Federal fisheries officials on Monday rejected a bid to designate West Coast Chinook salmon as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

In response, one of the conservation groups that petitioned for the listing, the Center for Biological Diversity, says it is considering a legal challenge.

“The major species protections ...Read more

SAN DIEGO — The San Diego County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday adopted a resolution vowing to fight efforts by the Trump administration to expand offshore oil and gas drilling more than three miles off the coast of California.

The measure, approved on a 4-1 vote, was introduced by board chair Terra Lawson-Remer and chair pro tem Paloma ...Read more

New Jersey is parched top to bottom.

In some regions, rainfall has plunged as much as eight inches below average for the past year, straining reservoirs, streams, and aquifers enough that the state Department of Environmental Protection has issued a drought warning — a notch shy of an emergency.

As a result, officials are asking residents to...Read more

SpaceX sent up its second launch in less than 24 hours on the Space Coast on Tuesday afternoon, while also bringing home its booster for the last time on a landing zone it has been leasing for the last 10 years.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on the NROL-77 mission with a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office from Cape ...Read more

ORLANDO, Fla. — NASA astronaut Jonny Kim flew home with two Roscosmos cosmonauts from the International Space Station packed tight in their Soyuz spacecraft landing in the frozen steppes of Kazakhstan on Tuesday to complete an eight-month stay in space.

Kim launched to to the station back on April 8 with cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey ...Read more

SpaceX is set to complete its second launch in less than 24 hours on the Space Coast with a national security mission lines up for Tuesday afternoon.

A Falcon 9 rocket is set to lift off on the NROL-77 mission with a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 ...Read more

A profound unraveling is underway in the American Southwest, happening across a thousand-mile arc from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the central Sierra. In an unprecedented calamity, the most widely distributed, most iconic tree of the region — the beautiful ponderosa pine — is disappearing. So significant is this loss, both visually and ...Read more

CHICAGO — When you look across a field of miscanthus, it’s “hypnotically beautiful,” says Emily Heaton, whose family farm has for two decades grown the first commercial field of this grass in Illinois. Dense, sun-loving and often called “giant,” it blooms in late summer to fall with a showy silver flower.

Just like cornstalks across...Read more

After avoiding it for nearly two decades, wildlife officials say that the illness wiping out millions of bats may have reached Nevada.

The fungal disease is known as white-nose syndrome, and it’s considered to be the single most deadly wildlife disease outbreak in North American history. Scientists first documented the disease in New York in ...Read more

A federal judge on Monday struck down the Trump administration’s ban on federal permits for wind energy projects in what supporters said was an important victory for the embattled industry.

President Trump issued the ban on his first day in office through an executive order that called for the temporary withdrawal of nearly all federal land ...Read more

WASHINGTON — Less than a year after President Donald Trump banned new wind projects, a federal judge ruled the president’s executive order was illegal.

U.S. District Judge Patti Saris said Monday the order is “arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law,” siding with more than a dozen U.S. states and a clean energy group that had ...Read more

President Donald Trump’s executive order directing government agencies to halt approving new wind energy projects was ruled illegal by a federal judge.

The ruling Monday sided with more than a dozen states and a New York clean energy group that had challenged the executive order that essentially froze U.S. approvals of wind energy ...Read more

Elon Musk denied news reports that his rocket and satellite maker SpaceX is seeking a $800 billion valuation through a share sale.

“There has been a lot of press claiming SpaceX is raising money at $800B, which is not accurate,” Musk said in a post Saturday on his social media platform X. “SpaceX has been cash flow positive for many ...Read more

TAMPA, Fla. — Thirty years ago, Lisa McPherson died after spending 17 days in the care of the Church of Scientology at its Fort Harrison Hotel in downtown Clearwater. Throughout the more than two-week period, caretakers logged McPherson’s behavior as she experienced a mental breakdown and became physically ill.

On Dec. 5, 1995, they took ...Read more

A man mourns the loss of his dead celebrity mom, who unexpectedly appears before him as a hologram in his childhood home, singing and strumming a guitar.

The touching scene is from a new short film called “Sweetwater” that has an unlikely backer: Google.

Amid all the hand-wringing over artificial intelligence and the potential threat it ...Read more

Are artificial intelligence companies keeping humanity safe from AI's potential harms? Don't bet on it, a new report card says.

As AI plays an increasingly larger role in the way humans interact with technology, the potential harms are becoming more clear — people using AI-powered chatbots for counseling and then dying by suicide, or using AI...Read more

CHICAGO — After years of little snow across the Chicago area, recent record-breaking snowfall and below-freezing temperatures might seem to contradict scientific reports of winters getting warmer. But climate change is still transforming how locals experience the changing seasons, including this fall, one of the top 10 warmest recorded in ...Read more

ORLANDO, Fla. — It’s one thing to visit an aquarium and gaze in awe at a 1,000-pound manatee swimming just behind the glass. It’s another thing to share the same water with Florida’s sea cows, encountering them in an up-close and personal way.

Such an opportunity is only possible while visiting the aptly-named “Manatee Capital of the ...Read more

The Chicago Tribune filed a copyright infringement lawsuit Thursday in New York federal court against Perplexity AI, alleging the California-based startup has been unlawfully profiting off the newspaper’s content in building its AI-driven search engine.

The complaint challenges the unauthorized use of often fully reproduced Tribune reporting ...Read more