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

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Stargazers will be in for a special treat when the next full moon shines over California.

A partial lunar eclipse will coincide with a harvest supermoon on Tuesday, Sept. 17.

During the celestial event, the moon will look “slightly larger-than-average,” according to Space.com.

What’s a harvest moon? A supermoon?

...Read more

Human activity is imperiling eight of the planet’s critical life-support systems and seven of them have already passed into a danger zone, according to a massive review of Earth science conducted jointly by more than 60 researchers and published Wednesday in The Lancet Planetary Health.

Looking at necessities of a livable Earth — including...Read more

The Food and Drug Administration announced it has started a research project examining the possible effects of toxic metals in tampons, sparking concerns about products used by millions of women in the U.S.

A recent study found a variety of metals — including mercury, arsenic and lead — in more than a dozen brands of tampons.

The FDA said ...Read more

NASA astronaut Don Pettit is on his way to the International Space Station with two Russian cosmonaut crewmates who have helped set a record — they’re among 19 people in orbit at the same time.

Pettit, who was part of the 1996 NASA class of astronauts, made his fourth trip to space Wednesday joining Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and ...Read more

San Mateo County, California, home to tech giant Meta, urged Congress to pass legislation requiring social media companies to add labels to their platforms warning people about their potential to harm users’ mental health.

The Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution Tuesday, the same day 42 state attorneys general, including ...Read more

ORLANDO, Fla. — The four passengers on the Polaris Dawn mission that launched from Kennedy Space Center early Tuesday reached their goal of flying farther away from Earth than anyone since the last Apollo mission.

SpaceX early Wednesday posted video taken from Crew Dragon Resilience of the event that included the audio exchange from its ...Read more

Warm water in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico can fuel powerful hurricanes, but how destructive a storm becomes isn’t just about the climate and weather – it also depends on the people and property in harm’s way.

In many coastal cities, fast population growth has left more people living in areas at high risk of flooding....Read more

Humans generate a lot of plastic waste – more than 400 million metric tons a year.

To bring this fact a bit closer to home, the U.S. produced an average of 0.75 pounds (0.34 kilograms) of plastic waste per person each day in 2010, which is equivalent in weight to an unopened can of soda.

Plastic products have been propelling...Read more

Just because a USB charging cable has the right connections doesn't mean it will give you optimum performance. There's a big difference in how much power they can carry, which translates into how fast they can charge your power-hungry device, and whether they are able to deliver the proper USB Power Delivery standard to power and run a laptop....Read more

The best way to enjoy Star Wars is to ignore the franchise’s fans. The community is cancerous and its toxicity has metastasized through social media with a rabid irrational hate over most projects. With that bias, it makes any online criticism about Star Wars shows and video games hard to trust.

When it comes to “Star Wars Outlaws,” the...Read more