The lawyers will be as busy as bees. The long-running row over insecticides linked to declines in bee numbers is going to court. Beekeepers and activists are suing the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), saying it should have banned neonicotinoid insecticides.

Neonicotinoids are relatively new chemicals but have already become widely used in recent years because they are taken up by all parts of a plant, giving comprehensive protection against crop pests.

A British Petroleum representative allegedly rewrote 44 percent of the oil giant's Wikipedia page, including the environmental sections. Some Wikipedia editors are crying foul.

Oil giant British Petroleum is well-known for the Deepwater Oil Horizon disaster and its much-criticized handling of the cleanup's aftermath. But you might want to think twice before you read about the event, or the company's environmental record, on Wikipedia.

Angry Wikipedia editors estimate that BP has rewritten 44 percent of the page about itself, especially about its environmental performance.

Global warming might be an environmental catastrophe, but countries eyeing the North Pole also see it as an opportunity.

“We’ve never had a situation where an ocean has appeared overnight,� says Rob Huebert, a political scientist at the University of Calgary, who studies Arctic security issues. “The ice kept everybody out, and now all of a sudden the ice is going to be gone. So what happens?�

Maybe a 21st-century version of the Great Game, which Russia and Britain played among the mountains and deserts of Central Asia in the 19th century. The prize then was the riches of India; today, it’s new shipping routes and untapped natural resources, including an estimated 13 percent of the earth’s oil and 30 percent of its natural gas.

When a cold snap hits and the temperature drops, there’s nothing to stop it from falling below zero, whether Celsius or Fahrenheit. Either zero is just a mark on a thermometer. But drive a temperature lower and lower, beyond the coldest realms in the Arctic and past those in the most distant reaches of outer space, and eventually you hit an ultimate limit: absolute zero.

It’s a barrier enforced by the laws of physics below which temperatures supposedly cannot possibly go. At minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (or minus 273.15 Celsius), all the heat is gone. Atomic and molecular motion ceases. Trying to create a temperature below absolute zero would be like looking for a location south of the South Pole.

Like bloodhounds on the fading scent of an escaped convict, researchers have tried for decades to trace the ancient footsteps of the first modern humans who left Africa. Even though this exodus was one of the most important events in human evolution, scientists have been unable to pinpoint when and where it began. Now, using ancient DNA for the first time from ancient Europeans such as Ötzi, the famous Iceman, and from earlier fossils, a team of evolutionary geneticists has dated the start of this legendary journey to less than 95,000 years ago and, possibly, as recently as 62,000 years ago.

OSLO - A pre-Viking woolen tunic found beside a thawing glacier in south Norway shows how global warming is proving something of a boon for archaeology, scientists said on Thursday.

The greenish-brown, loose-fitting outer clothing - suitable for a person up to about 5 feet, 9 inches tall (176 centimeters) - was found 6,560 feet (2,000 meters) above sea level on what may have been a Roman-era trade route in south Norway. Carbon dating showed it was made around the year 300.

“Drill, baby, drill� has become a slogan of those who want to produce more oil and gas and who scoff at alternatives to petroleum. But rarely mentioned is the expense required to get that oil and gas—and still more rarely mentioned is the energy required to access those resources.

Charles Hall, an ecologist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, has spent most of his long career trying to get fellow researchers and the public to take a serious look at the energy required to get the energy we use. He is given credit for creating a measure known as the energy return on investment, or EROI—the ratio of energy output over energy input.

For a while, Adam Martiny and some of his fellow scientists had suspected something was not right in how researchers understand the oceans. The object of their suspicion was something called the Redfield ratio, a principle stating that, when nutrients are not limiting, ocean microorganisms always have the same ratio of three elements: carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus.

This matters now because the Redfield ratio is used to help modelers and biogeochemists understand how important elements like nitrogen and carbon cycle in the oceans. If the Redfield ratio does not hold true, climate researchers might have to adjust how that process is represented in their climate models.

Proposed changes to marriage would open the way for Star Wars Jedi to perform ceremonies, a church has said.

The Free Church of Scotland said the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Bill will allow groups promoting a belief to marry couples.

The government said the change was relevant to bodies such as humanists, who are classed as religious rather than non-religious at the moment.

Sugar - given to children by adults, lacing our breakfast cereals and a major part of our fizzy drinks - is the real villain in the obesity epidemic, and not fat as people used to think, according to a leading US doctor who is taking on governments and the food industry.

Dr Robert Lustig, who was this month in London and Oxford for a series of talks about his research, likens sugar to controlled drugs. Cocaine and heroin are deadly because they are addictive and toxic - and so is sugar, he says. "We need to wean ourselves off. We need to de-sweeten our lives. We need to make sugar a treat, not a diet staple," he said.

The late Venezuelan president implied that his enemies gave him cancer. Katherine Belov, an expert on transmissible cancer in Tasmanian devils, says that is unlikely—but not impossible

Venezuelan officials announced this week that they would investigate whether enemies could have deliberately infected late President Hugo Chávez with cancer. Chávez died on March 5, apparently of a heart attack, after battling cancer for two years.

When the former Venezuelan president was diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer in 2011, he speculated that his enemies could have given him the disease.

More than a month has passed since archaeologists announced they'd found the bones of Richard III under a parking lot in Leicester, and the headlines have mostly moved on. But for many, the lure of King Richard III is just beginning.

Richard III enthusiasts, or Richardians, as they are known, have societies in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The discovery of the bones of the medieval king has only swelled their ranks. At the same time, the reburial of the king has sparked strong opinions. Why does this particular monarch incite such fascination? Fans say his shrouded history is a major draw.

Fossil footprints could provide a skewed view of how ancient animals — including early human ancestors similar to the famous Lucy fossil — walked, new research suggests.

In the past, paleontologists and anthropologists assumed the depth of the footprint correlated with the pressure used to create it. But the analysis, published today (March 19) in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, reveals that the heel tends to create a deeper indentation even when applying the same amount of pressure.