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

Boeing’s Starliner costs and delays remain the target of the latest audit from NASA’s Office of the Inspector General, but remains a cheaper option for the agency than relying solely on SpaceX for its commercial crew needs.

The audit released June 30 dinged the beleaguered spacecraft’s tumultuous and still uncertain path toward ...Read more

Many major tech companies have pledged to pay their fair share of the costs associated with generating and transmitting more electricity to serve large data centers. But ratepayers across the United States are worried about the potential costs they might have to bear. That’s because it’s not immediately clear how the cost of data centers�...Read more

Spring migration has taken flight, but with rising temperatures and shifting seasons, birds are adjusting when and how they migrate to keep up with a rapidly warming climate.

Morgan Tingley, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies the effects of climate change on birds.

...Read more

LOS ANGELES — Fireworks can frighten animals and send them scattering, but Jackie and Shadow's eaglets apparently are made of sterner stuff.

Chicks Luna and Sandy were seen safe and sound Sunday morning around 6 a.m. on the popular livestream nest cam aimed at their Big Bear pine tree, snacking on fish in the family aerie.

Mom and Dad did ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — As extreme heat smothered the eastern United States over the July Fourth weekend and Europe struggled with its own deadly heat wave, experts warned that more record high temperatures could be in store for this year because of a strengthening El Niño.

"We know that temperatures are warming in the long term, linked to human-...Read more

Hours after savoring that perfectly grilled steak on a beautiful summer evening, your body turns traitor, declaring war on the very meal you just enjoyed. You begin to feel excruciating itchiness, pain or even swelling that can escalate to the point of requiring emergency care.

The culprit isn’t food poisoning – it’s the fallout...Read more

Illinois’ tick season may be starting earlier, lasting longer and creeping into new corners of the state, scientists and researchers say.

Milder winters and earlier springs are helping ticks survive in greater numbers, while doctors report earlier cases of tick-borne illnesses this year than in previous seasons. And ticks aren’t only in ...Read more

MIAMI — With the one-time immigration detention camp known as “Alligator Alcatraz” closed down, environmental groups say the time has come to turn the remote airport into an environmental preserve. That could include ripping up the jumbo runway that was the subject of a huge environmental fight decades ago.

Miami-Dade County owns the 17,...Read more

ORLANDO, Fla. — The sight of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket has flown for the last time in its most powerful configuration.

The rocket, sporting five boosters, launched at 12:30 a.m. Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41 on the Amazon Leo 8 mission.

All six remaining Atlas V rockets have been...Read more

When polar ice sheets melt, the effects ripple across the world. The melting ice raises average global sea level, alters ocean currents and affects temperatures in places far from the poles.

But melting ice sheets don’t affect sea level and temperatures in the same way everywhere.

In a November 2025 study, our team of ...Read more

When I started bird-watching as a teenager, a few years after the first Earth Day in 1970, several species that once thrived in my region were nowhere to be found.

Some, like the passenger pigeon, were extinct. Others had retreated to more remote, wild areas of North America. In many cases, humans had destroyed their habitat by ...Read more

By its very essence, the American West requires a jeweler’s touch.

I know. Over three decades, I was a town wildlife officer, leading Mammoth Lakes’ effort to find balance with its coyotes, bears, mountain lions and more.

I crawled into bear dens, I managed their population surge, I led programs to educate the public and police.

Through ...Read more