Researchers from the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies took this picture of a shark eating another shark near the Great Barrier Reef. Nature is crazy!

Via the invaluable Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, this video by Marija Jacimovic and Benoit Detalle uses vegetables -- so many, many awesome vegetables -- to illustrate Michael Pollan's Food Rules (the version that expands on "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”).

The anti-Keystone email campaign gathered more than 800,000 messages to Senate leadership. Check out this picture of the messages being delivered.

Internal documents from Heartland Institute, the climate-denying think tank, show funding from sources like Microsoft, Koch Industries (which had reportedly stopped funding the institute), tobacco companies, and other corporations. One "Anonymous Donor" gave more than $1.6 million in 2010 and $979,000 in 2011.

The White House said senior advisers would recommend the president veto the House version of the transportation bill, citing provisions to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and to approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

Maybe Republicans didn't hear that after its completion, the pipeline could create as few as 20 permanent jobs.

In 2004, Paul François, a French farmer, breathed in the vapor of Monsanto's Lasso weedkiller while cleaning out the tank of a crop sprayer. He lost consciousness and later suffered from memory loss and headaches. Monday, a French court found that Monsanto could be held liable for poisoning François.

This week, the Senate is considering a highway bill with a rider attached to it that would approve the Keystone XL pipeline, the tar-sands project that just won't die. Yesterday, 350.org led a charge to send 500,000 emails to the Senate asking elected leaders to "block any efforts to revive the dangerous Keystone XL pipeline." The push started at noon and will end at noon today. The pile of emails hit the 500,000 mark after about seven hours, and this morning was closing in on 700,000.

350.org founder Bill McKibben appeared on The Colbert Report last night to discuss the campaign and explain to Stephen Colbert why his view that "everything we're extracting from the ground is natural" isn't quiiiiite right:

Happy Valentine's Day! Enjoy that chocolate now: it could be harder to find as climate change takes its toll on the cacao tree. Here are some other "green(ish)" ideas for presents to the one you love, be it your sweetie, your kid, your BFF, or your favorite teacher. And here’s Grist’s V-day roundup.

President Obama's 2013 budget increased funding for renewable energy by 29 percent.

In France, a judge found Monsanto guilty of poisoning a farmer who was exposed some of the company's weedkiller.

Hurricanes could tear up offshore wind turbines

After the Fukushima disaster, Japan launched a campaign to cut energy use. Businessmen wore relatively skimpy outfits to the office, turned off lights, abstained from air conditioning. But despite those energy efficiency efforts, carbon emissions still went up after the nuclear plant shut down. Aw hell -- hot dark rooms full of scantily clad people aren’t the future of sustainability?

According to a new report from the Breakthrough Institute (which is generally skeptical of energy efficiency and cool with nuclear power), Japan produced 4 percent more carbon dioxide this November than last, and the overall carbon intensity increased, as this graph shows:

College campuses across the country have been fighting to ban bottled water from campuses, and the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) is fighting back. The trade group put together this pretty inane video, which we recommend you watch for the giggles. (We particularly like the soundtrack’s switch to new age-y happy music the first time a bottled water vending machine makes an appearance.)

The IBWA has two main arguments, laid out with all the intellectual grace of a freshman composition class paper dashed off an hour before it's due.

Trader Joe's signed a Fair Food agreement with Coalition of Immokalee Workers that increased the price the company pays per pound of tomatoes.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu defended the Energy Department's loan guarantee program, after a independent review outlined possible improvements to the program's oversight. The White House is pointing out that the review showed the total program portfolio has less risk than previously thought.

The new Maldives government faces an investigation by the Commonwealth of Nations, an organization of countries once under British rule. Former President Mohamed Nasheed says the new government forced him from office at gunpoint.

This round of La Niña, which has had a hand in the Northeast's warm winter, should have run its course by May.

The Obama administration is expected to propose a birth-control compromise today for Catholic-run institutions that don't want to pay for their employees to avoid pregnancy. New federal rules guarantee free contraception coverage, but a narrow exception already exists for Catholic churches that don't believe in not having babies. The compromise would still allow women to access contraception but would not make objecting employers pay for it directly.

Update: Here's a fact sheet with details about the compromise. The upshot: Religious employers aren't required to pay for birth control, but if they don't cover it, the woman's insurance company has to shoulder the whole cost.

Even with the compromise, the administration's contraception policy ranks pretty high on the list of green initiatives it's undertaken. It's not usually labelled as an environmental policy, but babies use a lot of stuff! And then they grow up and use even more.

That said, hormone-based birth control may be less eco-friendly than plain old condoms (even allowing for the fact that you never see ortho-tricyclen strewn on the ground in parks).