ArcaMax

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

Q. I love the sound of my open-back Grado headphones, but in my old age (55) I am over the constantly twisted cables and overall discomfort. I am not interested in Sennheisers as they sound completely muted to me. Do you have any suggestions for great-sounding headphones that are more luxurious in comfort and overall experience than my Grados, ...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

Before developer Tomonobu Itagaki brought the “Ninja Gaiden” franchise into the polygonal realm, the series had been an arcade mainstay and a classic Nintendo Entertainment System trilogy. The side-scrolling adventure was renowned for its difficulty and visuals that pushed the 8-bit system to its limits.

For its time, Ryu Hayabusa’s ...Read more

MIAMI — Florida anglers say sharks are snatching their catches at unprecedented rates, calling it an “overwhelming problem” and blaming a boom in Gulf shark numbers.

But scientific research paints a more complicated picture.

Scientists who study sharks acknowledge that depredation — the act of fish being eaten by an underwater predator...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — In better times, droves of young winter-run Chinook salmon would travel 300 miles downstream from the Sacramento River, beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Pacific. They would return as adults, shimmering silver and red, and spawn at their exact place of birth in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta.

Today, fewer ...Read more

On a sunny day in San Francisco, along the city's waterfront, families dived into the wacky world of artificial intelligence inside the Exploratorium museum.

Visitors made shadow puppets for AI to identify, used AI to generate songs, asked chatbots questions and faced off with AI in a game in which players tried to draw images that only humans ...Read more