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Sunday Mail: PRINCE Charles faced ridicule yesterday for taking the Royal train on a week-long nationwide tour to promote cycling. The prince has ordered the nine carriage train for a five-day, 1300-mile "green tour" of Britain, starting from Glasgow tomorrow. His trip is aimed at promoting environmentally friendly lifestyles and ethical modes of transport and he has boasted that the train will run on biofuels. But yesterday experts accused Charles of hypocrisy after it emerged the ...

Guardian: Climate scientists meeting in Britain this week hope to build a database to predict natural disasters precisely. And records of the voyages of the Bounty and Beagle will assist them in their task Leading climate scientists will gather in the UK this week to finalise plans for a revolutionary project aimed at transforming their ability to predict meteorological disasters. The goal is to create an international databank that would generate forecasts of unprecedented ...

Guardian: The government will this month sound the death knell for the world's largest tidal energy project – to be built across the Severn estuary between Somerset and south Wales – when it rules out public funding for the controversial £20bn plan. The announcement will please some environmentalists, who were worried about the impact on bird life in the estuary, but others say such spending cuts will make a mockery of David Cameron's pledge to be the "greenest government ever". The ...

NYT: THE scientific rebel J. Craig Venter created headlines – and drew comparisons to Dr. Frankenstein – when he announced in May that his team had created what, with a bit of stretching, could be called the first synthetic living creature. Two months later, only a smattering of reporters and local dignitaries bothered to show up at a news conference to hear Dr. Venter talk about a new greenhouse that his company, Synthetic Genomics, had built outside its headquarters here to conduct ...

Guardian: It has been a summer of record temperatures – Japan had its hottest summer on record, as did South Florida and New York. Meanwhile, Pakistan and Niger are flooded and the eastern US is mopping up after hurricane Earl. None of these individual events can definitively be attributed to global warming. But to see how climate change will play out in the 21st century, you needn't look to the Met Office. Look, instead, to the deaths and burning tyres in Mozambique's "food riots" to see what happens ...

Guardian: The soaring price of wheat has raised questions about the UK's commitment to biofuels as it attempts to wean itself from its dependence on oil. A network of biorefineries that convert wheat and other crops into bioethanol that can then be blended with petrol are being developed as the UK looks to meet its EU renewable transport fuels obligations. But the huge amounts of wheat that will be used in the process – up to a fifth of the UK's current annual production within four ...

Independent: David Cameron's claim to lead the "greenest government ever" was thrown into the heart of the Labour leadership contest last night, amid concern about plans for a deep-sea drilling operation in the North Sea. David Miliband, one of the candidates to succeed Gordon Brown as Labour leader, said the coalition's refusal to impose a moratorium on deep-sea drilling in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico disaster exposed its commitment to the environment as "nothing but spin". He said: ...

AP: A crane hoisted a key piece of oil spill evidence to the surface of the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, giving investigators their first chance to personally scrutinize the blowout preventer, the massive piece of equipment that failed to stop the gusher four months ago. It took 29 1/2 hours to lift the 50-foot, 300-ton blowout preventer from a mile beneath the sea to the surface. The five-story high device breached the water's surface at 6:54 p.m. CDT, and looked largely intact with black ...

Other than that, early man was fantastic...

The legacy of one of America's longest combat missions will continue to affect the thousands of troops who came home suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries.

The Dorset waters are Britain's largest known breeding colony for seahorses, according to the Telegraph, which writes that adult, pregnant male, and juvenile spiny seahorses have been spotted there since surveys of the area began in 1994. But this was the first time a baby has been spotted.

A Dutch company has unveiled what it believes to be the first commercial dyeing machine to replace water with supercritical carbon dioxide—a pressurized form of the gas with unusual liquid-like properties. Heated up to 31 degrees Celsius (88 degrees Fahrenheit) and pressurized to 74 bar, CO2 takes on the characteristics of both a liquid and a gas, allowing for the dissolution of compounds such as dyes.

The fruit of the bramble is a delicious, guilt-free and ephemeral pleasureNot that one. The handheld gizmo with all the addictiveness, and few of the upsides, of a class A substance has just ruined your holiday. You're now going to have to reconnect with nature in between long hours at a desk. But h

In Norfolk I have long grown accustomed to a very patchy distribution in our local swallows. Much of the vernacular architecture has been converted into residences or otherwise made unsuitable for these barn-dwelling creatures. The more pervasive use of insecticides in our arable county has also cut

What happens when fierce scientific rivals go head to head? Joel Levy discusses some of history's most epic battles to discredit the work of colleagues. Do these often petty quarrels help or hinder the progress of science?Joel's book Scientific Feuds: From Galileo to the Human Genome Project is out

Unions argue that abusive behaviour and racism are widespread and wants shake-up of system in light of worsening safety recordTransocean, the American rig owner at the centre of BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill, has been accused of compromising safety in the North Sea by "bullying, harassment and intim

Fur stoles are being snapped up by lovers of vintage fashionBasil Brush beware - fox stoles, once disdained as gruesome artefacts of a crueller era, are back. Trendspotters report seeing increasing numbers on vintage lovers. And it's not just the pelts ? these are old-fashioned stoles, with little f

AFP: Six rich economies joined a website unveiled on Friday detailing pledges in short-term aid they made at last December's climate summit, a move aimed at restoring damaged trust with developing countries. The portal www.faststartfinance.org showed that Britain, Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway had so far allocated the equivalent of 3.2 billion dollars in climate funds. Twenty-seven poorer countries are named as beneficiaries, including Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, ...

Associated Press: Environmentalists on Saturday praised Burger King's decision to stop buying palm oil from an Indonesian company accused of destroying rainforests. The U.S. hamburger chain giant -- which recently sealed a deal to sell itself for $3.26 billion to 3G Capital -- said Friday that it was canceling its contract with PT Sinar Mas Agro Resources and Technology over concerns it had not adopted sustainable farming practices. It cited an independent audit that found the company's ...

AFP: Prosecutors have called for French state energy giant EDF, accused of spying on environmental campaigners Greenpeace, to face criminal trial, EDF lawyer Alexis Gublin said Saturday. The energy company, and former executives Pierre Francois, who was the company's second highest security official, and his immediate superior Pascal Durieux, are also implicated, along with two other employees. It will now be down to the judge Thomas Cassuto to decide on whether or not the case ...