Environment The Price of an Oil Spill Details of BP's settlement over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill have been released. Madeleine Thomas
Environment Ancient Soil Samples Link Fires to Climate Change We're in for a hot one, a study of thousand-year-old charcoal deposits in northern Colorado suggests. Nathan Collins
Environment Please Silence Your Sonar The U.S. Navy agrees to give marine mammals off California and Hawaii a break from deafening noise. Brian Palmer
Environment What Cheating Emissions Standards Tells Us About Ourselves To understand the outrage over the Volkswagen scandal and recall, consider the meat industry. James McWilliams
Environment The Perks of Being a Virtual Social Butterfly Facebook makes us sad and Twitter is bad for our relationships, we’ve been told, but are these apps actually changing how humans communicate? Rick Paulas
Environment Power of the People Crowdsourcing could cut conservation costs for boring, uncharismatic, or ugly species. Jason Bittel
Environment Tweets From Mobile Devices Convey More Egotism New research finds they also contain more negative words than Web-based tweets. Tom Jacobs
Environment Has Development Turned Nairobi National Park Into a Glorified Zoo? As fences spring up on all sides, a great wildlife reserve morphs into something much less great. Brian Palmer
Environment Scientists Quantify How Different Humans Are From Each Other, Genetically We're definitely distinct, but not too different. Francie Diep
Environment What the 2015 MacArthur Fellows Are Up to The latest scientists to win the "genius grants" are learning about the brain, turning sewage into useful stuff, and everything in between. Nathan Collins