LAS VEGAS — Four years ago, Lake Mead hit a historic low, a harbinger of the threat facing Southern Nevada’s primary water source.

Lake Mead reached its record low of 1,040.58 feet above sea level on July 27, 2022. As Lake Mead’s water level continues to trend downward over the past 20 years, conditions this year have stressed its supply ...Read more

It’s no secret: This year has been a bad one so far for severe thunderstorms around Pittsburgh. In fact, it has been quite an active season throughout the Ohio Valley and a large part of the Midwest.

How bad has it been? In the months of March, April, May and June 2026, Pennsylvania saw a whopping 852 reports of severe weather. By ...Read more

If you’ve ever found yourself stuck in a rut while cooped up all day at a nine-to-five job, or just felt stressed about work, school or life in general, you’re not alone. Hearing “just go outside” might sound like trivial advice, but researchers have been investigating a new, unconventional strategy to boost mental health: Seeking the...Read more

MIAMI — The Queen Conch, a giant sea snail and unofficial mascot of the Florida Keys, was listed as endangered on Valentine’s Day, 2022. Once a species is listed under the Endangered Species Act, the federal government has to identify and protect the “critical habitat” essential to its recovery.

That still hasn’t happened.

The ...Read more

The latest transatlantic technology brouhaha unfolded on Instagram.

During a week in June when the leaders of the Group of Seven descended on France and Paris held its flagship technology conference, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu took to the platform better known for aspirational travel content to announce his government was seeking...Read more

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-third of the world’s fertilizer normally passes, has made clear that access to nutrients for crops remains as strategically important in the 21st century as access to oil.

As an environmental historian, I study how fertilizer transformed the modern world. That history is...Read more

Before Rick Walker retired and became an owl monitor at the Rainbow Owl Preserve in the northwest valley, he was a dentist in New Orleans.

Walker said there’s a common thread between the two pursuits: watching his patients and the western burrowing owls grow up.

“It was great because you got to see families grow up,” he said. “Same ...Read more

The early 1900s were a very bad time to be a bird. On average, more than 5 million were killed every year — not for sustenance, but to feed perhaps the most frivolous of trades: plume-topped hats.

Ostentatious headwear made of egrets and other animals — some of which featured an entire taxidermied body— was so popular at the start of the ...Read more

Chandler Bondurant fly-fishes in the Boise River every day, but since the first week of July, the only thing he’s caught is slime.

“It’s pretty much unfishable in town,” Bondurant told the Idaho Statesman.

As soon as he casts his line, brown globs floating through the water get caught on his hook and the knots in his line. “If you ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — As wildfires rage across Canada and the American West, the announcement from federal forecasters that an El Niño warming is forming thousands of miles away in the tropical Pacific Ocean may offer some regions relief — next year, at least.

The El Niño climate pattern materializes erratically every two to seven years and can ...Read more

Pennsylvania’s roughly 100,000 oil and gas wells produce wastewater that’s many times saltier than seawater and contains radium, a known carcinogen. For decades, that saltwater, called brine, was spread on dirt and gravel roads across the state to control dust and also on paved roads to melt ice.

The state Department of ...Read more

When a devastating heat wave, hurricane, flood or wildfire strikes, people often want to know: How much did human-caused climate change influence this event, if at all?

For many years, scientists could answer that question only in general terms. They knew that human-caused climate change was increasing the frequency or intensity of ...Read more

Engines were switched and a tropical storm had moved along, so SpaceX was able to launch the Starship and Super Heavy rocket on its 13th suborbital test mission on Friday night.

The heavy-lift rocket lifted off at 6:51 p.m. EDT from SpaceX’s Texas launch site Starbase with a successful booster separation that sent the upper stage Starship on ...Read more

WASHINGTON — Federal lawmakers are considering whether to expand the government’s authority to kill more sea lions and seals to bolster salmon recovery efforts in the Pacific Northwest.

The region’s critical salmon runs are on life support: Fourteen species and populations of salmon and steelhead trout in Washington State are deemed at ...Read more

LOS ANGELES -- It lurks ominously beneath California’s many natural wonders, a reminder that nothing in this landscape is truly permanent.

It’s been described as “the mother of all earthquake faults,” the source of both our geological birth and, perhaps, our ultimate undoing.

But the most unnerving thing about the San Andreas fault ...Read more

It was Labor Day 2017, and the remote thermometer at McIntyre Estate Vineyard in Monterey County’s Santa Lucia Highlands was registering a noontime temperature Steve McIntyre couldn’t quite believe: 104 degrees.

McIntyre jumped in his car, hoping the sensor was broken. Twenty miles later he stepped out into the searing air at his vineyard ...Read more

An autonomous AI agent powered by OpenAI models escaped a testing environment designed to isolate it from the internet and hacked another company’s systems to steal answers to a cybersecurity test, an “unprecedented” breach that demonstrated how AI agents can evade their developers’ controls in pursuit of assigned goals.

OpenAI said the...Read more

President Donald Trump signed proclamations on July 13, 2026, cutting the size of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by roughly 90% – meaning nearly 3 million acres will lose monument status and revert to ordinary public lands management in September. The Antiquities Act of 1906 requires presidents to use ...Read more

California and two other states have avoided the harshest water cutbacks the Trump administration could have imposed over the next two years to deal with the deepening crisis on the Colorado River.

The Los Angeles Times has learned that federal officials have agreed with an offer made earlier this year by California, Arizona and Nevada to ...Read more

Spotted lanternflies, the pest that has infested Maryland for 8 years, are shifting their populations across the state as increased predators, effective management techniques and community reporting play a role in the bug’s presence.

Although scientists disagree on whether the bugs are on the decline within the state, they agree that the ...Read more