"The State University of New York at Buffalo has rebuffed calls for an investigation of the work of a new institute it founded that is devoted to the study of shale gas drilling, saying it is defending the freedom of faculty members to conduct research."

"Now that he survived his recall election, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is lending his support to an upcoming fundraiser for the Heartland Institute, a climate-denying think-tank."

"When Silent Spring was published in 1962, author Rachel Carson was subjected to vicious personal assaults that had nothing do with the science or the merits of pesticide use. Those attacks find a troubling parallel today in the campaigns against climate scientists who point to evidence of a rapidly warming world."

"For a century, doctors have waged war against bacteria, using antibiotics as their weapons. But that relationship is changing as scientists become more familiar with the 100 trillion microbes that call us home — collectively known as the microbiome."

"The University of Washington has admonished a prominent surgeon who told lawmakers questionable stories about burned babies while testifying in favor of flame retardants."

"State lawmakers ran into a problem this year when recommending a study on rising sea levels and their potential impacts on coastal Virginia. It was not a scientific problem or a financial one. It was linguistic."

"A senior Chinese official demanded on Tuesday that foreign embassies stop issuing air pollution readings, saying it was against the law and diplomatic conventions, in pointed criticism of a closely watched U.S. embassy index."

"YORK RIVER, Virginia -- Dying wetland trees along Virginia's coastline are evidence that rising sea levels threaten nature and humans, scientists say - and show the limits of political action amid climate change scepticism."

Two scientists say BP's aggressive efforts to subpoena e-mails related to their estimate of the oil flow rate during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill invade their privacy and threaten the integrity of the scientific deliberative process.

"In the menagerie of Craig Venter’s imagination, tiny bugs will save the world. They will be custom bugs, designer bugs -- bugs that only Venter can create. He will mix them up in his private laboratory from bits and pieces of DNA, and then he will release them into the air and the water, into smokestacks and oil spills, hospitals and factories and your house. "

Some new lines of evidence are confirming a decades-old conclusion that climate change was the key cause for the end of the ancient Harappan civilization in what is now the Indus valley of India, Pakistan, and neighboring regions.

"An advance guard of 18-wheelers is scheduled to roll into a business park in Cheyenne, Wyo., this week to unload components of a supercomputer called Yellowstone. This 1.5-quadrillion-calculations-per-second crystal ball will model future climate and forecast extreme weather."

"Earlier this month, the State University of New York at Buffalo released a report concluding that fracking is getting safer, as both industry and regulators are doing a better job. The study got plenty of coverage--the Associated Press, Forbes, WGRZ, Buffalo News--but in the week since it was released, it's been attacked for a number of flaws."

"The White House appears to be blocking Environmental Protection Agency efforts to tighten oversight of engineered nanoscale pesticides and other chemicals, according to environmental and safety advocates."

"Canada is dismantling the nation's entire ocean contaminants program as part of massive layoffs at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans."