Right now, in the Northwest’s high desert, the biscuit root should be ready to bloom.

Pregnant ground squirrels should be up to the surface, munching fresh shoots. But that’s not happening.

On much of Washington’s and Oregon’s eastside, snow has been on the ground for six weeks, and it has some experts wondering how life will shake out for stressed flora and fauna.

Heidi Newsome, is a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service out of Burbank, Wash.

The options to share your fandom or your love of nature through your car license plate keep growing in Oregon and Washington. But not all license plate ideas go down smoothly: A proposed Washington wine country license plate, like Oregon already offers, drew some whining at the state legislature this week.

In the woods near Olympia’s Capitol Forest, there’s a brown two-story house with unpainted plywood walls in the entryway that tell a story.

A research project to model the effects from a Cascadia megaquake found higher risk of collapse for modern tall buildings than previously thought.

Prenters Broughton was always getting into trouble as a kid. So, his older sister came up with a nickname for him.

“He was just a little devil,” Alana Ervin, a Tacoma resident, said of her brother. “So PB, just to shorten it up for peanut butter because he’s always in the thick of things.”

The State of Washington has completed its first statewide inventory of buildings prone to crumble or collapse in an earthquake. The bottom line: There are an awful lot of unreinforced, old brick or stone buildings that could be dangerous  — a similar number to estimates in Oregon.

Democrats in the Washington Legislature want to revive a tax break for buyers of electric cars, which critics view as wasteful and unnecessary. Meanwhile, a publicly-financed rebate for battery-powered cars in Oregon is finding thousands of takers.

A Portland-based energy developer has signed property leases for a big solar farm in Klickitat County near the Columbia River. When completed, the solar project will be the largest in Washington state.