"Eighteen months after the Environmental Protection Agency announced reforms to its controversial process for evaluating health hazards posed by dangerous chemicals, significant problems continue to hamper the program and leave the public at risk, according to a new report by a nonprofit research group."
"In the face of probes by a state attorney general, hints of hostile congressional hearings and assaults from critics in the blogosphere, hundreds of members of the American Geophysical Union are forming a rapid-response team aiming to challenge disinformation and misinformation deployed in the policy wars over global warming."
"Federal financing of science research, which has risen quickly since the Obama administration came to power, could fall back to pre-Obama levels if the incoming Republican leadership in the House of Representatives follows through on its list of campaign promises."
"In the wake of Election Day, prepare for a new round of politicized skirmishes in the never-ending climate wars, with the battleground shifting once again to Capitol Hill hearing rooms."
"Energy magnate David Koch ceded his spot on a National Cancer Institute (NCI) advisory board last month, but green advocates are taking aim at the conservative mega-donor nonetheless by calling for a review of federal ethics policies that allowed him to sit on the panel despite a potential conflict of interest."
Physicists probing the origins of the universe at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva hope they will turn up evidence of parallel universes.
"Have hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from major oil companies compromised the ethics of energy research at such institutions as UC Berkeley, UC Davis and Stanford?"
"The sun may warm the Earth more during waning solar cycles, new satellite data has shown, turning scientific understanding on its head and helping to explain extreme local weather patterns, scientists said on Wednesday."
The press policy documents, obtained by Margaret Munro of Postmedia News, reveal scientists must get permission to talk to the press — and climate science and oil sands are off limits. Any statements on those topics must be approved by political appointees at the ministerial level.
The revised policy puts the onus on political appointees as well as scientists, declares a presumption of openness in public access to scientific information generated at the agency, and affirms the right of scientific employees to talk to news media and investigative agencies.
