San Diego Chargers to Support MADD Designated Driver Program

1. The San Diego Chargers are one of three NFL football teams to join a Mothers Against Drunk Driving designated driver program, MADD
announced Thursday. MADD will have a presence in the Qualcomm Stadium parking lot on game days. Information cards will be distributed inside the facility, and an audio public service announcement will be played to encourage the use of designated drivers who remain sober to ensure everyone in their group returns home safely.

2. A San Diego County resident and other parties filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking to compel the Obama administration to reassess whether a bird species should remain federally protected—with tens of thousands of acres reserved as "critical habitat''—even though its nesting grounds extend well into Mexico. San Diego-area resident Dr. Lou Marsh, the Property Owners Association of Riverside County and the Santa Maria-based Coalition of Labor, Agriculture & Business are challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's designation of the California gnatcatcher as a threatened species.

3. An extra layer of biochemical instructions on top of DNA sequences might be more responsible for generational changes between humans, animals and plants than mutations of genes, according to a study by the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and The Scripps Research Institute published Thursday. Researchers tracked changes to the Arabidopsis thaliana flower over 30 generations and found differences in that extra epigenomic layer came much faster than did mutations to genes.