"About a mile south of Lucas Oil Stadium in Downtown Indianapolis, Tony Chao stood fishing one recent morning on the bank of the White River."

"Mason Hansen guns his pickup and cranks the steering wheel to spin through sand up to 4 feet high, but this is no day at the beach. Hanson once grew corn and soybeans in the sandy wasteland in western Iowa, and his frustration is clear. Despite months spent hauling away tons of sand dropped when the flooded Missouri River engulfed his farm last summer, parts of the property still look like a desert."

"As the climate gets warmer, so do the rivers and lakes that power plants draw their cooling water from. And that is going to make it harder to generate electricity in decades to come, researchers report."

"In an article in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists measured temperatures now and projected what they would be at midcentury. The temperatures vary according to the time of year, and, even if the extremes remain similar, they will be more frequent -- meaning that the water will be too warm to allow full power production, they predict.

"In the menagerie of Craig Venter’s imagination, tiny bugs will save the world. They will be custom bugs, designer bugs -- bugs that only Venter can create. He will mix them up in his private laboratory from bits and pieces of DNA, and then he will release them into the air and the water, into smokestacks and oil spills, hospitals and factories and your house. "

"Chagas disease, a tropical illness that is transmitted by biting insects, may pose a major unseen threat to poor populations in the Americas and Europe, according to a report published May 29 in the journal PLoS."

"LONDON -- Plants and shrubs have colonised parts of the Arctic tundra in recent decades growing into small trees, a scientific study found, adding the change may lead to an increase in global warming pressures if replicated on a wider scale."

"At 58, retired machinist Bruce Revers is tethered to his oxygen machines -- a wall unit when he’s at home, a portable tank when he’s out. The simple act of walking to the curb to pick up his newspaper is a grind."

Two scientists say BP's aggressive efforts to subpoena e-mails related to their estimate of the oil flow rate during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill invade their privacy and threaten the integrity of the scientific deliberative process.

"UNITED NATIONS -- A five-year report out [Thursday] from a U.N. refugee agency goes to great lengths to say climate change is likely to increase human displacement among nations. What is less clear in the report is what can be done about it."

"The White House [Thursday] night issued a veto threat to a pending House spending bill to fund the Department of Energy, the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies, citing cuts to clean energy promotion and other DOE priorities and 'policy riders' that would reopen the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository, undo federal building efficiency requirements and block guidance on the Clean Water Act."