EarthScape

Dogged by delays and intense pressure from the Obama administration, BP Plc faces a pivotal day on Wednesday as it attempts a tricky plan to clog the gushing Gulf of Mexico oil well five weeks into the disaster. If the “top kill” procedure joins the list of BP failures to plug the leak, U.S. President…

New reports are surfacing every day about the immediate impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on Gulf Coast wildlife, especially as the oil reaches the sensitive marshlands along the coast. What will be the long term impact to local marine life? There is some knowledge from earlier releases such as Valdez off Alaska. Oil…

Closing fishing areas and regulating the use of fishing gear can result in more profitable catches that boost fishermen’s incomes, according to a study. The conclusion has emerged from a long-term investigation in Kenya on the effects of fishery closures on fishermen’s profits. The study, published today in Conservation Biology, used data on 27,000 fish…

Manufacturers have been adding the germ fighter triclosan to soaps, hand washes, and a range of other products for years. But here’s a dirty little secret: Once it washes down the drain, that triclosan can spawn dioxins. Dioxins come in 75 different flavors, distinguished by how many chlorine atoms dangle from each and where those…

Seventy percent of firms with revenue of $1 billion or more say they plan to increase spending on climate change initiatives in the next two years, a global survey reported on Tuesday. Nearly half of the 300 corporate executives who responded to a survey conducted for the accounting and consulting giant Ernst & Young said…

A diet with nuts, including pistachios, significantly lowered total and LDL-cholesterol levels, in addition to triglycerides, a new study found. The finding, published earlier this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine, confirms other evidence that nuts can help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, researchers said.

BP sharply reduced its estimate on Monday of how much oil it is siphoning off each day from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico that has been spewing oil for a month and threatening ecological disaster. The British-based energy giant said the oil captured on average by a mile-long siphon tube was 2,010…

Lisa Jackson, EPA Administrator, the top U.S. environmental official was to visit the Gulf Coast on Sunday as energy giant BP Plc scrambled to contain a widening oil spill. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson planned to return to the Gulf to monitor the EPA’s response, while Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was to travel to…

President Barack Obama said on Saturday that offshore oil drilling could only go forward if there were assurances that a disaster like the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill would not happen again. As Obama officially unveiled a commission to investigate the accident, he issued a stern message that while keeping pressure on firms involved…

J. Craig Venter has created a “synthetic cell” by synthesizing a complete bacterial genome and using it to take over a cell. Venter’s breakthrough, reported in the online edition of Science, represents a preliminary step toward the goal of creating microbes from scratch in the lab and using them to make biofuels, vaccines, and other…