PONTIAC, Mich. — A drone lifts off from an Amazon facility with a package secured tightly beneath. It climbs over Metro Detroit neighborhoods on its way to a customer's doorstep — and into a growing debate over noise, privacy and who controls the skies.

Amazon is betting drones will reshape package delivery. Amazon Prime Air launched in the...Read more

Reducing rampant pollution across the United States was so important that when Congress passed many environmental protection laws, including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act, it didn’t want to leave enforcement only to the executive branch.

Congress specifically wrote into those laws ways for citizens ...Read more

TOOLIK FIELD STATION, NORTH SLOPE, Alaska — Unlike most people, Rose Cory wasn’t drawn to northern Alaska for the vistas of the weather-scarred Brooks Range or the braided rivers winding through seemingly endless tundra. Rather, she was lured by what it contains on an atomic level: “It’s the carbon,” Cory said.

To Cory, an aquatic ...Read more

Why not just build them in space? As data centers face rising costs, strained resources and growing political opposition, a number of entrepreneurs — Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt — have raised the possibility of processing and storing data aboard satellites in low-Earth orbit, using large solar arrays for power. It’s a crazy idea, ...Read more

HAMPTON, Va. — NASA officials and state leadership cut the ribbon Friday on the agency’s first new wind tunnel in more than 40 years as the agency undergoes a wave of consolidation.

The Flight Dynamics Research Facility at Langley Research Center is a 25,000-square-foot facility that aims to play a major role in providing research for ...Read more

Federal water managers on Friday announced a 10-year plan to manage the critical Colorado River that opens the door to unprecedented water supply cuts to three states and will require near-constant negotiation between water users in the river basin.

The report made public Friday is the culmination of years of intense and divisive negotiations ...Read more

CHICAGO — President Donald Trump’s administration has stopped work on a project to slow the spread of invasive carp in the Great Lakes, a move Gov. JB Pritzker on Friday said amounted to a major attack on Illinois’ and the nation’s freshwater supply.

The comments came hours after the Pritzker administration said it had asked the federal...Read more

Federal water managers on Friday announced a 10-year plan to manage the critical Colorado River that opens the door to unprecedented water supply cuts to three states and will require near-constant negotiation between water users in the river basin.

The report made public Friday is the culmination of years of intense and divisive negotiations ...Read more

The Trump administration has released its long-awaited 10-year plan for dealing with worsening water shortages along the Colorado River. Instead of ordering the most drastic water cutbacks it could have imposed, the administration chose to take more of a wait-and-see approach.

The plan allows for harsh water cuts if they’re deemed necessary, ...Read more

California hit a major milestone in May, generating more than half its electricity from the sun in what is believed to be a global first, according to a new analysis from the U.K.-based energy think tank Ember.

“California has had a wealth of solar growth in the last five years,” said Abby Lestina, an analyst at Grid Status, another group ...Read more

The Trump administration has released its long-awaited 10-year plan for dealing with worsening water shortages along the Colorado River. It allows for harsh water cutbacks if deemed necessary, potentially requiring California, Arizona and Nevada to cut up to 3 million acre-feet per year — up to 40% of the combined allotments.

But state and ...Read more

A bus company that left its buses’ engines running while parked in Boston neighborhoods has settled a lawsuit by agreeing to pay US$5.6 million in damages for the resulting air pollution.

The settlement came in a citizen-enforcement lawsuit under the Clean Air Act, which allows any person to sue alleged polluters for the harm done ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — Forget the smell of blood and all the shark fears we’ve internalized thanks to “Jaws” and “Shark Week.” Turns out, the first thing a shark notices about humans actually might be the unique sounds we make in the ocean.

And great white sharks — at least the ones in a sharky hot spot like Southern California— have ...Read more

Anthropic PBC announced that its artificial intelligence models had breached three different organizations during cybersecurity tests that went awry, a little more than a week after its chief rival, OpenAI, disclosed a similar incident.

Anthropic said in a blog post Thursday that it made the discovery after performing a review of its own ...Read more

LinkedIn has a new mission: Cleaning up the AI-generated junk in its feed.

The Microsoft-owned platform on Thursday unveiled a “seems like AI slop” button so users can report posts that appear to be low-quality posts written by AI.

“People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas and expertise...Read more

For more than 15 years, Google co-founder Sergey Brin didn’t spend a cent in California elections, but earlier this year, when it seemed likely a union-backed wealth tax would make its way onto the November ballot, he reopened his wallet.

The $85 million that he’s contributed so far this year eclipses his past political spending in the ...Read more

ORLANDO, Fla. — That bump in the night you might have heard in the wee hours of Thursday morning could have been for national security.

That’s because a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on the NROL-95 mission carrying a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex ...Read more

Thick smoke from massive wildfires has been spreading in North America and Europe once again in 2026. The health impacts of breathing this particle-filled air are becoming well known, but wildfires’ influence on the weather is less widely recognized.

We often think about weather controlling wildfires: Dry air, heat, wind and ...Read more

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has halted construction at the Brandon Road Lock and Dam complex, a state-federal project in Joliet, Illinois, meant to block invasive carp from reaching the Great Lakes.

"The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued the stop work order," Army Corps Public Affairs Officer Gene Pawlik said Wednesday. "The project is ...Read more