When you think “prison,” you don’t usually think “idyllic bower of nature’s most rare and beautiful specimens.” But at the Washington State Department of Corrections, inmates can skip the license-plate making and spend their days cultivating endangered local animals, insects, and plants. Participants in the Sustainable Prisons Project raise Oregon spotted frogs, Taylor's checkerspot butterflies, native prairie plants, local birds, and bees. Its organizers are now looking to expand the project more widely.

The project, a partnership between the Department of Corrections and Evergreen State College, began in 2004, when inmates were recruited to help research moss farming -- they helped find an easily cultivated species that could serve as a replacement for moss unsustainably harvested from forests.

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have started to rise again.

After May 5, Japan will be without nuclear power, at least until two idled reactors are started back up.

New forecasting technology means fewer people die in extreme weather.

How big was my raise? Thiiiiiis big.

How big was your raise last year? John Watson, the CEO of Chevron, got a 52 percent bump in his compensation. That's a nice chunk of change for anyone, and in Watson's case, it brought his total yearly take up to about $25 million.

Which is nothing to complain about, unless Watson is comparing his raise to the raise of his rival giganto oil company. In that case, he might be feeling a little bit short-changed.

Here is an amazing example of humans piggybacking on a natural phenomenon to create an incredibly clever system: crab-based computing.

A crab-based computer starts with swarms of crabs. These swarms include hundreds of thousands of crabs that, individually, run every which way but that, as a group, progress in one direction. Even more incredible -- when two swarms collide, they merge and start moving along the vector of their combined velocity (hellloooo, high school physics!).

So what does this have to do with computing? A team of researchers set up a system where crab behavior would provide the basic logic on which computers work. For instance, a computer might need to take inputs X and Y, and output the result “X or Y” -- a 1 if either X or Y is 1, and a 0 otherwise. Crabs can do that:

A team using very high resolution satellite pictures counted twice as many emperor penguins in Antarctica than any previous study had.

President Obama formed a new working group in Washington to coordinate federal oversight of fracking.

Those earthquakes in Oklahoma and Arkansas could be caused not just by fracking wastewater disposal but by fracking itself.

The U.S. government owns 200,000 foreclosed homes. And to keep those empty homes looking spiffy for would-be buyers, the government has to keep up appearances -- including the appearance of the lawn. As a result, we taxpayers are forking over $40 million for lawn-mowing at these uninhabited houses.

We going to have to eat half as much meat as we do now in order to curb climate change.

After Deepwater Horizon, throughout the Gulf "things are just a little bit out of kilter," says the head of NOAA's restoration team.

With 659 certified Energy Star buildings, Los Angeles has the most of any city in the country.

The House just won't give up on trying to force Keystone XL approval through.

Artist Rob Carter is interested in the relationship between the built environment and nature, and his newest exhibition, which opens tomorrow in New York City, features mini replicas of three homesteads -- Charles Darwin's, Henry David Thoreau's, and Sir John Bennet Lawes'. The miniatures live in a garden of dandelions, bush beans, and corn, which over the course of the exhibit will take over the houses:

Viewers are invited to witness as the garden overcomes the estates in Carter’s controlled but fragile ecosystem in three distinct ways: time-based video projections, peepholes cut into the sides of the garden, and from an elevated viewing platform.

The Nebraska legislature passed a bill that'll kickstart planning for the rerouted Keystone XL pipeline.

Turns out a bunch of former NASA employees are also climate skeptics.

Canada's unlikely to meet its 2020 goal for carbon emissions cuts.

Crossroads GPS, Karl Rove's super PAC, is spending $1.7 million in six swing states to attack Obama's energy policy. Here's what Rove wants swing voters to think about Obama:

We're not really sure that it's the best political strategy to remind voters that the Bush administration existed at all, let alone that it passed policies that are still having an impact. But we’ll assume Rove knows what he’s doing. It’s not like Crossroads GPS has ever gotten two Pants On Fire ratings from Politifact or anything.

The ad also says that drilling's gone "down where Obama's in charge." Now, why did that happen? Not because Obama hates oil and gas interests: From an environmentalist's point of view, he's been rather friendly to those industries. Since Crossroads relied on Greenwire for its citation of the 14 percent drop in oil production on federal lands in 2011, we'll go to Greenwire to explain why: