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

Jose “Moke” Simon III recalls as a child in the ‘70s watching the creeks that flow into Clear Lake in Northern California turn black with fish — a fish found only in these waters — as they made their springtime run.

Someone would call from the neighboring reservation with the news: “The hitch are running!” Everybody would grab ...Read more

U.S. farmers will produce a record-breaking harvest of 4.52 billion bushels of soybeans in 2026, according to projections from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. At 60 pounds to the bushel, that is roughly 800 pounds of soybeans for every American.

Most people don’t think of themselves as soybean consumers. Few sit down to a plate ...Read more

A sweeping bipartisan bill that seeks to prevent catastrophic wildfires and restore fire-ravaged forests has revealed a schism in the nation’s environmental movement as some conservation advocates find themselves allied with a longtime foe: loggers.

The Fix Our Forests Act, which Congress is close to passing, aims to speed up forest ...Read more

SAN DIEGO — Carlsbad declared a local emergency Wednesday to expedite repairs of coastal erosion that threatens to undermine Carlsbad Boulevard, also known as the historic Highway 101.

Early next week crews will begin placing boulders weighing 4 to 8 tons each on the beach beside the highway just north of the Encinas Creek outlet, city ...Read more

The Trump administration is seeking to revise a federal climate report published three years ago to recast worst-case climate scenarios as implausible and limit their use in federal decision-making.

The White House has proposed an “amendment and clarification” to the findings of the National Climate Assessment 5, published in 2023. National...Read more

California, home to the world's largest tech companies, is placing more guardrails around social media and artificial intelligence as child safety concerns escalate.

On Thursday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed more than 10 bills aimed at keeping young people safe online.

From suicides to sextortion, parents and their children are ...Read more

Amid an oppressive stretch of extreme heat and Florida-esque humidity that has been punishing much of California, consider, for a moment, the Ice Age.

For millions of years, Pacific mastodons — huge, hairy relatives of modern elephants — roamed a vast and lush range that included California, Oregon, the northern Rocky Mountains and parts of...Read more

The Tibetan Plateau may be on the other side of the world from California, but what happens on this high-altitude landscape in Asia can set off a chain of events that fuels powerful atmospheric rivers with flooding rainfall and heavy snow hitting the U.S. West Coast.

My team of atmospheric scientists discovered this connection, and we...Read more