Conservation biologists have successfully trained dogs to use their sharp sense of smell to help in a variety of conservation tasks.

"WASHINGTON -- The federal government is fighting with itself over a massive fire at a Chevron refinery in California that sent 15,000 people to hospitals with respiratory ailments."

"An official with the Army Corps of Engineers told a Congressional committee Tuesday it doesn't plan a broad environmental study on exporting coal from the western United States."

"The antipoverty group Oxfam has come up with a scorecard that evaluates the impact that the supply chains of behemoth food companies have on water consumption, labor and wages, greenhouse gas emissions and nutrition."

"Microbes are known to be able to thrive in extreme environments, from inside fiery volcanoes to down on the bottom of the ocean. Now scientists have found a surprising number of them living in storm clouds tens of thousands of feet above the Earth. And those airborne microbes could play a role in global climate."

"PITTSBURGH -- An ongoing U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study on natural gas drilling and its potential for groundwater contamination has gotten tentative praise so far from both industry and environmental groups."

"A mercury-containing preservative rarely used in the United States should not be banned as an ingredient in vaccines, U.S. pediatricians said Monday, in a move that may be controversial."

"An anonymous donor is giving Georgetown University $20 million to support a major initiative for the study of the environment, school officials say."

"Google's Street View maps are headed into the backcountry. Earlier this week, two teams from Google strapped on sophisticated backpacks jammed with cameras, gyroscopes and other gadgets and descended to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. But this is just the first step in the search giant's plan to digitally map and photograph the world's wild places."

"Like evolution, climate science has opened rifts in classrooms across the United States. Educators are lifting climate out of its narrow unit in middle school science – an effort, they hope, that will improve science literacy overall."

Budget and management problems have wracked the National Children's Study, once the most ambitious effort to document the effects of many factors -- including environmental ones -- on children's health during the entire time they are growing up.

"WASHINGTON -- After more than 12 years and at least $100 billion in construction costs, NASA leaders say the International Space Station finally is ready to bloom into the robust orbiting laboratory that the agency envisioned more than two decades ago."

"Greenpeace released its latest report today asking, 'How clean is your cloud?' The annual report examines the server farms built by the largest Internet companies -- including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo -- and ranks them according to how efficient their cloud facilities are, and where they get their electricity."

"A US climate scientist at the centre of a row over Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's stance on climate change has spoken out for the first time.

A Stanford professor is showing how many more ecological costs need to be factored in to estimates of the economic impacts of environmental actions.