"U.S. 9th Circuit panel says Southern California air quality board can't impose restrictions that could interfere with interstate commerce."

"According to recently leaked documents, the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security has been tracking anti-gas drilling groups and their meetings — including a public screening of the film 'Gasland,' a documentary about the environmental hazards of natural gas drilling."

"The Corn Refiners Association, which represents firms that make the syrup, has been trying to improve the image of the much maligned sweetener with ad campaigns promoting it as a natural ingredient made from corn. Now, the group has petitioned the United States Food and Drug Administration to start calling the ingredient 'corn sugar.'"

GOP efforts to stop EPA regulation of greenhouse gases by tacking a rider onto an appropriations bill in committee may have been thwarted for now.
 

The invasive and harmful quagga mussel is showing up in Western states, and the Western states are fighting back.

"Dispensing antibiotics to healthy animals is routine on the large, concentrated farms that now dominate American agriculture. ... Now, after decades of debate, the Food and Drug Administration appears poised to issue its strongest guidelines on animal antibiotics yet."

"A biotech company plans to announce Tuesday that it has won a patent on a genetically altered bacterium that converts sunlight and carbon dioxide into ingredients of diesel fuel, a step that could provide a new pathway for making ethanol or a diesel replacement that skips several cumbersome and expensive steps in existing methods."

"The tragic explosion of a gas pipeline  in a San Francisco suburb has shed light on a problem usually kept underground: Communities have expanded over pipes built decades earlier when no one lived there. Utilities have been under pressure for years to better inspect and replace aging gas pipes — many of them laid years before sprawling communities were erected around them — that now are at risk of leaking or erupting."

A progressive blog reports that almost every Republican candidate running for a U.S. Senate seat this fall either denies consensus scientific findings of manmade climate change or opposes efforts to head it off.

"Scientists in the Arctic are reporting a rare mass migration of thousands of walrus from the ice floes to dry land along Alaska's coast."