The only thing that stands between us and eating fish riddled with genes that some dude spliced together in the lab is the Office of Management and Budget. The FDA has finished its evaluation of genetically engineered salmon and recommended that the fish be commercialized. The GE fish grows fast and big, which means more fish for all of us. But it also could have worrisome impacts on the environment, because it's a fish that we programmed in order to bend its entire existence to our will! It probably won’t interbreed with regular fish. The GE salmon is supposed to …

The planet is kind of amazing sometimes. Researchers have discovered plumes of fresh water at the bottom of the Dead Sea, deeper than any previous plumes that had been found. And around the plumes: life. Even though most microbes that live in salt die in fresh water and vice versa, some tough little buggers are hanging on in a space where salinity shifts constantly. The top of the springs’ rocks are covered with green biofilms, which use both sunlight and sulfide -- naturally occurring chemicals from the springs -- to survive. Exclusively sulfide-eating bacteria coat the bottoms of the rocks …

While U.S. border monitors were busy looking for terrorists in cargo containers, a slew of invasive species slipped unnoticed into the country. Whatever that sheen in the Gulf is, it's not BP's fault, okay?? If carbon is a risk (and it is!), the market should adjust for that, valuing companies with high "exposure to climate change" less than those that are climate-resilient. But since markets don't seem to ever do what they should in theory, that hasn't happened yet. Electric vehicles are only as climate-positive as the electric grid that fuels them, so in places like China where coal-fired electricity …

Hey, remember that rumor that sharks were roaming the streets after the Queensland floods earlier this year? That may well have been reality. This Brisbane golf course is infested with 10-foot sharks, who washed into the water hazards during a previous giant flood.  The sharks aren't really hurting anyone, except the local kids who used to earn some money fishing balls out of the lake, and they're actually kind of an attraction, so the golf course has let them stay. It makes you wonder what future floods might have in store, though. Sharks in the swimming pools? Sharks in the …

This month the BBC is debuting Frozen Planet, a Planet Earth-style nature doc that focuses on the Arctic and Antarctic. This is going to be massive, gorgeous, and probably depressing: The last of its seven episodes is all about the effect of climate change on the stunning vistas and incredible animals you've met in the first six parts. But it's narrated by David Attenborough, whose dulcet tones will comfort you.

Start playing the video above, and after you're suitably grossed out by the close-ups, skip to about 0:45. These are insects called hairy crazy ants -- that is what they’re really called -- and they are terrifying. How do they move that fast? These guys are invading the American South. They are called hairy, because their bellies are hairy. They are called crazy, because they move crazy fast, and also they are crazy with nothing to lose. And they're hard to kill: if one dies, the others swarm the site to attack the danger. This one guy in Texas tried …

See related slideshow As humans spread and sprawl across the landscape, other critters are left up a creek without a paddle -- and sometimes even without a creek. In the natural course of things, plant and animal species do go extinct, but not nearly at the clip we're seeing these days. The rate of extinction has been estimated at 1,000-10,000 times what it would be without marauding Homo sapiens, and we're losing roughly 30,000 species a year, or three an hour. The Center for Biological Diversity is one of the few conservation organizations drawing an explicit link between population and …

This is why we have national parks, people: So there's one place in the country where "share the road" means "stop your damn car so baby bears can have a little tussle."

Dumping buckets of fish guts into the ocean turns out not to be so good for the ecosystems involved. Basically, the more dead fish you put in the water, the fewer live fish can survive there. Off the coast of Alaska, one seafood processor has created "a massive wasteland of fish guts about 50 acres or more … a dead zone." The processor, Seattle-based Trident, now has to pay $30 to 40 million to clean up its mess (plus, stop dumping so many damn fish innards into the sea). That’s the result of a settlement with the EPA, which apparently …

Red-collared lorikeets -- a type of parrot -- show up every year in Australia acting like they've been hitting the fermented fruit juice a little too hard. Locals report symptoms like "falling over" and "difficulty flying" and "running into things" and "act[ing] friendlier than normal," which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever gone to college. (Don’t ask about “difficulty flying.” That was a bad night.) Ok, but less funny -- the "drunken" lorikeets also have respiratory problems and goop coming out of their noses and eyes. In the past decade, more and more birds have shown up with the …