing 30 subjects, grouped by their relative affinity for music. The bottom group,...

New research has found that women are on average no more likely to have multiple sexual partners in a single month after they are provided no-cost access to birth control methods than they were before. And while women reported a slight uptick in their reported monthly sexual encounters a year after getting free contraceptives, the new study says the resulting frequency of sexual activity fell within expected boundaries for women of childbearing age.

In a prospective cohort study called the Contraceptive Choice Project, 9,256 women and teenage girls in and around St. Louis were provided...

The odds are increasing that El Niño, the powerful climate phenomenon that alters precipitation patterns across the globe, will develop in the Pacific Ocean this year, U.S. government forecasters say.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center activated its alert system on Thursday to issue an El Niño watch.

The alert means that conditions in the eastern tropical Pacific are favorable enough that El Niño has a more than a 50% chance of forming by the summer or fall.

Though it’s too early to predict with much confidence, if El Niño re-emerges it...

Peering deep into the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, scientists have spotted the first disintegrating space rock ever observed.

The rock is crumbing slowly -- its disparate pieces gliding gently away from each other at the sluggish rate of one mile an hour, slower than human walking speed.

The strange space rock first caught scientists' attention in September when the Catalina and Pan STARRS sky survey telescopes detected what looked like an unusually fuzzy object on the far side of the asteroid belt.

PHOTOS: Amazing images from space

A closer inspection with the higher resolution W....

The ocean doesn’t just moderate temperatures and influence weather in some of the world’s biggest cities; it also has the power to cleanse the air, new research suggests.

At night, the sea surface can absorb and remove up to 15% of smog-forming nitrogen oxides that build up in polluted air in coastal cities like Los Angeles, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers at UC San Diego came to that conclusion after deploying scientific instruments at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography pier last year to measure the...

James Gurney, the author and illustrator of the "Dinotopia" book series, has had a dinosaur named after him. 

And it happens to be a particularly cool dinosaur, too. Torvosaurus gurneyi is the largest predatory land dinosaur ever discovered in Europe, according to a new study in the journal PLOS One. 

T. gurneyi was 32 feet long, a little shorter than the average school bus. It was a therapod that stood on a two legs, and it had razor-sharp teeth up to 4 inches long. Its skull was nearly 4 feet long.

It lived 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, and was probably at the top of the...

In a psychology lab at Oregon State University, 37 girls ages 4 to 7 have finally demonstrated what feminists have long warned: that playing with Barbie dolls drives home cultural stereotypes about a woman's place and suppresses a little girl's career ambitions. But here's an unexpected, though preliminary, finding: Playing with Mrs. Potato Head, by contrast, appears to have the effect of attending a "Lean In" circle on little girls. After spending just five minutes with Jane Potato-Head, girls believed they could grow up to do pretty much anything a boy could do.

This small but telling experi...

A baby infected with HIV appears to be free of the virus after doctors at a Long Beach hospital initiated aggressive drug treatment just four hours after birth.

A pediatrician at Miller Children's Hospital Long Beach and her colleagues disclosed the case Wednesday at a Boston AIDS conference.

The newborn girl was initially confirmed to have HIV through blood and spinal fluid tests. However, after six days of treatment with antiretroviral drugs, the virus could no longer be detected, doctors said.

The girl, who was born in April and is being referred to as the "Los Angeles baby," remains on...