Journalism & Media

"Genetic engineering of crops is essentially the same as centuries-old, conventional plant breeding, except more precise, scientists say." As voting time nears on California's Proposition 37, arguments about science, safety, and the public's right to know intensify.

"Penn State University scientist Michael Mann, whose work showed that Earth’s temperatures have risen along with increased fossil fuel use, announced Tuesday he had filed a lawsuit against the conservative National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for defamation, complaining that they falsely accused him of academic fraud and compared him to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky."

"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."

President Obama, GOP contender Mitt Romney, and the U.S. news media moderators pointedly refused to mention climate change once during the series of four presidential debates.

"NEW YORK -- Dozens of wells drilled this year across rural Ohio are quietly pumping out the answer to the U.S. energy industry's most loaded question: Is the Utica shale formation, touted as a potentially $500 billion frontier, a boom or a bust? Yet the answer is likely to remain concealed for some time."

"A new 'addendum' to be released as soon as this week purports to update with the latest science a 2009 federal assessment on the impacts to the United States of climate change. The addendum matches the layout and design of the original, published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program: Cover art, 'key message' sections, table of contents are all virtually identical, down to the chapter heads, fonts and footnotes. But the new report comes from the conservative Washington, D.C.-based Cato Institute."

"An un-redacted version of a recently released Nuclear Regulatory Commission report highlights the threat that flooding poses to nuclear power plants located near large dams -- and suggests that the NRC has misled the public for years about the severity of the threat, according to engineers and nuclear safety advocates."

A lawyer for a climate-change-denial group seeking records from scientist Michael Mann apparently failed to get advance permission from his then-employer EPA to work on the case pro bono.