What will the world look like in 2050?

It's 2050, and another balmy day in Los Angeles. A young woman steps outside and puts on her air filtration mask. The air is thick with smog, which aggravates her asthma. As she hurries to get into an air-conditioned, self-driving ...

Rare fossil clam discovered alive

Discovering a new species is always exciting, but so is finding one alive that everyone assumed had been lost to the passage of time. A small clam, previously known only from fossils, has recently been found living at Naples ...

NASA's planetary radar captures detailed view of oblong asteroid

On Feb. 3, an asteroid more than three times as long as it is wide safely flew past Earth at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers, or a little under five times the distance between the Moon and Earth). ...

NASA's Mars helicopter reports in

Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California have received the first status report from the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which landed Feb. 18, 2021, at Jezero Crater attached to the belly of ...

A third of California methane traced to a few super-emitters

NASA scientists are helping California create a detailed, statewide inventory of methane point sources—highly concentrated methane releases from single sources—using a specialized airborne sensor. The new data, published ...

NASA's close up of Hurricane Rosa shows hint of an eye

On Sept. 26 at 4:30 p.m. EDT (1630 UTC), the MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of Hurricane Rosa. Credit: NASA Worldview, Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS)

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California

California ( /kælɪˈfɔrnjə/ (help·info)) is the most populous state in the United States, and the third largest by area. It is located on the West Coast of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean, and is bordered by Oregon to the north, Nevada to the east, Arizona to the southeast, and the Mexican state of Baja California to the south. Its four largest cities are Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. The state is home to eight of the nation's fifty largest cities. It is known for its varied climate and geography, as well as its diverse population.

California is the third-largest U.S. state by land area, after Alaska and Texas. Its geography ranges from the Pacific coast to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the east, to Mojave desert areas in the southeast and the Redwood-Douglas fir forests of the northwest. The center of the state is dominated by the Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world.

Beginning in the late 18th century, the area known as Alta California was colonized by the Spanish Empire. It and the rest of Mexico became an independent republic in 1821. In 1846, California broke away from Mexico, and, after the Mexican-American War, Mexico ceded California to the United States. It became the 31st state admitted to the union on September 9, 1850.

In the 19th century, the California Gold Rush brought about dramatic changes, with a large influx of people and an economic boom that caused San Francisco to grow from a hamlet of tents to a world-renowned boomtown. Key developments in the early 20th century included the emergence of Los Angeles as center of the American entertainment industry, and the growth of a large, state-wide tourism sector. In addition to California's prosperous agricultural industry, other important contributors to the economy include aerospace, petroleum, and information technology. If California were a country, it would rank among the ten largest economies in the world, with a GDP similar to that of Italy. It would be the 35th most populous country.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA