LOS ANGELES — For decades, Southern California’s war on smog has focused on strategies to reduce pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks. But one of the main drivers of lung-aggravating smog may be right underneath our feet, according to new research.

About 100 miles east of San Diego, in the heart of the Colorado Desert, the Salton Sea ...Read more

ORLANDO, Fla. — Could Elon Musk and SpaceX be set to drop $1.8 billion for new launch support facilities in Cape Canaveral?

Space Florida, the state’s aerospace economic development entity, isn’t saying just who wants to spend the money, but they are planning to discuss the secretive plan called “Project Hinton” at a meeting this week...Read more

A decade ago, I stood on the muddy banks of the Great Marsh, a salt marsh an hour north of Boston, and pulled a thumb-sized crab with an absurdly large claw out of a burrow. I was looking at a fiddler crab – a species that wasn’t supposed to be north of Cape Cod, let alone north of Boston.

As it turned out, the marsh I was ...Read more

SpaceX has two Space Coast launches booked for the weekend, but will have to wait at least one day after scrubbing the first launch attempt on Friday night.

A Falcon 9 rocket on the RRT-1 mission carrying an undisclosed payload is now targeting liftoff at 7:59 p.m. Eastern time Saturday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch ...Read more

LAS VEGAS — Access to clean water and renewable energy on Nevada’s tribal lands has not historically been a given.

With a $20 million Environmental Protection Agency grant, the Walker River Paiute Tribe in west-central Nevada, south of Fallon, is a step closer to strengthening its water delivery system and making homes on the reservation ...Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — SpaceX has two Space Coast launches booked for the weekend with the first lined up for Friday night.

A Falcon 9 rocket on the RRT-1 mission carrying an undisclosed payload is targeting liftoff at 8:04 p.m. from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 in the middle of a launch window that runs from...Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — Cape Canaveral Space Force Station had a different kind of launch on its plate Thursday when the Army and Navy teamed up to complete a test of a hypersonic missile.

The launch of what is known as the Dark Eagle Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon system was an end-to-end test using Space Launch Complex 46, which hosted a pair ...Read more

Imagine a photograph of your great-grandparents, grandparents and parents side by side. You’d see a resemblance, but each generation would look distinct from its predecessors. This is the process of evolution in its simplest form: descent with modification.

Over many generations, a staggering amount of modification is possible. This...Read more

The Chesapeake Bay Executive Council, a group of governors and other environmental leaders, announced plans to revise the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement.

With the 2014 agreement, the council committed to increasing the watershed’s resiliency and withstanding the effects of a changing climate. Many of the objectives in the agreement have a...Read more

BOISE, Idaho — Wild birds are dying by the thousands in the Treasure Valley because of avian flu outbreaks, according to a news release from the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

The agency said Wednesday that it received reports of large numbers of dead birds — many of them geese — at Fort Boise, Lake Lowell and in Parma recently. Fish ...Read more

MONTEREY, Calif. — King tides return this weekend and with them a reminder of rising sea levels.

“As sea level rises, the king tides will get higher and the potential damage that extreme high tides cause will be greater,” said Annie Kohut Frankel, grants and education manager at the California Coastal Commission. “Soon the places we ...Read more

ELKHORN SLOUGH, Calif. – Though sea otters are an unofficial mascot of Monterey County and popular amongst tourists and locals alike, they are also described as voracious predators that help keep problematic invaders out of coastal waters.

A recent study was published in the scientific journal Biological Invasions, detailing that otters at ...Read more

OpenAI said it has identified and fixed an issue that left millions of global users unable to access ChatGPT and the recently released AI video generator Sora.

“We’re experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix,” the AI giant posted on X shortly after 6 p.m. ET. “Sorry and we’ll ...Read more

Minnesota utility regulators on Thursday unanimously approved what would be the state’s first carbon dioxide pipeline, stretching 28 rural miles from an ethanol plant near Fergus Falls to the North Dakota border.

The decision is the latest victory for Summit Carbon Solutions for its plan to capture planet-warming gases from 57 ethanol plants,...Read more

Winter is the time to look for coyotes in Missouri, from the city to the country.

These dog relatives are native to North America, and they spread as far as Alaska and the Panama Canal during the 20th century.

Meriwether Lewis described the coyotes as “little prairie wolves” in 1806, when the Lewis and Clark expedition noticed a group of ...Read more

Powerful earthquakes like the one felt last week across Northern California are stark reminders for people to plan — perhaps to fortify their home or business or, at minimum, finally build that earthquake kit.

But for the Devils Hole pupfish, a critically endangered species found only in a deep limestone cave in Death Valley, an earthquake ...Read more

Coastal populations are expanding quickly around the world. The rise is evident in burgeoning waterfront cities and in the increasing damage from powerful storms and rising sea levels. Yet, reliable, detailed data on the scale of that population change has been hard to pin down, until now.

We study human geography as a sociologist at ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS -- It was technically a successful scientific discovery when analysts at the Hennepin County, Minnesota, forensic science lab recognized there was a contaminant somewhere in its DNA process. That did not lessen the sense of dread.

Allison King, the DNA supervisor and technical leader, summed up the general feeling inside the lab ...Read more