ArcaMax

LOS ANGELES — The winter season has brought cold and wet conditions that are perfect for fungi like death cap mushrooms, or Amanita phalloides, to grow in California, experts say, but with that has come a rash of people mistakenly eating them thinking they're safe.

So far this year, at least 23 people have been sickened by eating death cap ...Read more

BALTIMORE -- A yearslong surge in displaced roosters is overwhelming animal sanctuaries in Maryland and across the country, fueled by a pandemic-born boom in backyard chicken coops and the noisy realities of owning a male bird.

“All the time — calls, emails, text messages wanting us to take roosters,” said Cathy Rogers, executive ...Read more

Amazon.com Inc.’s new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is the company’s most serious effort yet to turn its e-reader into a productivity tool. But with a starting price of $630 — making it the priciest Kindle yet — Amazon will need to persuade even its most loyal readers that the upgrade is worth it.

The device, which went on sale starting in ...Read more

People aren't lovin' it.

McDonald's was forced to pull down an AI-generated Christmas commercial from YouTube after some consumers said the AI-slop-filled tongue-in-cheek take on the holidays was distasteful.

The ad, titled "It's the most terrible time of the year," was a satirical take on holiday realities. It showed a series of short, ...Read more

This week I have two excellent home audio deals and more on the Wolfbox blower/dusters, one of the most popular products I covered this year.

Soundbar specials: The ZVOX AV855 was a huge hit for its hi-fi sound and AccuVoice dialogue enhancement, which makes voices easier to hear and understand. The AV855 was later joined by the AV835, a ...Read more

Gamers of a certain age will remember when beat-’em-ups ruled arcades. The cabinets inhaled quarters as four players teamed up to brawl their way to save Maggie Simpson or battle Shredder across New York. Those memories are connected to pizza parties or late-night forays, with parents handing one more dollar to see if the kids could finish ...Read more

Getting an offer to review a soft-serve ice cream machine is a dream come true, at least for me. Obviously, I'm an ice cream fan, and reviewing the Gourmia Soft-Serve Ice Cream Maker has to be one of my favorites in my 25-plus years of reviews.

Spoiler alert: To say the Gourmia Soft-Serve Ice Cream Maker was the hit of my recent social ...Read more

A few weeks ago, a friend asked if he should replace the battery in his iPhone SE. He’d noticed the phone needed to be topped off before the end of the day and asked if I thought he should replace the battery or just buy a new phone.

I started out asking if he was happy with the performance of the phone. Did it do everything he needed it to...Read more

This last Christmas gift guide is concentrated on gifts for the person with a home office or computer desk.

There are gifts here for all ages and price ranges.

I especially loved trying out the reMarkable tablet and the Pitaka case.

Terramaster F4-425 4-Bay NAS

If you have a household full of computer users, chances are you could benefit ...Read more

Spotify Technology SA’s list of its top podcasts of the year didn’t offer much in the way of surprises — Joe Rogan, for example, is number one yet again, for the fifth year in a row. But one stat is noteworthy: Nearly half of those shows, 24 of the 50, also have a video version streaming on the platform. And Spotify video consumption has ...Read more

Federal fisheries officials on Monday rejected a bid to designate West Coast Chinook salmon as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

In response, one of the conservation groups that petitioned for the listing, the Center for Biological Diversity, says it is considering a legal challenge.

“The major species protections ...Read more

SAN DIEGO — The San Diego County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday adopted a resolution vowing to fight efforts by the Trump administration to expand offshore oil and gas drilling more than three miles off the coast of California.

The measure, approved on a 4-1 vote, was introduced by board chair Terra Lawson-Remer and chair pro tem Paloma ...Read more

New Jersey is parched top to bottom.

In some regions, rainfall has plunged as much as eight inches below average for the past year, straining reservoirs, streams, and aquifers enough that the state Department of Environmental Protection has issued a drought warning — a notch shy of an emergency.

As a result, officials are asking residents to...Read more

SpaceX sent up its second launch in less than 24 hours on the Space Coast on Tuesday afternoon, while also bringing home its booster for the last time on a landing zone it has been leasing for the last 10 years.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on the NROL-77 mission with a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office from Cape ...Read more

ORLANDO, Fla. — NASA astronaut Jonny Kim flew home with two Roscosmos cosmonauts from the International Space Station packed tight in their Soyuz spacecraft landing in the frozen steppes of Kazakhstan on Tuesday to complete an eight-month stay in space.

Kim launched to to the station back on April 8 with cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey ...Read more

SpaceX is set to complete its second launch in less than 24 hours on the Space Coast with a national security mission lines up for Tuesday afternoon.

A Falcon 9 rocket is set to lift off on the NROL-77 mission with a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 ...Read more

A profound unraveling is underway in the American Southwest, happening across a thousand-mile arc from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the central Sierra. In an unprecedented calamity, the most widely distributed, most iconic tree of the region — the beautiful ponderosa pine — is disappearing. So significant is this loss, both visually and ...Read more

CHICAGO — When you look across a field of miscanthus, it’s “hypnotically beautiful,” says Emily Heaton, whose family farm has for two decades grown the first commercial field of this grass in Illinois. Dense, sun-loving and often called “giant,” it blooms in late summer to fall with a showy silver flower.

Just like cornstalks across...Read more

After avoiding it for nearly two decades, wildlife officials say that the illness wiping out millions of bats may have reached Nevada.

The fungal disease is known as white-nose syndrome, and it’s considered to be the single most deadly wildlife disease outbreak in North American history. Scientists first documented the disease in New York in ...Read more