Science

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says the Dec. 21 memo implies that existing EPA openness policy meets White House criteria. Meanwhile, the Office of Management and Budget may again be tampering with agency science for political purposes — accused by Arizona congressman Raúl Grijalva (pictured) of censoring FOIA'd documents relating to the mid-summer estimate of Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Topics at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Feb. 17-21, 2011 in Washington, D.C., include climate change, energy, health, oceans, national security, nanotechnology, GMOs, religion, space weather and many more.

A man claiming to be an ex-CIA agent is telling people they may stand to get rich if only they could come up with some dirt on scientist Michael Mann, author of the famous hockey-stick graph that shows the earth getting warm suddenly in recent years. No luck so far.

The media blog Gawker thinks it has uncovered a campaign to discredit the New Yorker writer after her August 2010 story on billionaires Charles and David H. Koch, who have secretly funded attacks on government regulations and bankrolled efforts to discredit settled climate science.

Anonymous White House lawyers have blacked out all information about how the administration's science openness policy was arrived at, and are fighting in court against efforts to shed light on it.