A German-born engineering professor at the University of Texas became the oldest person ever to win a Nobel Prize at age 97 on Wednesday. John B. Goodenough shares the prize for chemistry with British-American chemistry professor M. Stanley Wittingham, 77, and Japanese scientist Akira Yoshino, 71.

Residents stocked up on water, food, and gasoline ahead of the largest planned blackout in California history. To keep its equipment from starting wildfires, Pacific Gas and Electric shut off power on Wednesday to nearly 800,000 customers in Northern California as hot, windy weather continued in the region. Schools closed, and residents expected delays on the road caused by nonfunctioning traffic lights. The utility could expand the blackout to Southern California.

The 113th Nobel Prize in physics honored cosmologist James Peebles of Princeton University on Tuesday for his theories about dark matter and cosmic background radiation. He shares the prize with Swiss scientists Michel Mayor, 77, and Didier Queloz, 53, who discovered the first planet outside our solar system, 51 Pegasi B, in 1995.

Members of the public lined up outside the Supreme Court in Washington over the weekend for a chance to sit in on a landmark hearing about LGBT employee relations. The nation’s top court listened to oral arguments Tuesday morning in the case of a transgender funeral home employee who sued his Christian employers because they said his dressing as a woman at work would disturb bereaved families and violate their religious convictions about gender. In two other cases, the justices heard from the lawyers of people who claim they lost their jobs because of their sexual orientation.

When a group of kids heard the announcement about an elderly woman missing in their neighborhood, they hopped on their bicycles. The police department in Roseville, Calif., on Sept. 30 asked the public for help finding 97-year-old Glenneta Belford, who had dementia and was “mostly non-verbal.”

North Korea said Sunday it would not participate in any more “sickening negotiations” unless the United States changed its approach. U.S. officials left weekend nuclear talks—the first in more than seven months—in Stockholm sounding optimistic. But the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement that talks broke down because Washington “has not discarded its old stance and attitude” and needs to reverse unspecified “hostile” policies.

Despite slower hiring, unemployment hit a five-decade low in September. U.S. employers added a modest 136,000 jobs last month, according to numbers the federal government released Friday. The unemployment rate for workers without high school diplomas dropped to 4.8 percent, the lowest recorded level since 1992.