PAUL VOOSEN

Jane Lubchenco and Marcia McNutt have reached the limits of science. As the oil surged up, week after week, from the Gulf of Mexico's renegade well two years ago, McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found themselves far removed from the stately pace of their past academic careers. ...

Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, the world's largest conservation group, has some hard truths for environmentalists. The movement is at a crossroads. Science has unraveled its founding ethic -- the protection of a pristine nature into perpetuity -- at both ends. If conservation is to survive, it will have to abandon its cherished myths. There will no return to Eden. Some species will not survive.

It is time, Kareiva says, to enter the Age of Man. And he is not alone. ...

Sept. 11, 2001, brought peace to few in the world -- except whales. ...

In the Earth's frozen extremes, it appears, the future is now. For some time, it's been thought in climate science that the glaciers and ice caps crowning mountain ranges from the Andes to the Himalayas are the canaries of the cryosphere. ...

Restoring the post-spill Gulf Coast will be like no other environmental recovery effort in U.S. history. It will confuse notions of how restoration works and what it can do. It will test the resolve of politicians presented with a bounty of cash, and the limits of scientists seeking ways to compensate for damage done miles below the sea surface. ...

Rather than flowing in a tidy path to the southwest, pulled along by a steady current, the Deepwater Horizon plume was a mess of swirl and slosh. Virgin water exposed to the spill, rather than whisking away permanently, would return after weeks, carrying with it microbes already primed to chew hydrocarbons ...

WAIMALU, Hawaii -- As the midday sun baked his four-bedroom home in the Honolulu foothills, George Hayashi watched two workers, with drills whirring, install 18 gleaming solar panels on his garage. ...

One of the world's leading energy companies, Norway's Statoil, is going public this month with a scientific innovation that it says will drastically reduce the costs and risks of discovering new deposits of fossil fuels. ...

Hydraulic fracturing may be in for a bumpy ride. A previously unreported study out of the Oklahoma Geological Survey has found that hydraulic fracturing may have triggered a swarm of small earthquakes earlier this year in Oklahoma. ...

MAUNA LOA, Hawaii -- At nightfall, 11,000 feet up, under the summit of a looming volcano, the black lava moonscape cools as the sun's tropical heat escapes upward. Settling, subsiding, some of the world's purest air -- a sample of the entire central Pacific atmosphere -- descends on the dusk, cloaking Mauna Loa in stillness.

That's when John Barnes flips on his emerald-tinged laser and shoots it into the sky. ...

PUNA, Hawaii -- His shoes crunching through volcanic grit on the Big Island's eastern shore, Dennis Gonsalves walks into a grove of juvenile papaya trees. A renowned plant pathologist, Gonsalves eyes the bulbous green fruit stacked up the trees' trunks. In a few months, harvest will arrive, each tree shedding two or three papayas a week. ...

KUNIA RESEARCH FARM, Oahu, Hawaii -- On a furrowed hillside suspended between alternate takes on paradise, with rugged, green mountains above and the placid waters of Pearl Harbor below, Hawaii's plantation legacy is constantly re-emerging. ...

A few years back, several New Zealand scientists began tinkering with petunias, the elegant flowers blooming in many gardens. Playing with pigment genes, they developed biotech varieties with lush dark leaves, their funnel-shaped flowers popping against a midnight backdrop. ...

Down on a farm in Illinois, his forearm stuck inside the noisome gut of a living and otherwise unperturbed brown cow, Matthias Hess, a German-born microbiologist and geneticist, felt far removed from the white hum of his biology lab. ...

In a decision set to upturn the biotech industry and outrage its opponents, the Agriculture Department announced late last week that it does not consider a lawn grass genetically engineered to resist a weedkiller within its regulatory domain, ratifying a pathway for certain classes of bioengineered plants to bypass federal regulation. ...

A multinational group of scientists has developed farm-ready wheat resistant to a virulent and devastating plague that has slowly spread from Africa into the Middle East, carrying with it the threat of famine. ...

Amyris, perhaps the hottest biofuel company around, seems like the model American startup.

Few can match its pedigree. Several years ago, Amyris helped create a landmark achievement in medicine, engineering microbes to produce an expensive antimalarial drug. Related tricks, it later found, can create a liquid fuel similar to diesel. Well-heeled partners lined up at its door. The company went public last fall, and its stock has only risen since. ...

For decades, it has been an open secret among conservationists. An elegant equation widely used to calculate how many species will go extinct from deforestation and habitat destruction -- one of the "laws" of ecological theory -- was a little shaky. ...

The oil was lucky to last as long as it did.

As it began to rush out of the Deepwater Horizon's bent pipes and busted caps 5,000 feet beneath the sea's surface, the oil and gas unleashed last year by BP's Macondo well discovered a dangerous, exotic environment. The Gulf of Mexico was full of reactive chemicals, voracious wildlife and splitting pressure. Dangers lurked at every corner. ...

Surfactants are mongrel compounds. They resemble elongated keys, with a bulbous head that favors water and a skinny tail that loves plunging into oil and fats. When not made out of petroleum, their tails are stewed out of palm or coconut oil, hardly standard-bearers for sustainable chemistry, given their tendency to replace rainforest. ...

Nori Nakamura's mother, who lived near Hiroshima, had a rule for when her son went out to play."My mother did not want me to wear colored shirts in the summer," said Nakamura, a radiation biologist, born the year after the atomic bomb fell. "Only white." The rule wasn't about fashion, he said. It came from a lesson well-learned. ...

BOSTON -- Bioengineer Jeff Way has seen what happens when the claims of algae biofuel companies get ahead of the science, when their promises of "renewable diesel" slam into the realities of engineering. ...

Overnight, Tokyo transformed into the world's largest psychological laboratory. ...

It's long been a vexing issue in the scientific community, spurred in large part by public panic over nuclear power, waste and radiation: Why the terror? ...

When considering the current troubles at three nuclear reactors of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant, two words must be promptly defined: radiation and meltdown. The former carries fears of spreading, invisible poison; the latter seems one step away from an atomic blast. Neither is quite what it seems. ...

The Department of Agriculture's decision to fully deregulate biotech alfalfa will delay, but not forestall, a day of reckoning between the rising organic industry and the coalition of farmers, agribusinesses and biotech firms that support the widespread adoption of genetically engineered crops ...

A core ingredient of the dispersant injected deep underwater at BP's runaway oil well remained trapped in an undersea plume of oil, methane and other hydrocarbons, resisting decay even as it became vanishingly dilute ...

Several decades ago, the town dump was a nasty place where drums of chemicals, oil cans, rusting metal, food debris and pesticides were haphazardly tossed into crude pits. ...

Thanks to global warming, North American wheat production is set to move back in time. ...

The Department of Agriculture is considering the imposition of geographic restrictions and isolation distances on the cultivation of a genetically modified crop, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced today, a stark reversal of the agency's previously laissez-faire policies. ...

Polar bears may be threatened, but they aren't yet doomed. While Arctic sea ice will continue to retreat under the glare of rising global temperatures, the ice is unlikely to collapse in spectacular fashion, causing hope that, with aggressive greenhouse gas emissions cuts and wildlife management, polar bears may retain viable habitat into the next century ...

Microbes have long done the world's dirty work. They gobble up oil spills. They defend our guts against disease. And even in rugged northern latitudes, hosts of bacteria filter through the soil, feeding on falling leaves and decay, freeing carbon and nutrients for each spring's renewal. ...

This herbicide-tolerant canola is likely to be the first in a wave of crops created by targeted mutation, a long-sought technique that allows tailored changes in plant genes, down to single pairs of DNA. The technology is poised to upend the debate on modified crops, forcing regulators and the public to face a simple question: What does "genetically engineered" mean? ...

Even on a high, dry plateau in central Oregon, it's hard not to find a riot of grass. Farmers grow Kentucky bluegrass for the seed, and lining irrigation canals are wild varieties of rabbit's foot and water bent, along with stubby lawn grasses that, grown thick, would make an excellent putting green.

And recently, a new variety has joined the scene: feral, genetically engineered bentgrass. ...

Perhaps it should have been called the Gulf of Mexico gas spill. ...

Simmered out of eucalyptus, charcoal is being hoed into the degraded soils of former forests in western Kenya. Roasted out of chicken manure, it is spurring the growth of malting barley in Australia. And in Iowa, researchers are plowing charcoal into corn rows, hoping to limit the tons of fertilizer that saturate the state's fields each year. ...

The Gulf of Mexico's undersea oil plume is no more.

For nearly a month, scientists sampling the site of a deepwater plume stretching southwest from BP PLC's failed well in the Gulf have been foiled. Their sensors have gone silent. Where once a vibrant -- if diffuse -- cloud of oil stretched for miles, 3,600 feet below the surface, there is now only ocean, and what seems to be the debris of a bacterial feeding frenzy. ...

A new study confirming the existence of a massive plume of oil trapped deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico defies notions that bacteria, while they are degrading the oil, will make as quick work of petroleum lingering in the water's cold depths as they have on the surface. ...

The Gulf Coast has long been home to a small fleet of scientific consulting firms that use ancient fossils to date rock formations buried deep beneath the ocean. Rather than hunting for the big bones of dinosaurs, these industry scientists have an eye for truly small fry, the fossils of plankton, microns in width, that once bobbed in the Gulf's ancestral waters. ...

Not so long ago -- at least, in geological time -- many in the oil game thought the Gulf of Mexico was tapped out. Financiers called it "the Dead Sea." Nearly a century of production had run its course. Well after deeper well turned up dry, many drilling into thick layers of salt. And where there was salt, most believed, all hope of oil was lost. ...

As crude washes into marshes and beaches along the Gulf of Mexico, several small businesses have been barnstorming to sell local and state officials on what seems like a dream scenario. Douse the oil with our compound, they say, and your contamination problems will likely vanish -- all through the miracle of microbes. ...

Microbiologists are unsure which bacteria, feeding off the oil, are already growing exponentially in the Gulf. They are curious how long the bacterial growth will last once the oil's hard remnants drift down into ocean sediment. And no one seems certain how the surge in microbial life will alter the intricate, disentangling web of the Gulf's already weakened ecology. ...

Five years ago, before the money dried up, oceanographer Robert Weisberg had 14 buoys bobbing up and down off the West Florida coast. The buoys were vital scientific instruments, recording salinity, temperature and current speed. They granted real-time insight into the unruly stew of the Gulf of Mexico's shifting flows. Ocean models were tested, and improved.

Those good times are over. ...

A large rotating cyclone of cold water is pushing into the southern body of the Gulf of Mexico's Loop Current and now appears likely to destabilize or even sever the current and the oil it contains from its connection to Florida, scientists said today. ...

A thin stem of oil stretching east from BP PLC's spill is increasingly likely to enter the Loop Current, a powerful Gulf of Mexico flow that runs past the Florida Keys and up the Atlantic Seaboard, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief said today. ...

Genetically engineered crops are becoming victims of their own success. ...

BARENDRECHT, the Netherlands -- Kees Pieters has had enough. When the Dutch computer consultant abandoned city life to settle here 30 years ago, Barendrecht was a true village with 15,000 people. Weeping willows lined the canals and, in nearby fields, farmers grew sprouts and potatoes. ...

Atrazine, watch out: There's a killer from the future tracking you down. ...

An undersea conveyor belt to Florida is approaching the Gulf Coast oil spill, and should it stretch past its typical bounds, oil from the BP accident, blobbing placidly off the Louisiana coast, could soon stream into the Florida Keys and up the United States' Eastern Seaboard. ...

UTRECHT, the Netherlands -- The Dutch used to discover new worlds across unexplored seas. Now, they are beginning to trace the edges of a new undiscovered country, and it is right beneath their shores. ...

BERLIN -- The Stuttgart Formation may just be the most important hunk of rock in the world. Buried some 2,000 feet down 25 miles west of here, the saltwater-flush sandstone has seen its eons-old life disturbed recently by clanging seismic probes, electrical currents and drills as geologists examine its every pore and flaw. ...

AACHEN, Germany -- Scientists here in the academic heart of Germany's coal-mining region are readying what they say is a disruptive model for the electric utility industry. Leave the coal deep underground, they say, and forget the death and expense that come with mining. Instead, put a drilling hat on. ...

NIEDERAUSSEM, Germany -- Europe's biggest carbon dioxide emitter has no plans to stop burning coal. Johannes Heithoff, the research chief for the German utility RWE, said his company's goal is to burn through its 3.4 billion metric tons of brown coal reserves, a supply that could last for decades. ...

FREIBERG, Germany -- Climate regulations pushed electricity generators and chemical manufacturers into each other's arms. As oil and carbon prices soared in Europe a few years ago, these two behemoths found themselves in a flush of mutual discovery. ...

BRANDENBURG, Germany -- Vattenfall wants someone to take its CO2. Please.

The first electric utility in the world to launch a coal-fired power plant designed from the ground up to capture its carbon dioxide emissions, Vattenfall has found that building the complicated pilot plant may have been the easy part. Finding a home for its captured gas? Now that's hard. ...

The European Union today approved the first new genetically modified (GM) crop for domestic growing in more than a decade, ending what has been a long stalemate over a backlog of GM crops awaiting cultivation approval. ...

Two industry giants, International Paper Co. and MeadWestvaco Corp., are planning to transform plantation forests of the southeastern United States by replacing native pine with genetically engineered eucalyptus, a rapidly growing Australian tree that in its conventional strains now dominates the tropical timber industry. ...

Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak have every reason not to get along.

Ronald, a plant scientist, has spent her past two decades manipulating rice from her lab bench, bending the grain's DNA to her whim. Adamchak, meanwhile, is an organic farmer, teaching college students the best practices of an environmentally gentle agriculture at his California market garden. ...

Using advanced biotechnology, long hidden in the background and only now starting to pay dividends, scientists are changing crops without tapping foreign genes -- and often without the regulatory oversight that is given to GM crops. ...

Could nuclear power plants last as long as the Hoover Dam? ...

When the Berlin Wall fell, 20 years ago today, and the crowds pushed through -- first in a trickle and then a flood -- few could then imagine that one of the most lasting, if abstract, legacies of the popular revolt against communist governments across Europe would be a marked decline in CO2 emissions. ...

Europe can't feed its pigs -- at least, not by itself. Meat-hungry and short on animal feed, European nations have relied for years on protein imports, such as the ground meal of soybeans from the United States, to sustain their cattle and pig farms. While this complex chain of trade has worked reasonably well, it has started to be threatened by a microscopic foe: the dust of genetically modified crops. ...

Just as other scientific issues, such as climate change and evolution, faced politicization in the United States, some European countries have politicized scientific evaluations of GM crop safety. Trying to ban the politically unpopular crops, the countries have invoked a science-based protection clause using what some scientists, policymakers and businesses say is flimsy evidence. ...

These days, there is no rarer commodity in farming than trust.

Take Oregon's Willamette Valley, which for generations has been the germ of the U.S. sugar beet industry, producing nearly all the country's seeds. Such breeding is complicated when neighbors grow genetically similar crops and stiff Pacific winds, baffled by the Coast Range mountains, shove pollen every which way. ...

Two weeks ago, a group of marine biologists from Israel's National Institute of Oceanography set sail from the country's central coast. Under a full moon, with the lights of hectic Tel Aviv a band on the horizon, they cast their nets into waters that have sustained civilization for millenia in the Levantine Basin, the eastern branch of the Mediterranean Sea.

They had a rich catch that night on the research vessel Shikmona, according to Bella Galil, a senior scientist at the institute. Spilling from the nets were pucker-faced dragonet fish, sprawling octopuses and brown crabs, snapping their claws. On the examination table, it seemed a display of the sea's bounty.

Unfortunately, it was another sea's bounty. ...

Yesterday, the European Union announced plans to launch an indicator this year to measure environmental stress. The index will reflect the pollution and environmental harm within the bloc's member states, including aspects of climate change, biodiversity, air pollution, water use and waste generation. ...

Every robot has its limit. For the famous Roomba vacuum, it's two to three hours. For the several thousand robots deployed in Iraq, about the same. For the warehouse robots sorting our sneaker orders, eight hours. And the Energizer Bunny? Forget about it -- a few minutes, tops. ...

For a brief, shining moment, Spain was the best solar market in the world. Unlike in cloudy Germany, the sun bakes Spain's southwestern provinces -- the brown, hard-packed Extremadura and Andalusia -- on the Mediterranean coast. And the Spanish government, eager to fulfill its commitments to renewable energy, guaranteed generous subsidies for any company that met its aggressive deadlines. ...

The first U.S. industry to face a cap on its greenhouse gas emissions is not, as may be expected, the coal-burning power utilities. It's not the oil refineries, churning through crude. It's not the automakers, manufacturing again.

It's the airline industry. ...

Long left in the dust by their peers in climate research, a small group of soil scientists is spearheading an effort to apply rigorous computer analysis to the ground beneath our feet. Their goal: to produce a digital soil map of the entire world. ...

There is little certainty why the DNDO went off the rails in its procurement efforts. There are theories: the lure of a silver-bullet technological solution, fears that the current monitors were deeply flawed, a need for the office to prove its place in the bureaucracy, and the eagerness of defense contractors to expand into a well-funded new field. ...

For centuries, Mediterranean countries have found countless ways to disagree -- over religion, ethnicity, colonialism and trade. But there are signs the region might yet unite in pursuit of a common goal: renewable energy. ...

Plague conjures images of Gothic horror -- rough wooden carts piled high with pestilent bodies -- but it is more than a medieval memory. The disease, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, kills several hundred people every year by attacking the lungs, lymph nodes or blood. Less obviously, plague also ravages wildlife around the world. ...

MEYRIN, SWITZERLAND -- Located on the outskirts of Geneva and in sight of the Alps, Meyrin is likely the only town in the world that decorates its traffic circles with inactive, high-powered superconducting magnets.

Such decorations are only logical when buried beneath this bucolic Swiss canton and extending well into France is the biggest traffic circle of them all: the 27-kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, set to come online Sept. 10. The launch of the multibillion-euro machine is expected to receive much fanfare, including live coverage on Eurovision. ...

Algorithm by algorithm, Google is bringing us back to the days of the Tower of Babel. ...

There are papier-mache horses and dragons and a Dionysus with wreathed head and a chain of sausage cycling through his mouth. There's a Genghis Khan; a man as a Christmas tree, his date a present; children in fairy-tale costumes; and bears, for scaring the children. In the courtyard's corner, a man sells sausages smoking in a trash can with stove pipe, a foreshadowing of other pig parts soon to come. ...

PLZEN, WEST BOHEMIA -- People often ask Vaclav Berka how he knows that the beer he brews, Pilsner Urquell, is the same as it was 150 years ago, when it was first created by a Bavarian named Joseph Groll.

Sitting in his office on the grounds of Plzensky Prazdroj, Berka, the brewery's senior trade brewmaster, eases his bulk from his chair and walks to a glass cabinet. He pulls out two thick, musty books and puts them on the table. ...

Sixteen years ago, Alexandr Flek lay upon the floor of the church where he worshipped, and he was in agony.

It had been four years since he converted to Christianity and became a preacher, and two years since the Velvet Revolution. And still, there was no project under way to translate the Bible into Czech. In the past 400 years, there had been only two Czech translations -- one archaic if revered, and the other denuded of its figurative force by the taint of communism. ...

I wasn't too nervous when the young boy standing at the other side of camp hoisted a German anti-tank missile launcher onto his shoulder and aimed in my general direction.

Boys will be boys, I thought. And the Panzerfaust -- as the World War II weapon is called -- was decommissioned. I was pretty sure of that. At the least, its blowback would throw the kid's shoulder open, sending the warhead streaking into the clear, blue sky. ...

Maybe he found it in the Gobi desert as his explosives concussed beneath the dunes, sussing out a legendary worm. Or perhaps it was while hacking through the thick of Madagascar's jungles in search of a man-eating death blossom, or scuba diving beneath the blue waters of a remote Micronesian island, sure he'd discover a mausoleum filled with platinum coffins.

Wherever and whenever it was, Ivan Mackerle, the noted Czech adventurer and seeker of apocryphal creatures, has finally found a sense of skepticism. ...

ROZNA URANIUM MINE, WEST MORAVIA -- Gazing up at the primary shaft of this massive uranium mine, 800 meters beneath the surface of the Czech-Moravian Highlands, Pavel Zinkler, the mine's manager and an employee of 25 years, is waiting for an elevator. After a few minutes stuck on the 16th level, he opens up. ...

Stepping into one of the steel lifts, its white paint rusting off in flakes, there is a calm, the only sound that of rainwater rushing hundreds of meters below. Then several staccato bell rings, reverberating through the metal, and a plummet into black. The lift bucks and shakes against the speed of descent, tossing its complaints into the air like a robotic banshee, shrill and consuming. ...

Joe Sixpack is bored. Savvy to marketing and unimpressed with traditional domestic beers -- and large brewers' attempts at innovation -- Americans are increasingly looking to imported beer to slake their thirst, with a 10 percent growth in that market segment in the first three quarters of 2006. Domestic brewers are getting the message, and Anheuser-Busch, maker of Budweiser and the world's largest brewer, is aggressively expanding its portfolio of imports. ...

In 1993, a mason doing demolition work at a house in the small town of Barcarrota, Spain, near the Portuguese border, put his pickaxe through a wall and into a hidden trove of 16th-century texts. The cache included a Spanish picaresque novel, Italian pornography, and a palm-reading manual. It also contained a previously unknown edition of Alborayque, a long-popular polemic against Spain's conversos, the Jews who converted to Christianity under duress during the Middle Ages. ...

As an exhausted Poehler, friends, and family walked through the twilight to a closed reception in Burns Library, William Poehler, who frequents the campus for football and basketball games, was contemplative at the head of the pack. Stressing his pride in both his children -- his son Greg is a '96 BC graduate -- he said of the day's large and exuberant crowds, "It's mind-blowing. They're all here to see Amy." ...

Wikipedia was begun in January 2001, but its first article on Boston College did not appear until June 4, 2003. At a mere 214 words, it contained two errors (placing BC in Boston rather than Chestnut Hill and six miles south, instead of west, of downtown). Since then, there have been 446 user edits -- each logged and archived to discourage abuse and promote discussion -- and the Boston College entry has grown to three articles of a combined 10,500 words. ...

WITH ITS THICK fur, the eastern coyote is often mistaken for a wolf, which is larger. But eastern coyotes more aptly resemble medium-sized dogs, with long snouts, triangular ears, and pelts the variegated colors of rust. ...