WASHINGTON – In a marathon hearing on Thursday, the CEO of TikTok struggled to assuage lawmakers’ concerns that the massively popular video app’s ties to the Chinese government make it a threat to U.S. national security.

More than half the solar system’s planets will align Monday in a rarely seen spectacle, arcing across a corner of the night sky.

Under the spring sun inside the Gaiser Conservatory, Pam Smith held her nose.

Jeff Watters and his friends weren't sure what to think of the streaking lights that dashed across the Sacramento night sky late Friday. About seven meteor-like blazes appeared to dart by around 9:30 p.m., diverting attention from ongoing St. Patrick's Day revelry, as evidenced by video that Watters took.

The report published Monday by the world's leading climate science body, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, summarizes the panel's output over the past five years, amounting to some 10,000 pages of dense scientific prose. This synthesis is succinct at 37 pages, and its message is blunt: Burning fossil fuels is threatening human well-being and the stability of much of life on Earth, and our chance to avoid the most severe impacts is fast moving out of reach.

Half of all job postings in rural Washington are in health care, and STEM opportunities are growing rapidly, according to a recent report.

The state House of Representatives last week passed a bill that would authorize the department to use state lands for carbon sequestration or habitat restoration, such as reforesting land post-wildfire, planting forests on lands without trees or aquatic projects in the state's kelp forests. Those projects could then generate carbon credits, which the department could sell in carbon markets, such as Washington's cap-and-trade program.

The city of Airway Heights this week is making its case that a new well over the Spokane aquifer will not cause environmental problems, even as some remain wary about the potential effect of a new well near the river.

The company that runs a cryptocurrency mining operation in Usk is seeking $400,000 grant from the state that it says will help to restart a shuttered papermill even though the site doesn't have access to the electrical power needed to operate the plant.

In space, moon suits are the height of fashion, and NASA officials Wednesday lavished their highest praise on what astronauts will be wearing when they step on the moon in the coming years.The latest in lunar spacewear — black with orange and blue highlights — comes from Axiom Space in Houston.At an event in Houston unveiling the new suit, an engineer from Axiom who was demonstrating the lunar gear showed how he could easily squat and move around. The large clear bubble around the head provides wide visibility as well as lighting, which will be important when astronauts step into shadowed craters near the lunar south pole. It also has a mount for a high-definition camera.Astronauts will get into and out of the spacesuit via a hatch in the back side.“You would put your feet in, put your arms in, and then kind of shimmy down into the suit,” said Russell Ralston, deputy program manager for extravehicular activity at Axiom Space. “And then we would close the hatch.”On the back is a backpacklike contraption containing the life support system. “You can think of it as a very fancy scuba tank and air conditioner kind of combined into one,” Ralston said.The main difference between the prototype shown today and what will be going to the moon is that the ones going to the moon will be white instead of dark. “That’s really for thermal reasons,” Ralston said.By turning to this private company, NASA is again relying on new commercial space enterprises to provide key components faster and cheaper than it could itself develop.The approach follows the template NASA used in hiring Elon Musk’s company SpaceX to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station and to the lunar surface on the mission for which the Axiom suits were designed.The moon suit is a key component that is required for the Artemis program, which will be sending astronauts back to the moon as NASA faces heightened competition in space and on the moon from China’s booming space sector. The Axiom suits will be worn during the Artemis III mission, the program’s first moon landing, which is scheduled for 2025.Axiom is led by Michael Suffredini, who previously served as NASA’s program manager for the International Space Station. The company has been primarily focused on low-Earth orbit, sending private astronauts to the ISS and building a private module to be added to the space station.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Arctic sea ice declined dramatically in 2007 and has never recovered. New research suggests the loss was a fundamental change unlikely to be reversed this century, if ever - perhaps proof of the sort of climactic tipping point that scientists have warned the planet could pass as it warms.

So much for all the efforts to slow the proliferation of Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades over the last two decades, including with paid contractors, trained volunteers and an annual hunt that has drawn participants from as far as Latvia: The giant snakes have been making their way north, reaching West Palm Beach and Fort Myers and threatening ever-larger stretches of the ecosystem.

If you want to know what interstellar space is like, it can be a mosh pit. Energetic shocks from our sun and countless other stars blend together, creating a soup of particles and radiation. You can listen to the galactic party - as music.

A Catholic cardinal and Gonzaga University graduate explored the intersections between faith and climate change in a lecture at the school Thursday evening.