David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz discuss how the chemical industry and its powerful lobbies prevail in blocking efforts to reform outdated laws, leaving the public afloat in a soup of toxins.

Would you sacrifice your child’s health or life for the greater good? That is the question that arises in tonight’s film The Greater Good, directed, produced, and written by tonight’s guests Leslie Manookian and Kendall Nelson. The Greater Good takes a step back from the recent divisiveness discussing the issue’s complexity and nuances, bringing the bigger picture into focus through the stories of three families affected by vaccinations, with experts on both sides and in the middle of the vaccination debate.

Chris Stewart, a Republican from Utah, was recently appointed Chair of the House subcommittee on Science.

This means that Congressman Stewart now has dominion over the EPA, climate change research, and “all activities related to climate.”

The Music of π. The discovery and refinement of pi was a result of a collaboration over centuries from the Babylonians, to Archimedes, to Tsu Chung-Chi, to Leonardo … on through today

Just a few short weeks after NOAA operations wrote that 2012′s La Niña was the warmest on records, NOAA researchers announced they recalculated historical La Niñas because of warming global temperatures. NOAA confirmed something that occurred to me while I was writing that post: eventually, historical El Niños will be cooler than future La Niñas.

Three events collided this past week for me in the space of 36 hours, all revolving around climate change: Obama’s inaugural address, the death of John Chandley, and the decision of Nebraska’s governor to allow the Keystone XL pipeline to be built in his state. Three other events loom on the horizon: the ongoing drought, the Presidents Day protests in DC led by 350.org and Bill McKibben, and the eventual decision — one way or another — by President Obama on that pipeline.

The Russians think they’ve got a clean water sample from Lake Vostok. We’ll have to wait a bit to be sure. Their last sample was bad. They might find life, they might find cold water. However, the US is actually ahead on the search for life, just from another lake. I still think Vostok is more interesting, the water there is older.

There was ample time to anticipate Hurricane Sandy after it killed at least 52 people in Haiti. New Jersey, New York and Washington, DC, all were very public about preparations that were being made. This gave media in the United States an opening to get in and cover before the storm did any damage.

Opening up a discussion about this historic storm that was on its way and why it would be so devastating could have occurred. They could have ventured into an important scientific discussion about how the planet is changing.

Why do we vote? Why do some stay home? And with the right persuasion techniques, can the political industrial complex manipulate those patterns?

These important questions are at the heart of a new book exploring the science behind campaigning, because for all the hullabaloo made over television ads, this election will be won and lost by the ground game.

The Victory Lab, The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, by journalist Sasha Issenberg, has been called the Moneyball of politics. It takes readers into the minds of pollsters and field operatives to reveal some of the tactics behind getting-out-the-vote.

Hurricane Sandy has everyone’s attention, especially along the east coast, which isn’t surprising given the satellite imagery and computer models that put it crashing into the Atlantic coast between Maryland and Massachusetts. But back while things were quiet on the hurricane front — last February — people were thinking about them, like NOAA director Jane Lubchenco and Paul “Austerity Rocks!” Ryan.

But that was last spring, when the seas were calm. Today, Paul Ryan probably doesn’t want anything to think about what he proposed for the NOAA budget.