CHICAGO — Cook County Forest Preserves has used a $40 million yearly windfall from voters to buy up and conserve more land, pay for maintenance and add programming while bolstering its pension funds, the district reported Tuesday.

Voters overwhelmingly gave the preserves the OK to raise property taxes by 0.025% in a 2022 referendum. While at ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — More than 40 dead cormorants, the black birds known for perching on rocks and stretching their wings to dry, washed ashore on Venice Beach this weekend.

“We don’t usually see that many,” Nicole Mooradian, spokesperson for L.A. County Department of Beaches and Harbors said.

Carcasses lay strewn along the shoreline as the ...Read more

Federal lawmakers from California are leading a bipartisan push, backed by nearly a third of Congress, to stop the Trump administration from moving forward with a proposal to transfer public land in Yosemite National Park to a private developer.

In a letter sent Tuesday morning to the U.S. Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the ...Read more

OpenAI is working on steps to address artificial intelligence safety issues with its top competitors Anthropic PBC and Google DeepMind, escalating industry efforts to respond to a groundswell of concern that the technology poses an economic and security threat.

Chris Lehane, the global policy chief for OpenAI, said Tuesday that the company’s ...Read more

WASHINGTON — Members of House Democrats’ Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition and its affiliated nonprofit released a set of policies on Tuesday to serve as a template to address both economic and climate concerns in the next Congress should their party make big midterm gains.

The SEEC Institute’s Thriving Economy Project is ...Read more

ORLANDO, Fla. — Blue Origin continues to push through a rebuild of its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station after suffering catastrophic damage in a rocket explosion earlier this year.

CEO Dave Limp posted side-by-side drone images of Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36 showing the extensive damage seen May 29 the day after a hot fire...Read more

As parts of the Southern California coastline crumbled into the sea, slammed by intense waves and flooding in recent days, oceanographer Kim McCoy had one thing on his mind: the nuclear waste set in concrete on the beach near San Clemente at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant.

“Rising sea levels, storm waves, El Niño which ...Read more

Los Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of generative artificial intelligence on school devices for the 2026-27 academic year, joining New York City Public Schools in limiting children's access to a technology no one yet knows how to safely manage.

The nation's two largest school districts made the move at...Read more

In almost three decades of growing apples at her family’s orchard in northern Illinois, SueEllen Arndt and her husband, Ralph, never experienced anything like this year.

Five spring frosts killed most of the blooms on their trees, she said, forcing Prairie Sky Orchard to close for the 2026 fall harvest season.

“In the last few years, they�...Read more

An AI researcher who recently resigned from Google DeepMind warned humanity is running out of time to prevent artificial intelligence from causing widespread harm, the latest staffer to voice concerns about the direction of the technology.

“At Google, I witnessed AI development first hand. I too am extremely concerned by the default ...Read more

Artificial intelligence stocks tumbled on Monday after American leaders of the AI revolution called for a coordinated slowdown in building more powerful AI systems.

Over the weekend, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, published an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," calling for an industrywide effort to slow AI development. ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California legislators passed a bill last month that pushed back against changes to a state law Gov. Gavin Newsom had previously jammed through the Legislature, as part of an array of environmental measures that headlined this year’s legislative session.

That measure joined bills regulating data centers, home energy use...Read more

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Monday it will no longer regulate dangerous planet-warming pollution from power plants that burn coal or natural gas.

The nation’s top environmental authority is rolling back the majority of Biden-era limits on greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to remove “red tape” that drives up energy ...Read more

As top artificial intelligence labs call for a slowdown in the development of the technology, Microsoft released a code of conduct for how it plans to clamp down on its own AI models.

“At Microsoft AI, we begin with a simple premise: people matter more than AI,” the company said in a Monday blog post.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told...Read more

NORTH MANKATO, MINN. — Shantelle Colum, a 33-year-old artist, loved supporting small local businesses, especially Seoul Foods, the newly opened Asian grocery store near her.

Then this summer, Colum noticed Seoul Foods’ ads on Facebook weren’t showing real pictures of delicious dumplings or spicy ramen noodles. Instead, she saw computer-...Read more

Qualcomm debuted two new processors this month, its latest step toward integrating intelligence into seemingly everything.

The Q-2390 and IQ-2390, which were unveiled Sept. 1, fall under the company’s Internet of Things, or IoT, business — one of Qualcomm’s fastest-growing sectors — building hardware and software that make things like ...Read more

One of the problems with how America deals with wildfires is thinking there is one primary strategy that can end the nation’s wildfire crisis. Whether that’s detecting and putting out every fire fast, increasing logging and forest thinning, or allowing fires to burn under safe conditions, the default choice today is to pour more money and...Read more

It’s been more than three years since California was in a drought. Reservoirs are above average levels. A strong El Niño is brewing in the Pacific that could bring soaking storms this winter.

But there’s a new endangered species across the state: grass. A broad new water conservation law will soon take effect in phases, banning the ...Read more

A facility at the Nevada National Security Site outside of Las Vegas has been used to perform testing on key components for very small nuclear reactors — a technology that some believe holds great promise for advancing energy production in the United States.

Several companies around the world are now racing to produce what are known as ...Read more

Over two days in the summer of 1910, wildfires roared across the bone-dry forests of the inland Northwestern U.S., the Rockies, and parts of British Columbia. Whole towns burned. The blazes scorched 3 million acres of forest, an area the size of Connecticut, and left behind a legacy that profoundly changed how the U.S. managed wildfires – ...Read more