A mild earthquake occurred off the shore of the northern suburbs Wednesday afternoon, officials said.

A 2.9 earthquake was recorded in Lake Michigan near the Illinois-Wisconsin border at around 2:38 p.m., the United States Geological Survey reported.

The earthquake, which stretched about 3.1 miles deep, took place 13.8 miles northeast of ...Read more

The warning bells are ringing for another potentially killer season for Florida’s beleaguered coral reefs, sending reef restoration companies scrambling to protect their brood.

While the atmospheric phenomena of El Niño is linked to a quieter hurricane season this year, it’s also cranking the thermostat on Florida’s waters. That’s bad ...Read more

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The last time the four astronauts of Artemis II were together in Florida, they were taking a ride on the most powerful rocket to ever launch humans into space.

The quartet of NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen, returned to the launch site ...Read more

BALTIMORE — Walking around Fells Point this week, Baltimore residents were greeted by the stench of rotting fish and sulfur as dead fish floated in the Inner Harbor in what has become a yearly trend.

These “fish kills” have been happening with increasing regularity. In a similar event last August, roughly 120,000 fish turned up dead in ...Read more

PARK CITY, Utah — If the early 20th-century auto revolution was sparked in Detroit by entrepreneurs like Ford, Dodge, and Sloan, the early 21st century has brought a new, digital auto revolution on America’s West Coast right out of a science fiction novel.

At its forefront are entrepreneurs like Sergei Brin of Google, Tesla’s Elon Musk, ...Read more

A growing nationwide shortage of high-skilled workers threatens to delay construction of billions of dollars in new semiconductor plants across the US and constrain future chip production unless the industry pools resources and the government keeps up funding, according to a new report.

The deficit is expected to be most acute in states such as...Read more

Across North America, in places such as Illinois, Iowa and Texas, farmers are busy growing the crops the world depends on for food, fuel and fiber.

But as their tractors roll across fields, a pressing concern weighs heavily on many farmers: the rising cost of synthetic fertilizers, widely considered essential for crop production.

...Read more

It’s pretty commonly known, and not very startling, that free-ranging cats eat birds and small rodents. But the degree to which they eat insects might surprise you.

We are biologists who for many years have been trying to figure out what feral or outdoor-roaming pet cats eat outside.

When domesticated cats – Felis catus �...Read more

PITTSBURGH -- What makes some teenagers more likely to experiment with drugs and alcohol? A new study from Pitt theorizes that one factor may be tied to their levels of dopamine, also known as “the pleasure chemical.”

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, analyzed a massive data set that followed substance use levels in...Read more

Upgrading from a basic thermostat to a smart thermostat offers many advantages, with the most significant being long-term energy savings. By optimizing your heating and cooling system, a smart thermostat can often pay for itself through lower utility bills. In addition, you can control your thermostat remotely from your smartphone; many models...Read more

This week my question comes from my own family. I had a text exchange with my brother-in-law who wrote, “We have at least one laptop that is broken, but we have information on it. What do we do?”

They actually had two old laptops, and they want to take them in for recycling. He was right to ask what to do about the information on the old ...Read more

Rockstar has started taking preorders for “Grand Theft Auto VI,” but the game is still months away from its Nov. 19 launch. In the meantime, the ridiculously hyped title has warped the video game calendar.

That’s what 13 years between sequels does to an industry and fanbase. The demand has generated its own undeniable gravity, and ...Read more

As the deadly New World screwworm spreads through Texas, posing significant risk to the U.S. cattle herd, experts are still puzzling over the mystery of how it got there.

The parasite fly’s larvae, which feeds within the wounds of warm-blooded animals, was first detected in a calf in Zavala County at the start of last month, marking the first...Read more

Zoom, the San Jose, California-based company known for its video conferencing platform, has agreed to purchase a Seattle startup as it tries to position itself as an artificial intelligence-powered workplace.

Four Seattle-area tech workers founded the startup, called Common Room, in 2020. The company offers a sales and marketing platform that ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — An environmental justice group is suing California’s top air regulator over its sweeping overhaul of the state’s cap-and-invest carbon market program, claiming it illegally rushed a last-minute incentive for industrial polluters.

The lawsuit from the nonprofit Communities for a Better Environment alleges that the California ...Read more

Microsoft Corp., looking to reduce AI costs, is starting to replace OpenAI and Anthropic with its own models in software products like Excel and Outlook.

Tens of thousands of AI prompts in the widely used spreadsheet and email applications are now being completed each week with Microsoft’s internally built MAI models, according to a person ...Read more

NASA’s $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has risen from its horizontal slumber at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, ahead of its planned launch next month.

The planet hunter, which will seek to unravel the mysteries of dark energy in the universe with infrared sensing, had made the trip to KSC in June from NASA’s...Read more

The DNA in a single cup of water can track wildlife, monitor pollution and survey pathogens in waterways and their surroundings, all at the same time.

DNA is contained in each cell of every plant, animal, fungus and microbe. It carries the genetic instructions needed for an organism’s survival, growth and function, and the DNA of ...Read more

A severe winter snow drought has left snowpack levels far below normal across the American West in 2026. Without a slow-melting blanket of snow to keep the soil and forests moist, alpine vegetation is drying into a tinderbox earlier than normal and ramping up the fire risk.

The historic dryness means electric utilities are facing a ...Read more

Reddit Inc. is battling a new kind of spam: stealth marketing content created by brands that want to get mentioned by popular artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini.

OpenAI and Alphabet Inc., whose AI tools formulate responses and recommendations by drawing on vast amounts of internet information, have content deals with ...Read more