CHICAGO — Sixty-five miles southwest of Chicago, a small hill that looks like a prop from an Indiana Jones movie breaks up the flat, monotone landscape. Consisting of shale, sandstone and rocks from an old coal mine, the waste pile — located on a massive river delta from another era — is an unremarkable remnant from the region’s once-...Read more

CHICAGO — For nearly four decades, owners of the Baldwin power plant in southern Illinois managed to avoid the most stringent requirements of the federal Clean Air Act.

The gargantuan coal burner, built during the early to mid-1970s, became the nation’s largest source of sulfur dioxide, which creates acid rain and lung-damaging soot. It ...Read more

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently said he’d sign into law a ban on “weather modification activities” — such as spreading tiny particles into the air from aircraft to control sunlight — it raised long-standing controversies over “geoengineering” and “chemtrails.”

“I think it’s kind of caricatured as kind of kooky,” ...Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Rep. Sam Liccardo, D-San Jose, lashed out at President Donald Trump’s cuts to programs combating climate change on Friday in Pacifica, where local officials and residents have been left scrambling to protect critical infrastructure after a long-anticipated $50 million federal grant to address severe coastal erosion along ...Read more

The troubled, $20 billion U.S. residential solar market’s future rests on whether Senate Republicans will challenge their brethren in the House of Representatives and change provisions of the massive tax and spending bill that executives and analysts say would devastate the industry.

The bill passed by the House this week would strip away tax...Read more

LOS ANGELES — Water began flowing from a pipe onto hundreds of acres of dry, sunbaked lake bed as California officials filled a complex of shallow ponds near the south shore of the Salton Sea in an effort to create wetlands that will provide habitat for fish and birds, and help control lung-damaging dust around the shrinking lake.

The project...Read more

Throughout his 2024 campaign for president, Donald Trump strongly and repeatedly denied any connection to Project 2025, the political platform document authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.

“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said during a debate with former Vice President ...Read more

SpaceX’s last two efforts to make progress on its Starship and Super Heavy rocket ended with streaks of debris hurtling across the sky. The Federal Aviation Administration, though, is now satisfied it’s safe for SpaceX to try again.

The FAA on Thursday announced the in-development rocket that launches from Starbase, SpaceX’s Texas site, ...Read more

U.S. job openings in research and development are plunging as the Trump administration ramps up funding cuts to government agencies, private contractors and universities, leaving some of the nation’s brightest minds scrambling to find work.

Scientific research and development job postings are down 18% since President Donald Trump took office ...Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif. — On a recent warm May day, bundles of small sun-kissed-colored fruit droop from a towering tree in Raffy Espiritu’s backyard in Milpitas. They soak in the light and ripen in the heat before suddenly splitting from the branches at the slightest tug of Espiritu’s hand.

At first glance, the harvest looks like a puzzling ...Read more

I really like it when something I write starts more conversations.

A while back I wrote about Windows PCs and antivirus software. In that piece, I included a line that read in part, “If you’re running Windows 11 (and you do need to be running Windows 11)…”

I received more than a few emails from readers asking why I wrote that ...Read more

Electrohome's Montrose record player and McKinley 2.0 stereo-powered bookshelf speakers make an excellent combination for anyone entering the vinyl world or for many like myself to get back in.

Electrohome has a history of making modern high-fidelity audio products with a classic look for over 100 years. With the Montrose two-speed belt-drive...Read more

Jony Ive, a former Apple executive known for designing the iPhone, is joining forces with OpenAI, the San Francisco startup behind popular chatbot ChatGPT.

On Wednesday, OpenAI said it's buying io, an AI devices startup that Ive founded a year ago, for nearly $6.5 billion in an all-stock deal, the largest acquisition in OpenAI's history.

"We ...Read more

Artificial intelligence training company Surge AI has been hit with a lawsuit alleging it has misclassified contractors hired to improve chat responses from AI software for some of the world's leading tech companies.

The proposed class action lawsuit alleges that "data annotators" — hired by Surge AI to ensure that powerful AI systems run by ...Read more

The recent firing of the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency is just the latest in a string of blows for the nation’s top disaster-response agency, which has been repeatedly undercut by the Trump administration’s efforts to rein in spending and restructure the federal government.

The dismissal of acting director Cameron Hamilton...Read more

San Jose State University has shot past Stanford and UC Berkeley to a top-10 spot in a ranking of U.S. universities based on a standardized computer coding test.

The school leapt to the No. 9 spot this year in rankings by CodeSignal, a San Francisco company whose General Coding Assessment is widely used by major technology companies to evaluate...Read more

In a rare acceptance of regulations adopted during the Biden administration, the Trump-led Environmental Protection Agency is backing the first national limits on a pair of toxic forever chemicals contaminating the drinking water of most Americans.

But the Trump EPA wants to eliminate standards for a handful of replacement chemicals that appear...Read more