The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has just released President Obama’s budget request for 2014. It will take some time for the budget’s full impacts on science to be dissected and debated, but here is a quick look at how one closely watched agency—NASA—fared. The president’s budget, which is subject to Congressional [...]

In Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, he intoned: ” For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change. … If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.” Now the president’s science advisors, a group known as PCAST for President’s Council of Advisors [...]

President Barack Obama secured a second four-year term in yesterday’s vote. What is the likely outcome of that historic event on energy and environmental issues? Simply put: more of the same. Let me rephrase that slightly. Obama will likely stay the course on his current energy and environmental policies. That means more executive orders like [...]

“We [seem to] have a 100-year flood every two years now,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says he told President Barack Obama during his tour of the damage from Hurricane Sandy on Tuesday. The remark is in the spirit of what climate scientists have been saying about the rise in “extreme weather events,” sea level [...]

Some people can’t wait for the U.S. Supreme Court announcement of its ruling on the Obama Administration’s Affordable Care Act (aka health care reform law), so they are betting on the outcome. Intrade, a popular online trading exchange, provides a platform for people to wager on whether or not future events will happen. More than [...]

THE WOODLANDS, Texas—Planetary scientists, usually an affable lot, are plenty riled up at the moment. The field is bristling at cutbacks, proposed last month by the Obama administration, to planetary science and especially to NASA’s program of robotic Mars explorers. Researchers gathered here for the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference have taken turns railing [...]

NASA just released its presidential budget request for 2013 and, as expected, the space agency’s planetary science program takes a big hit. The budget document (summary pdf) is merely the first volley in an often drawn-out exchange between the White House and Congress, but still sets the general direction for the space program. Although the [...]

Following the lead of presidents from George W. Bush to Jimmy Carter, the Obama White House—or specifically the Obama family’s living quarters—will get solar panels. While Carter’s solar thermal panels are long gone (one of them is in China and the Obama White House last month rebuffed the return of another), photovoltaics installed by President [...]

Story 5 The winners of YouTube’s SpaceLab competition learned the results of their experiments in the first-ever livestream from the International Space Station. Links: YouTube Space Lab: From 250 Miles Above the Earth Story 4 Scientists have discovered a giant magnetic star with a mass 20,000 times that of the sun. Links: Giant Super-Magnetic Star [...]