LOS ALAMOS N.M. (AP) — Public schools were closed and evacuation bags packed this week as a stubborn wildfire crept within a few miles of the city of Los Alamos and its companion U.S. national security lab — where assessing apocalyptic threats is a specialty and wildland fire is a beguiling equation.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A total lunar eclipse will grace the night skies this weekend, providing longer than usual thrills for stargazers across North and South America.
The celestial action unfolds Sunday night into early Monday morning, with the moon bathed in the reflected red and orange hues of Earth’s sunsets and sunrises for about 1 1/2 hours, one of the longest totalities of the decade.
HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. (AP) — A California coastal panel on Thursday rejected a long-standing proposal to build a $1.4 billion seawater desalination plant to turn Pacific Ocean water into drinking water as the state grapples with persistent drought that is expected to worsen in coming years with climate change.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The world's first image of the chaotic supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy doesn't portray a voracious cosmic destroyer but what astronomers Thursday called a “gentle giant" on a near-starvation diet.
VANDENBERG SPACE FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) — A SpaceX rocket carried 53 satellites for the Starlink internet constellation into orbit Friday after blasting off from California.
The Falcon 9 booster lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 3:07 p.m., and minutes later the first stage landed on a droneship in the Pacific Ocean while the second stage continued toward low Earth orbit.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — For the first time, scientists have grown plants in soil from the moon collected by NASA’s Apollo astronauts.
Researchers had no idea if anything would sprout in the harsh moon dirt and wanted to see if it could be used to grow food by the next generation of lunar explorers.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — A pair of University of Michigan researchers are putting the “pee” in peony.
Rather, they're putting pee ON peonies.
Environmental engineering professors Nancy Love and Krista Wigginton are regular visitors to the Ann Arbor school's Nichols Arboretum, where they have been applying urine-based fertilizer to the heirloom peony beds ahead of the flowers' annual spring bloom.
ESCONDIDO, Calif. (AP) — Over the past three decades Ara Mirzaian has fitted braces for everyone from Paralympians to children with scoliosis. But Msituni was a patient like none other — a newborn giraffe.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Michelle Butler was just over halfway through her pregnancy when her water broke and contractions wracked her body. She couldn’t escape a terrifying truth: Her twins were coming much too soon.
Frank Wilczek, the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist and author renowned for his boundary-pushing investigations into the fundamental laws of nature, was honored Wednesday with this year’s prestigious Templeton Prize, awarded to individuals whose life’s work embodies a fusion of science and spirituality.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Haitians are fleeing in greater numbers to the neighboring Dominican Republic, where they board rickety wooden boats painted sky blue to blend with the ocean to try to reach Puerto Rico — a trip in which 11 Haitian women drowned this week, with dozens of other migrants believed missing.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The deaths of four storm chasers in car crashes over the last two weeks have underscored the dangers of pursuing severe weather events as more people clog back roads and highways searching for a glimpse of a lightning bolt or tornado, meteorologists and chasers say.
MISSION, Kan. (AP) — “Y’all here to protect me,” the youth asked the officers, beseechingly. “Right?”
The 17-year-old’s foster father, unable to deal with a teen who seemed to be in the throes of schizophrenia, had called Wichita police.
STATELINE, Nev. (AP) — They found no trace of a mythical sea monster, no sign of mobsters in concrete shoes or long-lost treasure chests.
But scuba divers who spent a year cleaning up Lake Tahoe’s entire 72-mile (115-kilometer) shoreline have come away with what they hope will prove much more valuable: tons and tons of trash.
On the deadliest day of a horrific week in April 2020, COVID took the lives of 816 people in New York City alone. Lost in the blizzard of pandemic data that’s been swirling ever since is the fact that 43-year-old Fernando Morales was one of them.
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out.
MOMBASA, Kenya (AP) — The fatal floods that wreaked havoc in South Africa in mid-April this year have been attributed to human-caused climate change, a rapid analysis published Friday by a team of leading international scientists said.
ESCONDIDO, Calif. (AP) — Over the past three decades Ara Mirzaian has fitted braces for everyone from Paralympians to children with scoliosis. But Msituni was a patient like none other — a newborn giraffe.
SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Foreign drug cartels that established illegal outdoor marijuana farms in Oregon last year are adapting as pressure on them begins to mount, law enforcement officials said Thursday.
MARATHON, Fla. (AP) — A rescued juvenile bottlenose dolphin, flown from Texas to the Florida Keys-based Dolphin Research Center seven weeks ago, was moved to the facility’s primary dolphin lagoon Thursday.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Many parents are hunting for infant formula because of a combination of short- and long-term problems that has hit most of the biggest U.S.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Michelle Butler was just over halfway through her pregnancy when her water broke and contractions wracked her body. She couldn’t escape a terrifying truth: Her twins were coming much too soon.
“On the Count of Three” is marketed as a “darkly comic” movie. Well, there's dark comedy and there’s darker comedy, and then there's comedy like this — so dark that you wonder if the two words can realistically co-exist in one sentence.
BERLIN (AP) — Students at a high school in the western German town of Schleiden on Wednesday buried a longtime member of their community — a classroom skeleton that had served as an educational specimen for generations of pupils.
NEW YORK (AP) — More than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year, setting another tragic record in the nation's escalating overdose epidemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated Wednesday.
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — More than 90% of Great Barrier Reef coral surveyed this year was bleached in the fourth such mass event in seven years in the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem, Australian government scientists said.
TOKYO (AP) — Wim Wenders is making a film about high-end public toilets in Japan that will have what the renowned German director calls “social meaning” about people in modern cities.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Parents across the U.S. are scrambling to find baby formula because supply disruptions and a massive safety recall have swept many leading brands off store shelves.
Months of spot shortages at pharmacies and supermarkets have been exacerbated by the recall at Abbott, which was forced to shutter its largest U.S.
A new effort is underway to find the remains of a British ship that Rhode Island colonists burned 250 years ago, marine archaeologists and state officials announced Tuesday.
The June 10, 1772, burning of the HMS Gaspee was an an act of rebellion that some proud Rhode Islanders maintain was just as important in sparking the American Revolution as the Boston Tea Party more than a year later.
Testing for COVID-19 has plummeted across the globe, making it much tougher for scientists to track the course of the pandemic and spot new, worrisome viral mutants as they emerge and spread.
Experts say testing has dropped by 70 to 90% worldwide from the first to the second quarter of this year — the opposite of what they say should be happening with new omicron variants on the rise in places such as the United States and South Africa.
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazilian environmental and Indigenous organizations, together with some companies, are urging the United States to come through with promised funding for forest protection and deal directly with people who live in the forest, have protected it and, they say, “are directly affected by the escalating deforestation.”
BEIJING (AP) — A Chinese cargo vessel docked with the country’s under-construction space station Tuesday ahead of a new three-person crew expected to arrive next month.
The Tianzhou-4 spacecraft was slung into space atop a Long March-7 Y5 rocket at 1:56 a.m.
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (AP) — U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Russia's invasion of Ukraine has made energy independence more important than ever during a climate conference in South Florida on Monday.
The world is creeping closer to the warming threshold international agreements are trying to prevent, with nearly a 50-50 chance that Earth will temporarily hit that temperature mark within the next five years, teams of meteorologists across the globe predicted.
SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — President Gabriel Boric of Chile is attempting to relaunch an administration that has plunged in popularity less than two months since he made headlines around the world for becoming the country’s youngest president and a possible symbol for a resurgent left wing in South America.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA's new space telescope is in the home stretch of testing, with science observations expected to begin in July, astronomers said Monday.
The James Webb Space Telescope beamed back the latest test pictures of a neighboring satellite galaxy, and the results are stunning when compared with images taken by NASA’s previous infrared observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope.
WASHINGTON (AP) — As more doctors prescribe Pfizer's powerful COVID-19 pill, new questions are emerging about its performance, including why a small number of patients appear to relapse after taking the drug.
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — A strong earthquake struck off the east coast of Taiwan on Monday, shaking buildings in the capital, Taipei. No serious damage or injuries were reported, and authorities said there was no danger of a tsunami.
MIAMI (AP) — Humans don't know what they're missing under the surface of a busy shipping channel in the “cruise capital of the world.” Just below the keels of massive ships, an underwater camera provides a live feed from another world, showing marine life that's trying its best to resist global warming.
In the course of a single year, University of Maine climate scientist Jacquelyn Gill lost both her mother and her stepfather. She struggled with infertility, then during research in the Arctic, she developed embolisms in both lungs, was transferred to an intensive care unit in Siberia and nearly died.
Anton Vlaschenko often hears shelling outside his office in Ukraine's second-largest city of Kharkiv, not far from the front lines of the war. He sometimes even sees smoke rising from Russian tanks hit by missiles.