By ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN

NEW YORK (AP) — Two bright green comets are streaming through the skies and are visible to skygazers in the Northern Hemisphere.

Related Articles

Scientists hope underwater fiber-optic cables can help save endangered orcas

From barks to words: Researchers aim to translate dog sounds with AI

She saw a car-sized object above a Texas farm and found a wayward hunk of NASA equipment

Nobel Prize in chemistry goes to discovery that could trap C02 and bring water to deserts

Three scientists at US universities win Nobel Prize in physics for advancing quantum technology

Both hail from the outer edges of our solar system — possibly what’s known as the Oort Cloud, well beyond Pluto. Comet Lemmon will have its closest brush with Earth on or around Tuesday. The other cosmic snowball, Comet SWAN, should have its flyby with Earth on Monday, but it’s headed away from the sun and will likely grow dimmer as the days pass.

Spotting two comets simultaneously without special equipment is “rare, but not unprecedented,” said Carson Fuls, director of the University of Arizona-based sky survey that spotted Comet Lemmon.

To see the pair, go outside just after sunset and look to the northern sky for Comet Lemmon close to the horizon. Comet SWAN will also be near the horizon, but to the southwest.

The double comets could be visible with binoculars through the end of the month, but experts aren’t yet sure how bright they’ll remain, said astronomer Valerie Rapson of the State University of New York at Oneonta.

Comets are frozen leftovers from the solar system’s formation billions of years ago. They heat up as they swing toward the sun, releasing their characteristic streaming tails.

Comet Lemmon, also designated C/2025 A6, was discovered in January by a telescope scouring the night sky for near-Earth asteroids. Comet SWAN, also known as C/2025 R2, was spotted in September by an amateur astronomer using photos from a spacecraft operated by NASA and the European Space Agency.

The comets are green because of gases streaming off their surfaces. From Earth, they’ll look like gray, fuzzy patches.

Earlier this year, a green comet broke up as it swung by the sun, dashing hopes of a naked-eye spectacle. A bright comet called Tsuchinshan-Atlas zoomed by Earth in 2024, and other notable flybys included Neowise in 2020 and Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake in the 1990s.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By ALEX VEIGA, AP Business Writer

The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage declined again this week, easing to just above its lowest level this year.

Related Articles

I asked real buyers: How hard is it to find a house right now?

Average long-term US mortgage rate eases to 6.3%, back to its lowest level in about a year

Forecast: Home equity rates, the Fed and what’s next for home equity borrowing

Should you pay off your mortgage early?

Average long-term US mortgage rate ticks up for second straight week, to 6.34%

The average long-term mortgage rate slipped to 6.27% from 6.3% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. A year ago, the rate averaged 6.44%.

The latest dip brings the average rate to just above 6.26%, where it was four weeks ago after a string of declines brought down home loan borrowing costs to their lowest level since early October 2024.

Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, also eased this week. The average rate dropped to 5.52% from 5.53% last week. A year ago, it was 5.63%, Freddie Mac said.

Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy decisions to bond market investors’ expectations for the economy and inflation. They generally follow the trajectory of the 10-year Treasury yield, which lenders use as a guide to pricing home loans.

The 10-year yield was at 4.02% at midday Thursday, down from around 4.14% the same time last week.

Mortgage rates started declining in July in the lead-up to the Federal Reserve’s decision last month to cut its main interest rate for the first time in a year amid growing concern over the U.S. job market.

At their September policy meeting, Fed officials forecast that the central bank would reduce its rate twice more this year and once in 2026. Still, the Fed could change course if inflation jumps amid the Trump administration’s expanding use of tariffs and the recent trade war escalation with China.

Even if the Fed opts to cut its short-term rate further that doesn’t necessarily mean mortgage rates will keep declining. Last fall, after the Fed cut its rate for the first time in more than four years, mortgage rates marched higher, eventually reaching just above 7% in January this year.

The average rate on a 30-year mortgage has remained above 6% since September 2022, the year mortgage rates began climbing from historic lows. The housing market has been in a slump ever since.

Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes sank last year to their lowest level in nearly 30 years. So far this year, sales are running below where they were at this time in 2024.

By CLAUDIA LAUER, Associated Press

As police departments around the country report a surge in 3D-printed firearms turning up at crime scenes, gun safety advocates and law enforcement officials are warning that a new generation of untraceable weapons could soon eclipse the “ghost guns” that have already flooded U.S. streets.

At a summit in New York City on Thursday, the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety will bring together policymakers, academics, 3D-printing industry leaders and law enforcement officials to confront the growing challenge. They fear that as the printers become cheaper and more sophisticated — and blueprints for gun parts spread rapidly online — the U.S. could be on the brink of another wave of unregulated, homemade weapons that evade serial-number tracking and background checks.

Numbers collected by Everytown from about two dozen police departments show how quickly the problem is growing: A little over 30 3D-printed guns were recovered in 2020. By 2024, that figure had climbed above 300. While still a fraction of the tens of thousands of firearms seized each year by the nation’s nearly 18,000 police departments, the spike mirrors the early trajectory of ghost guns — build-it-yourself weapons assembled from kits that for years eluded federal regulation.

“We are now starting to see what kind of feels very familiar,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president of law and policy at Everytown. “It’s now at a small number of recoveries in certain major cities, such that it’s doubling or tripling year over year. We’re seeing this very familiar rate of growth and that’s why we’re getting this group together to discuss how to stop it.”

Ghost guns, provided by the New York City Police Department, are displayed in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, in New York, Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives imposed new rules in 2022 requiring serial numbers, background checks and age verification for ghost-gun kits, regulations upheld by the Supreme Court earlier this year. Lawsuits and state-level bans eventually pushed Polymer80, once the leading manufacturer of those kits, out of business in 2024.

But 3D-printed weapons present a thornier problem. They aren’t manufactured or sold through the firearms industry, and neither 3D-printer companies nor the cloud-based platforms that host gun blueprints fall under the ATF’s authority. That leaves much of the prevention work to voluntary action and new legislation.

In addition to seeking industry self regulations, the summit aims to bring together academics and policymakers to talk about possible legislative ways to address the issue such as creating statutes to criminalize manufacturing ghost guns or selling blueprints.

In New York, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has pressed printer manufacturers and online platforms to take down gun designs and add safeguards against misuse. His office recently asked YouTube to remove a tutorial on printing a gun that a suspect said he found while watching a Call of Duty demonstration.

″So we reached out to YouTube and got their policies updated,” Bragg said. “If we were just prosecuting gun possessions rather than thinking about how to prevent these guns from getting printed and proactively talking to these companies, then we would be sorely behind the curve.”

Related Articles

Federal immigration officers in Chicago area will be required to wear body cameras, judge says

Colleges are fighting to prove their return on investment

Authorities identify remains of 14 of 16 victims in Tennessee explosion

US stocks drift higher, led by Nvidia and tech

Obesity remains high in the US, but more states are showing progress, a new report finds

A major digital design platform also agreed to implement a detection and removal program earlier this year after Bragg’s office found numerous gun blueprints being shared and available for download on its site.

Both Everytown and Bragg said companies have been receptive. Some printer makers have introduced firmware that recognizes gun part shapes and blocks the machines from producing them, an approach that advocates compare to safeguards added decades ago to prevent color printers from copying currency.

John Amin, founder and CEO of Spanish company Print&Go, said he became fascinated with 3D printing when he was an engineering student. He voluntarily implemented a series of checks to prevent illegal weapons from being made including human oversight and automated detections.

“We must focus on curbing misuse, not demonizing the tool. And we already have powerful ways to do just that,” Amin said.