Kagi is a search engine, but it has ways to narrow the search. One of these is “news” and it works quite well. I saw a Lemmy post about scientists tattooing a tardigrade so I went to see if I could find relevant results. I found multiple news articles confirming it. Kagi is a paid service, but it may work for your use case.

This looks to be exactly what I was imagining. Thanks for the suggestion!

I was hoping to find something more specific by posting here.

We drive across some pretty remote places, sometimes alone, so it would be more helpful to have a solution that periodically pings (hopefully automatically) and somehow shares with selected individuals.

Good question since I didn’t specify. I would prefer periodic tracking at some configurable interval, but I actually really appreciate all the answers because to be honest I had not even considered things like sending my location in Signal or the other one shot approaches.