"A huge mass of magnetically charged material ejected from the sun is racing across space toward our planet, where it is expected to arrive on Tuesday. When it strikes the Earth's magnetic field, it could produce spectacular auroras."

"A House energy panel is concerned that scientists hired to assess the oil spill may be muzzled. The company's research funding is also under scrutiny."

"The Environmental Protection Agency unleashed a full-throated defense on Thursday of scientific evidence that mankind is dangerously warming the planet, and of the Obama administration's unilateral moves to curb the heat-trapping gas emissions scientists blame for climate change."

"Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford University climate scientist who for decades built the case that global warming, while laden with complexity, justified an aggressive response, has died."

BP and the Coast Guard, after months of blocking news media from covering the Gulf spill, say they have gone straight. One whistleblower who used to help them block TV coverage is now telling all.

Mainstream news media have given far less coverage to the five major panels that have debunked the "climategate" stolen-email flap kicked up by the fossil-fuel blogosphere than they did to the original charges now proven false.

"Last March, President Obama promised he'd have a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to the federal government on hand by July 29. A full year later, federal agencies still have not received any new directives and some government scientists say that conditions have not improved noticeably since Obama took power."

"Companies with a financial interest in a weed-killer sometimes found in drinking water paid for thousands of studies federal regulators are using to assess the herbicide’s health risks, records  of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show. Many of these industry-funded studies, which largely support atrazine’s safety, have never been published or subjected to an independent scientific peer review."

"Leading climate scientists on Thursday welcomed a British report that cleared researchers of exaggerating the effects of global warming and said they hoped it would restore faith in the fight against climate change."

"Climate scientists in the US say police inaction has left them defenceless in the face of a torrent of death threats and hate mail, leaving them fearing for their lives and one to contemplate arming himself with a handgun."

"Pennsylvania State University has found no evidence of research misconduct on the part of  Michael Mann, the prominent climatologist who is a leader in efforts to chart Earth’s past temperature patterns and has been a longstanding target of groups and individuals fighting restrictions on greenhouse gases."

A high-level seminar in Washington June 29 probed the apparent disconnect between scientific knowledge and public understanding, especially as it relates to climate change. The debate spilled over into the blogosphere.

"'Expert Credibility in Climate Change,' a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that 97-98% of climate researchers examined who are most actively publishing in the field support the IPCC conclusions, i.e., are convinced by the evidence for human-caused climate change, and that the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of researchers questioning the findings is significantly below that of convinced researchers."

"Though she has stayed behind the scenes for most of the federal response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt has emerged in the past week as a bold, forthright translator of the web of numbers and scientific estimates surrounding the spill."

Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told reporters yesterday that funding cuts in recent years for instrumental ocean observation programs have left scientists trying to track the movement of spilled oil partly in the dark.