North Star Weather Forecasts

The uppermost reaches of the ocean could be rapidly scanned in groundbreaking high detail using acoustic techniques, researchers say. The method resembles that employed to probe the deep Earth.

CHANTILLY, Va. (AP) — The plane parked outside the airport looks more like a giant exotic insect or maybe an outsized balsa wood toy airplane.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A solar-powered plane nearing the close of a cross-continental journey landed at Dulles International Airport outside the nation's capital early Sunday, only one short leg to New York remaining on a voyage that opened in May.

This article was updated at 12:03 p.m. EDT.

As soon as the decades-old Twin Otter landed at Lukla airport, passengers burst out in applause. They do that for nearly every safe landing at the often terrifying airport at the gateway to Mount Everest. ...

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Firefighters could again get some help from rain Monday as they work to put out hot spots from the most destructive wildfire ever in Colorado.

As far as government schemes come, the NSA's super-surveillance PRISM program sounds like something straight out of dystopian science fiction.

Global greenhouse-gas emissions rose to record levels in 2012, the International Energy Agency said in a report released last week. Especially disconcerting is the news from May that carbon-dioxide levels reached 400 parts per million "for the first time in several hundred millennia," the report states.

There's a lot of buzz at Washington State University over work to develop the first sperm bank for honeybees. Entomologist Steve Sheppard and his crew are using liquid nitrogen to preserve semen extracted ...

Thanks to decades of geologic detective work, scientists know that on Jan. 26, 1700, at 9 p.m., a massive earthquake and tsunami hit the Pacific Northwest.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The latest domestic energy boom is sweeping through some of the nation's driest pockets, drawing millions of gallons of water to unlock oil and gas reserves from beneath the Earth's surface.

GULF SHORES, Ala. (AP) — Finding tar balls linked to the BP oil spill isn't difficult on some Gulf Coast beaches, but the company and the government say it isn't common enough to keep sending out the crews that patrolled the sand for three years in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi.

UPTON, N.Y. (AP) — New York to Chicago, in five weeks?

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Authorities lifted evacuations in a wide swath of terrain outside Colorado Springs on Friday as they said a surprise rain shower helped them expand containment of a wildfire that has destroyed more than 400 homes.

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP) — Wrinkled and skinny at first, the translucent, jellyfish-shaped balloons that Google released this week from a frozen field in the heart of New Zealand's South Island hardened into shiny pumpkins as they rose into the blue winter skies above Lake Tekapo, passing the first big test of a lofty …

Some of nature's most fascinating fathers may be at risk of extinction.

In a boost to California's endangered amphibians, researchers released about 100 mountain yellow-legged froglets into the wild this week.

Plastic shielding could help protect astronauts from harmful radiation on long journeys through deep space, new observations from a NASA moon probe suggest.