LOS ANGELES — An unusual alliance of Republican lawmakers and animal rights advocates, together with others, is creating storm clouds for a plan to protect one threatened owl by killing a more common one.

Last August, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved a plan to shoot roughly 450,000 barred owls in California, Oregon and Washington ...Read more

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing a bill to streamline permitting for new oil wells that environmental groups say would wipe out scrutiny of the industry.

The bill would establish “plug-to-drill” permitting until 2036 where two wells would have to be plugged and abandoned before a new one is drilled. In addition, drillers no longer ...Read more

Lawyers hired by the Chicago Housing Authority recently cited Illinois Supreme Court case Mack v. Anderson in an effort to persuade a judge to reconsider a jury’s $24 million verdict against the agency in a case involving the alleged poisoning of two children by lead paint in CHA-owned property.

The problem?

The case doesn’t exist.

In the...Read more

Artificial intelligence figures to impact virtually every aspect of the global economy and now it’s making a foray onto California’s electric grid.

The California Independent System Operator, which manages the power system for about 80% of the Golden State and a portion of Nevada, just agreed to launch a pilot program that will use an AI ...Read more

CHICAGO -- Beatriz Swanson can remember the first time she saw the blinking glow. She was 10 years old, growing up in Mexico, when two fireflies appeared in front of her, floating away before she could carefully capture them in her hands.

Swanson did not see the shining insects again until she moved to upstate New York 17 years after her first ...Read more

Lucihub founder and CEO Amer Tadayon has started several businesses in California and Arizona. Those states never invested in his companies, but Nevada did.

Thanks to a growing startup ecosystem, increasing venture capital availability and favorable investing regulations, Tadayon called Las Vegas “one of the best places I’ve ever been to be...Read more

Ecologists in Australia were treated to an “adorable” surprise while reviewing thousands of images captured by their motion sensor field cameras.

There among photos was “a female bandicoot with three young at foot,” according to a July 15 news release from the Australian Wildlife Conservancy obtained by McClatchy News.

Experts called ...Read more

DENVER — The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday signaled it no longer believes Colorado can mandate utility companies close their coal-fired power plants, leading environmentalists to accuse the Trump administration of attacking the state’s plan to shift to 100% renewable energy by 2031 to meet its climate goals.

The EPA published...Read more

CHICAGO -- Three stories above the Field Museum’s exhibits, rows and rows of taxidermied chipmunks filled a tray in the museum’s mammal archives. Pointing to two of the oldest critters, mammalogist Stephanie Smith picked up the pair of chipmunks off the tray, balancing them in the palm of her hand.

“The oldest ones we have are from 1891, ...Read more

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators will zero out all federal fuel economy fines dating back to model year 2022, according to a letter sent to automakers that was obtained Wednesday by The Detroit News.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued the letter last week in response to President Donald Trump's signing of the One Big ...Read more

Despite suggestions it has been losing its edge, California is way ahead of others when it comes to the hottest technology right now: artificial intelligence.

The regions around San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles are among the top ranked in the country for AI, according to a report released Wednesday by the Brookings Institution.

The ...Read more

Just because Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos aren’t the best of friends, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper will directly compete with SpaceX’s Starlink satellites for broadband internet, doesn’t mean everyone can’t still get along.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched at 2:30 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday with 24 of Amazon’s satellites from Cape ...Read more

ANAHEIM, Calif. – Depending on how you look at it, UC Irvine doctoral candidate Te Han and his adviser, Paul Robertson, just made an already unimaginably difficult job – finding and observing planets outside our solar system – a lot harder or a lot more accurate.

Either way, what both men insist they didn’t do is transmogrify into the ...Read more

Nvidia is already the world's most valuable company being one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global artificial intelligence boom.

This week, the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker got another windfall.

The Jensen Huang-led technology giant on Monday received approval from the U.S. government to sell some of its AI chips in China, ...Read more

Hanging pictures should generally be easy, but often when you are hanging multiple frames at a specific angle or in a particular pattern, the results aren't what you want. With the Hozo M-Cube 02 Anti-Gravity Combo laser level/measurer, you'll wonder: Where has a tool like this been all my life? And, from now on you'll never hang anything that...Read more

This week a reader is having a problem with Microsoft OneDrive.

“I had been keeping all of my files off of OneDrive successfully for several years. Somehow in the last year, all of my files, documents, photos, etc., have been moved to the OneDrive cloud storage. I want everything back and nothing left on the cloud. Each time I have followed...Read more

CHICAGO — Already the calls are coming in at Chicago’s All Bright Solar.

Customers want solar roofs installed on their homes — and they want them before a federal tax credit worth about $8,000 expires at the end of the year.

The repeal of that tax credit under President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” is “pretty ...Read more