"The federal government will maximize enrollment in the land-idling Conservation Reserve, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a policy that would reduce U.S. cropland by 1.5 percent if successful."
 

"Sylvatic plague -- a close cousin of the dreaded disease that killed one-third of all European residents in the six years between 1347 and 1353 -- persists in rodents in the American West even when the disease does not erupt into epidemic form, new research demonstrates."

"More than a year after President George W. Bush created a vast marine national monument near the Northern Marianas Islands, the federal government has yet to make good on promised investments in the islands."

"Federal law forces companies to provide detailed information to U.S. EPA about the toxicity of the chemicals they use. But there is a catch. The same law -- the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA -- prohibits the agency from sharing that information with the public or even with state and local authorities. States are demanding that the law be changed."

"In the early 1980s, the cancer deaths of four little girls — whose bodies were so tiny they could fit in shoe boxes — forced Hazel Johnson to shift the focus of an organization she'd recently founded."

"Hopes for a nuclear revival, fanned by fears of global warming and a changing political climate in Washington, are running into new obstacles over a key element -- money. A new approach for easing the cost of new multibillion-dollar reactors, which can take years to complete, has provoked a backlash from big-business customers unwilling to go along."

"A new study has found that male frogs exposed to the herbicide atrazine -- one of the most common man-made chemicals found in U.S. waters -- can make a startling developmental U-turn, becoming so completely female that they can mate and lay viable eggs."

The Pacific "ring of fire" -- the zone where tectonic plates crunch -- doesn't stop at the equator. It extends through the U.S. Pacific Northwest, which is also vulnerable to intense quakes. States like Oregon are just beginning to retrofit potentially lethal buildings, and the seismic clock is ticking.

"Former Vice President Al Gore took aim at skeptics who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change, saying he wished it were an illusion but that the problem is real and urgent."