"More than 1,000 people were injured when a severe tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri, on 22 May 2011, and 158 eventually died. Within a few days of the tornado, several of the injured began to suffer from a fungal infection suspected to be cutaneous necrotizing mucormycosis."

"Much of the oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 disappeared within weeks of the capping of BP's Macondo well on July 15, digested by a massive explosion in oil-eating microorganisms, said Terry Hazen, a professor of environmental biology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, during a Monday panel at the national conference of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans."

"British chef and food activist Jamie Oliver ignited a firestorm in January 2011 when he mentioned on the Late Show with David Letterman that castoreum, a substance used to augment some strawberry and vanilla flavorings, comes from what he described as 'rendered beaver anal gland.' The next year, vegans were outraged to learn that Starbucks used cochineal extract, a color additive derived from insect shells, to dye their strawberry Frappuccino® drinks (eventually, the company decided to transition to lycopene, a pigment found in tomatoes)."

"A fungus tied to a disease devastating hibernating bats in the United States has been found in an Alabama cave system critical to the survival of endangered gray bats, government scientists said on Monday."

"A federal judge on Friday rejected BP's attempt to block the Deepwater Horizon claims administrator from awarding what it said could be billions of dollars in payments for 'business economic losses' that the British oil giant contends are based on 'fictitious' claims of damage.

U.S. District Court Judge Carl Barbier, who also is overseeing the sprawling BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill trial, seemed unlikely from the onset of the hour-long hearing to issue the temporary injunction that BP sought as part of the class action suit.

"Environmental groups on Monday asked the Obama administration to extend the approval process of the Keystone XL pipeline, using last month's spill of heavy Canadian crude oil in Arkansas as their latest reason to delay the project."

"With the warming U.S. Arctic region poised for greater oil and mining development, the White House needs to develop a national strategy that can take environmental decisions on a larger scale, a report issued Thursday concluded."

"On one covert video, farm workers illegally burn the ankles of Tennessee walking horses with chemicals. Another captures workers in Wyoming punching and kicking pigs and flinging piglets into the air. And at one of the country’s largest egg suppliers, a video shows hens caged alongside rotting bird corpses, while workers burn and snap off the beaks of young chicks."

"Listeria in cantaloupes. Salmonella in peanuts. E. coli in spinach. Hepatitis A in green onions. In the past decade a rash of tainted food has resulted in thousands of hospitalizations and hundreds of deaths. It has also prompted the most sweeping reform of U.S. food safety laws in more than 70 years."

"Leaky pipes are the 'super low-hanging fruit' of climate change."