SAN DIEGO -- Isaac Santos, 22, remembers growing up with family barbecues at his aunt’s house in Imperial Beach, south of San Diego, and swimming with his cousins. Sure, the ocean was dirty sometimes, but the beaches were open and accessible.

But since late 2021, swaths of the south San Diego coast have been closed every day — 1,345 days in...Read more

For years, Aqueous Film-Forming Foam (AFFF) has been the gold standard for suppressing and extinguishing petroleum-based fires.

But its effectiveness has come with a cost: the presence of PFAS, so-called "forever chemicals" that don't break down and are linked to health and environmental risks.

One potential contender to replace the PFAS-laden...Read more

Beneath a cloak of darkness, illuminated only by glow sticks and red-filtered flashlights, researchers waited underwater off Key Largo hoping to witness one of the rarest events of sex in the sea.

It’s a delicate spectacle called the coral spawn — a once-a-year phenomenon when Florida’s reef-building coral colonies simultaneously release ...Read more

As the rain came down in sheets one summer afternoon late last month, Thomas Baranowski was sitting on the back porch of his Garfield Ridge home when his wife, Rose, stepped outside.

“‘Oh come on, you’ve got to see this,’” she told him.

He followed her down the steep stairwell to their basement, where water was spewing out of their ...Read more

The Sierra Club, one of the nation’s oldest and most prominent nonprofit environmental groups, was thrown into upheaval this week after its executive director was fired.

In an email to staff Monday, Sierra Club President Patrick Murphy said the board of directors had voted unanimously to terminate Ben Jealous after conducting “an extensive ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — The travel pattern resembled a Southern California hiker's dream.

The journey began in Angeles National Forest above Glendora in May 2024 and progressed south into Azusa. There were stops, stays and starts from Monrovia and Sierra Madre, then northeast into La Cañada Flintridge, Tujunga and, eventually, the Santa Clarita ...Read more

A sweeping conservation plan identifies where Joshua trees may survive in a warmer future and plots out how to best protect that land.

Proponents say it’s the first time the state has taken steps to conserve a species that’s abundant now but is projected to lose much of its future habitat due to climate change.

Some fear the plan and the ...Read more

DENVER — Drought and long, hot summer days are sucking Western Colorado’s rivers dry, parching farm fields and fueling the massive wildfires proliferating across the region.

A chunk of northwestern Colorado in the last week plunged into exceptional drought — the most dire category recorded by the U.S. Drought Monitor. The swath of ...Read more

A series of more than 100 earthquakes has hit Northern California, shaking up the Geysers geothermal steam field in Sonoma and Lake counties.

Since Thursday, at least 131 earthquakes have been recorded — as small as magnitude 0.2 and as big as magnitude 4. The largest earthquake was recorded at 5:48 a.m. Pacific time Thursday, with an ...Read more

Any trip to the dark night skies of our Southern California deserts reveals a vista full of wonder and mystery — riddles that astrophysicists like myself spend our days unraveling.

I am fortunate to study how the first galaxies formed and evolved over the vast span of 13 billion years into the beautiful structures that fill those skies. NASA...Read more

Meta Platforms Inc. is spending a fortune to assemble the brightest minds in artificial intelligence. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg may want to note: Research suggests that packing a team with too much genius can backfire.

So far, more than a dozen engineers from OpenAI have defected to Meta, joined by notable experts from Anthropic ...Read more

MIAMI — From the front yards of West Miami-Dade to the waterfront mansions of Fort Lauderdale, artificial turf is appearing more and more.

And with the spread of artificial turf comes a mounting number of questions and criticisms — about everything from how it looks to how it impacts the environment, the climate and even human health. This ...Read more

Ecolab is spending $1.8 billion for a high-tech business that purifies water for data centers and semiconductor operations.

The St. Paul, Minnesota-based company’s deal is for Montreal-based Ovivo Inc.’s electronics division, which has about $500 million in annual revenue and 900 employees.

“Ovivo Electronics’ unique technologies ...Read more

DENVER — Rabbits with tentacles in northern Colorado.

There’s not really a better way to sum up recent photos and headlines about cottontail rabbits spotted around Fort Collins with long, dangling growths on their faces.

But as concerning as they appear, the virus that causes the dark, wart-like growths is relatively common and usually not...Read more

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the recent deal to allow Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. to resume lower-end AI chip sales to China, on the condition they give the U.S. government a 15% cut of the related revenue, could serve as a model for others.

“I think we could see it in other industries over time,” Bessent said ...Read more

This week a reader writes, “In (a recent) column you mentioned that you keep some of your passwords in your iPhone in a locked note. Could you please explain how one locks a note? It sounds So useful. Also, on a PC using windows, is there a way to lock an individual file? I’m thinking particularly of a spreadsheet that might contain ...Read more

For anyone who is not familiar with a soundbar, you need to be. A simple comparison of the sound your TV emits from the built-in speakers compared to how the same TV sounds with OXS’s S5 Soundbar, proves it doesn’t compare. The S5 is the device that will make or break the enjoyment of a media room or even a single-TV setup.

The OXS S5 ...Read more