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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A BP engineer intentionally deleted more than 300 text messages that said the company’s efforts to control the Gulf of Mexico oil spill were failing, and that the amount of oil leaking was far more than what the company reported, the Justice Department said Tuesday. In the first criminal charges related [...]
This year’s TIME 100 is, as always, full of personalities whose influence is at once lasting and admirable, and who have done big, powerful things to shake the world. But many big, powerful things have their roots in small, humble things – things like the inch-and-a-half-long zebrafish created by a University of Exeter team that [...]
A simplified version of the scientific method goes like this: ask a question, make a hypothesis, test the hypothesis in a controlled experiment, analyze results, draw conclusions. But as a team of scientists showed in a recent study of a New England forest, that approach won’t always yield perfect results—particularly in the natural world—if we [...]
Oil is all we seem to want to talk about these days—$3.82 a gallon gas will do that—but the shale gas boom is still going on in much of the U.S. Ground zero—as we wrote about last year in TIME—is Pennsylvania, where some landowners have made a lot of money leasing their land for shale [...]
The residents of California’s Santa Monica Bay have some rather noisy neighbors—and they’re not happy about it. That is the conclusion of a new study which shows that blue whales feeding off the coast of California stop calling to each other when a nearby naval base powers up its sonar for training exercises. It’s not [...]
Good news has been hard to come by for environmentalists, especially during an election year with potentially record-breaking gas prices. (Yes that was former President Bill Clinton at the ARPA-E summit on Wednesday telling greens they should “embrace” the controversial Keystone XL oil sands pipeline.) But there was good news to be had on Wednesday: two [...]
If you were trying to invent with a term that sounds as scary as possible, you couldn’t do better than “fracking.” That’s industry terminology for hydraulic fracturing, the process used to get at unconventional natural gas and oil contained in tight rock layers that need to be cracked open—or fractured—so drillers can get at the [...]
How long has the legal battle between indigenous groups in the Ecuadorean Amazon and the oil giant Chevron been going on? So long that Texaco—the company originally accused of dumping 18 billion gallons of toxic sludge in and around the Ecuadorean town of Lago Agrio—no longer exists, having been acquired by Chevron in 2001. So [...]
‘Tis the season to keep propping up the consumer electronics industry and swap out your old phones and tablets and computers in favor of slightly better, slightly more expensive new versions. Whether it’s an iPad 2 replacing an iPad, an iPhone 4s replacing an iPhone 4, or whether you just received an Kindle Fire tablet [...]
Recent examinations of the health and environmental impacts of mountaintop mining – stripping the tops off of mountains to extract coal – has the practice looking pretty guilty. It apparently spikes birth defects, worsens chronic conditions like heart disease, and ruins land, and it doesn’t look like it will be clearing its name anytime soon. [...]
