LOS ANGELES — An industrial chemical used in plastic products has been cropping up in illegal drugs from California to Maine, a sudden and puzzling shift in the drug supply that has alarmed health researchers.

Its name is bis (2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-4-piperidyl) sebacate, commonly abbreviated as BTMPS. The chemical is used in plastic for ...Read more

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — If you look up in the Kansas and Missouri skies on Tuesday, Sept. 17, you may be able to catch a glimpse at not only a supermoon — but also a partial lunar eclipse.

A supermoon occurs when the moon is at its closest point to Earth, according to NASA. NASA calls supermoons the “biggest and brightest” full moons of the...Read more

Kids born in 2020 worldwide will experience twice the number of wildfires during their lifetimes compared with those born in 1960. In California and other western states, frequent wildfires have become as much a part of summer and fall as popsicles and Halloween candy.

Wildfires produce fine particulate matter, or PM₂.₅, that ...Read more

LOS ANGELES -- Madigan Traversi’s world changed in the fall of 2017, but the forces responsible for her transformation had been brewing for a long time.

Late at night on Oct. 8, her family received a robocall about an evacuation warning — not an order — as more than a dozen wildfires tore through eight Northern California counties at once...Read more

After decades of trying to stop Earth from heating up, scientists are exploring how to reverse climate change and maybe even cool the planet back down.

Could clouds be brightened so they reflect more sunlight back into outer space? If lab-grown seaweed is sunk into the ocean, how much carbon dioxide could it absorb? Would drilling holes into ...Read more

Eighteen months later, Anna Holland still can’t stomach the smell of tomato soup.

“I can’t have a tin of it anymore,” said the climate activist, who shocked the art world — and much of the rest of the planet — by throwing Heinz Tomato Soup at Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in the National Gallery in London in October 2022.

Holland ...Read more

SpaceX brought home the four crew members of Polaris Dawn with a splashdown landing off the coast of Florida early Sunday.

The Crew Dragon Resilience, which launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday, landed at 3:36 a.m. off the coast of the Dry Tortugas in the Gulf of Mexico.

It marked the end of the five-day orbital...Read more

Any night now, the astrophysicists tell us, a new star will appear in the night sky over Philly and the rest of the world — about as bright as the North Star — the result of a cosmic explosion in a distant constellation millennia ago.

NASA scientist Rebekah Hounsell has called it "a once-in-a-lifetime event that will create a lot of new ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — Plumes of smoke from Southern California’s fires blew across Big Bear on Sept. 11, causing local air quality meters to return off-the-chart readings for particulate pollution.

Officials report air quality on a color-coded scale, in which green indicates “good” and maroon denotes “hazardous” conditions. An air quality ...Read more

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams watched the spacecraft that took them to the International Space Station leave them behind last week as the Boeing Starliner made its return trip to Earth without a crew.

“We’ve got lessons learned that we will go through. We will have discussions. We will be involved with those discussions, and things that ...Read more

DENVER — Adams County School District 14 will roll out 14 new electric school buses by 2025, adding to the 144 electric buses that already are ferrying school children in Colorado or are on-order for districts across the state.

The Adams 14 buses will phase out more than half of the 25 diesel buses used by the district. The school district ...Read more

SAN DIEGO — The San Diego County Air Pollution Control District will be expanding its role in addressing the foul odors affecting communities near where sewage spills over the U.S.-Mexico border, following conflicting reports earlier this week about whether the stinky air people breathe is dangerous.

On Thursday, the district’s governing ...Read more

Across Appalachia, September marks the start of ginseng season, when thousands of people roam the hills searching for hard-to-reach patches of this highly prized plant.

Many people know ginseng as an ingredient in vitamin supplements or herbal tea. That ginseng is grown commercially on farms in Wisconsin and Ontario, Canada. In ...Read more

Hunting large carnivores is a contentious issue in wildlife management and conservation. It’s on the ballot in fall 2024 in Colorado, where voters will consider Initiative 91, a proposed ban on hunting and trapping of mountain lions, bobcats and lynx in the state.

Wildlife agencies often use regulated hunting as a tool for ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — Roughly half of Americans subscribe to to some sort of conspiracy theory, and their fellow humans haven't had much success coaxing them out of their rabbit holes.

Perhaps they could learn a thing or two from an AI-powered chatbot.

In a series of experiments, the artificial chatbot was able to make more than a quarter of people ...Read more

While there’s no evidence that migrants in Ohio are eating domesticated cats and dogs, Trump Tower may have been illegally killing fish in the Chicago River for nearly 20 years.

A Cook County judge issued a summary judgment against downtown Chicago’s Trump International Hotel & Tower for violating federal environment laws that protect ...Read more

SpaceX passed 60 launches for the year from the Space Coast early Thursday with a Falcon 9 mission taking a set of five satellites to space.

The rocket flying the BlueBird 1-5 mission launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 4:52 a.m.

Its first-stage booster flew for the 13th time and brought a sonic boom...Read more

ATLANTA — A tech billionaire has become the first layperson to perform a space walk. Hundreds of miles above Earth, Jared Isaacman took part in an intricate performance of science and engineering that often comes with some serious health risks, even for professional astronauts.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX partnered with Isaacman to bring the Polaris...Read more