The Atacama desert in Chile is one of the most beautiful and forbidding places on Earth, so dry that it’s sometimes used by scientists to test run Mars missions. Most years the area sees less than half a centimeter of rain, but this past September unusually heavy precipitation brought forth a desert bloom, blanketing the ground wit...

If we’re being honest, 2025 did not start out great. For basically the whole month of January, a series of wildfires raged across Los Angeles, killing hundreds (more on that number below). On the other side of the country, an Arctic blast brought href="https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/historic-january-2025-snowstorm-southe...

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado is getting a name change. The groundbreaking research institute will no longer have the word “renewable” in its title, the U.S. Department of Energy href="https://www.nrel.gov/news/detail/press/2025/news-release-energy-department-renames-nrel-%27national-lab-of-the-rockies%27" target="_bla...

The county health worker scanned the Omaha home with an X-ray gun, searching for the poison.

It was 2022, and doctors had recently found high levels of lead in the blood of Crystalyn Prine’s 2-year-old son, prompting the Douglas County Health Department to investigate. The worker said it didn’t seem to ...

Karen Budd-Falen, a top official at the Department of Interior, has financial ties to the controversial Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada — a project that the Trump administration worked to fast-track during its first term. In recent months, the administration took an equity stake in the mine and the mine’s parent company.