The next round of hearings into the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster is now underway in Houston, Texas. Ian R Crane, a former oil industry executive and now a lecturer in geopolitics, provides unique insights into events leading up to the rig explosion in his new DVD presentation ‘‘BP - Population Reduction and the End of an Age’. He warns of a BP legacy which will affect health and food supplies for many years to come...

The answer: Policymakers must balance concerns about the damage and cost of controlling invaders against the economic necessity of free trade, say economists Santanu Roy, Southern Methodist University, and Lars J. Olson, University of Maryland. In their article "Dynamic Sanitary and Phytosanitary Trade Policy," Roy and Olson examine the various conditions policymakers must evaluate to determine the best policies governing invasive species based on sound economics. The article was published in July in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management...

Genetically modified corn and soybeans get all the press, but since as far back as 1996, transgenic squash, engineered to include resistance to three of the most deadly squash viruses, has been farmed in both the U.S. and Mexico. Since gene flow from GM crops into their wild counterparts is inevitable, some scientists worry that farmers may be inadvertently creating a race of super squash weeds. This would be a problem, because some varieties of wild squash -- specifically, Texana gourds -- are considered serious weed threats in cotton and soybean fields. This is what happens when you mess with Mother Nature -- your transgenic squash genetically contaminates wild squash which then proliferates through your genetically modified corn and soybean fields. Or at least that's one theory. Some researchers at Penn State, led by biologist Andrew Stephenson, set out to find out exactly what we can expect to happen as transgenic squash genes migrate into the wild...

Launching the report at a press conference in Abuja, Nigeria, Amnesty called the situation in the Niger Delta a 'human rights tragedy,' saying that the people of the Niger Delta have seen their human rights abused by oil companies that their government cannot or will not hold to account. Shell is the biggest oil company operating in the Niger Delta. The 141-page report, 'Petroleum, Pollution and Poverty in the Niger Delta', examines oil spills, gas flaring, waste dumping and other environmental impacts of the oil industry. The majority of the evidence on pollution and environment damage gathered by Amnesty International, and contained in its new report, relates to the operations of Shell.

The organisation also accused the Nigerian government of effectively placing substantial responsibility for remedying human rights abuses in the hands of the very actors responsible for the abuse - the oil companies. As a result, remedies are often ineffective.

In our technologically advanced society, we have a lot of advantages and conveniences. Unfortunately, technological advancements can also provide an avenue for law violators. Online businesses that deal in the wildlife trade are an increasing concern for Florida’s law enforcement agencies. With merely a laptop, garage and mailbox, anyone can open a business dealing in Florida’s wildlife. These businesses could be exchanging dangerous species, such as conditional snakes and lizards, or venomous reptiles, which are a serious public-safety concern. Also, if released into the wild, these nonnative species can pose a threat to indigenous wildlife. The Internet needs to be monitored to protect Florida’s natural resources from exploitation. Fortunately, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) is aware of this issue and has an effective tool on its side: the Internet Crimes Unit...

Washington's failure to develop a national standard for the treatment of ballast water isn't just frustrating, it borders on criminal neglect. Many of the 185 invasive species in the Great Lakes arrived via the cargo holds of ships sailing the St. Lawrence Seaway. These invaders have done lasting damage to the ecosystem, and the risk of future catastrophe is incalculable.

Sadly -- unbelievably -- Congress has yet to craft a strong national standard for treating ballast water.

The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and this summer its sea ice is melting at a near-record pace. The sun is heating the newly open water, so it will take longer to refreeze this winter, and the resulting thinner ice will melt more easily next summer.

At the same time, warm Pacific Ocean water is pulsing through the Bering Strait into the Arctic basin, helping melt a large area of sea ice between Alaska and eastern Siberia. Scientists are just beginning to learn how this exposed water has changed the movement of heat energy and major air currents across the Arctic basin, in turn producing winds that push remaining sea ice down the coasts of Greenland into the Atlantic.

Globally, 2010 is on track to be the warmest year on record. In regions around the world, indications abound that earth’s climate is quickly changing, like the devastating mudslides in China and weeks of searing heat in Russia. But in the world’s capitals, movement on climate policy has nearly stopped.

“Because of having that electronic device, people have an expectation that they can do something stupid and be rescued,” said Jackie Skaggs, spokeswoman for Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

“Every once in a while we get a call from someone who has gone to the top of a peak, the weather has turned and they are confused about how to get down and they want someone to personally escort them,” Ms. Skaggs said. “The answer is that you are up there for the night.”

Far more common but no less perilous, park workers say, are visitors who arrive with cellphones or GPS devices and little else - sometimes not even water - and find themselves in trouble. Such visitors often acknowledge that they have pushed themselves too far because they believe that in a bind, the technology can save them.

Abstract Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) are progressive neurodegenerative diseases and include bovine spongiform encephalopathy of cattle, chronic wasting disease (CWD) of deer and elk, scrapie in sheep and goats, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. An abnormally folded form of the prion protein (designated PrPTSE) is typically associated with TSE infectivity and may constitute the major, if not sole, component of the infectious agent. Transmission of CWD and scrapie is mediated in part by an environmental reservoir of infectivity. Soil appears to be a plausible candidate for this reservoir. The transport of TSE agent through soil is expected to influence the accessibility of the pathogen to animals after deposition and must be understood to assess the risks associated with burial of infected carcasses. We report the results of saturated column experiments designed to evaluate PrPTSE transport through five soils with relatively high sand or silt contents and low organic carbon content. Protease-treated TSE-infected brain homogenate was used as a model for PrPTSE present in decomposing infected tissue. Synthetic rainwater was used as the eluent. All five soils retained PrPTSE; no detectable PrPTSE was eluted over more than 40 pore volumes of flow. Lower bound apparent attachment coefficients were estimated for each soil. Our results suggest that TSE agent released from decomposing tissues to soils with low organic carbon content would remain near the site of initial deposition. In the case of infected carcasses deposited on the land surface, this may result in local sources of infectivity to other animals.

Cashman explains that a protein is a chain of amino acids that only acquires its function by being folded properly. When a prion protein becomes misfolded after contact with another misfolded prion protein, it exposes certain regions in the normal prion protein, technically called "epitopes". His team had identified a group of antibodies they thought could target these epitopes, and thus halt the disease. But in order to test the antibodies, using a technique called "immunostaining," they needed a line of easy-to-grow, regular cells to act as "negative controls." "And lo and behold, we found a few that stained intensely with these antibodies," Cashman explained to CTV.ca. Quite to Cashman's surprise...

The summer’s heat waves baked the eastern United States, parts of Africa and eastern Asia, and above all Russia, which lost millions of acres of wheat and thousands of lives in a drought worse than any other in the historical record. Seemingly disconnected, these far-flung disasters are reviving the question of whether global warming is causing more weather extremes.

Theory suggests that a world warming up because of those gases will feature heavier rainstorms in summer, bigger snowstorms in winter, more intense droughts in at least some places and more record-breaking heat waves. Scientists and government reports say the statistical evidence shows that much of this is starting to happen.

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A dead bat stashed in a freezer and a wallaby from a local zoo have helped reveal that relatives of the lethal Ebola and Marburg viruses likely began infecting mammals tens of millions years ago, making this family of viruses far older than scientists had thought. Remnants of genes from these viruses exist in the DNA of bats, marsupials, rodents, and other mammals, a finding that may suggest where these deadly microbes lurk before they emerge to kill people...