Giving a hard number as a critical threshold for dangerous climate change -  temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius - has not helped climate negotiations. 

The USA, for example, has led the developed world in reducing emissions from energy, though to be fair the anti-nuclear stance of the US led to runaway emissions from the 1980s on so things are now only getting back to even there. Yet for all the emissions the US has reduced, the rest of the world has accelerated. China is the world's top polluter but has been exempt from all negotiations because it is considered a developing nation, the same goes for India and Mexico.

Citizens who were told routine health checks were too expensive and so people did not get them, to the detriment of their health and higher costs later, just got good and bad news; the good news is that a new review says people don't need them. The bad news is that will be a reason not to have them available when the Affordable Care Act goes into force.

Check-ups don't reduce overall deaths or prevent serious diseases like cancer and heart disease, according to Cochrane researchers who carried out a systematic review on the subject. They warn against offering general health checks as part of a public health program, which is the opposite of what Americans have been told by the medical community for decades.

A planet around the mass of the Earth has been found, orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system; the nearest to Earth and also the lightest exoplanet ever discovered around a star like the Sun.

Secondary organic materials (SOM) in the atmosphere form two distinct types, liquids and jellies, and these airborne particles have begun to react with gases in the atmosphere. In the last 20 years' research and climate modeling, these SOM particles have been assumed to drift as liquids. In a liquid phase, the organic materials would absorb other compounds like ammonia or ozone very easily and then progress through a series of chemical changes, known as chemical aging, to form particles that reflect or absorb sunlight, or form clouds.

Next month will be the ten year anniversary of the Prestige sinking, which caused one of Spain's largest ecological disasters. The oil spill reached the coasts of Galicia and the rest of the Cantabrian coast, right up to the Landes area of France and Portugal. Thousands of people aided in the cleaning of the contaminated beaches and were exposed to the fuel for prolonged periods.

An experiment carried out on rodents exposed to fuel similar to that of the Prestige tanker oil spill concluded that inhalation of the fuel causes damage to genetic material. They say the results could be used to help people who carry out the industrial cleaning of coasts.

The best reasons to allow hunting in animal-heavy states are that they get hit by cars a lot and they starve. When it comes to cars, some areas are going to be a lot more dangerous than others and it is not a question of how many animals are there but simply where the road is. They have done things their way for 6,000 years and don't want to change, regardless of what automobiles might like.

But the animals will go over. Case in point: The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has announced the successful use of newly constructed overpasses that provide safe passage for thousands of migrating pronghorn over U.S. Highway 191 in Trapper’s Point, Wyoming, and surrounding areas.