BP prepared on Tuesday to try sealing off its runaway well with a new cap that it says could for the first time in 12 weeks finally arrest the flow of oil spewing from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. The British energy giant has suffered numerous setbacks in its struggle to control the…

It is summer and it is traditional to complain about how warm it is. Weather also is always a popular subject. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) State of the Climate report shows the June 2010 average temperature for the contiguous United States was 71.4 degrees F, which is 2.2 degrees F above the…

A recent study by British researchers at Imperial College London’s School of Public Health has found that, despite widespread concern over the safety of cell phones, children born to mothers who lived near cell phone towers while pregnant do not have an elevated risk of cancer.

Ten countries worldwide, including five African nations, are at “extreme risk” because of limited access to clean, fresh water, according to a new global water security index. And the effects of climate change and population growth will exacerbate the stress on these water supplies, potentially threatening stability in many regions, according to the analysis by…

Rising seas from global warming, coming after years of coral reef destruction, are forcing thousands of indigenous Panamanians to leave their ancestral homes on low-lying Caribbean islands. Seasonal winds, storms and high tides combine to submerge the tiny islands, crowded with huts of yellow cane and faded palm fronds, leaving them ankle-deep in emerald water…

BP Plc removed a containment cap from its stricken Gulf of Mexico oil well on Saturday in the first step toward installing a bigger cap to contain all the crude gushing into the sea and fouling the coast. The maneuver released a torrent of oil that will spew unrestrained into the Gulf for four to…

Exporters, livestock feeders and ethanol makers are going through the U.S. corn stockpile faster than farmers can grow the crops, the government said on Friday. Despite record crops in two of the past three years and another record within reach this year, the Agriculture Department estimated the corn carryover will shrink to the lowest level…

Integrated environmental modeling is a discipline of developing a system of models where models from two or more academic disciplines are integrated such that they behave like a unit to external stimuli. At least one of the models in the system is from environmental domain while others may come from other academic disciplines such as…

The polar bear has long been a symbol of the damage wrought by global warming, but now biologist Andrew Derocher and his colleagues have calculated how long one southerly population can hold out. Their answer? No more than a few decades, as the bears’ decline closely tracks that of the Arctic’s disappearing sea ice.

A provocative new study suggests that mice raised in spacious cages with lots of toys and companions are more resistant to cancer than mice living in standard cages. The work, which finds that exercise alone doesn’t explain the anticancer effect, is drawing both excitement and skepticism.