Ian Yarett

As part of a continued effort to improve our transparency, we are providing a deeper dive into scoring.

Newsweek's annual rankings reveal the planet's biggest protectors—and polluters.

As government efforts slow, our annual rankings show which companies are still carrying the eco-mantle. By Ian Yarett.

The Food Safety Modernization Act reflects a growing national concern about bacterial contamination of foods. But while it would go a long way toward dealing with pathogens in our food supply, the bill largely ignores hazardous man-made chemicals.

There are things individuals can do to be green without breaking a sweat. If you happen to be on the fence about whether you can easily be a greener guy or gal, we'd like to respond with a resounding "yes, you can." We offer seven ways to get started.

GoodGuide's mission is to help shoppers pick the greenest shampoo or toothpaste. But is that a business?

The program designed to assess the environmental effects of the BP spill may be skewed by the legal process, say scientists struggling to get funding for independent research.

Children who survived Hurricane Katrina are at increased risk to suffer mental-health issues today. How their plight is reshaping disaster planning.

In Congo, a vicious war is financed in part by the mining of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold—metals that make their way into phones, cameras, and computers.

Despite widespread media reports claiming that 75 percent of the oil from the gulf spill is gone, up to 50 percent—or nearly 2.5 million barrels—of the oil that was released could conceivably still be out there.

More than 100 days after the BP oil-spill disater began, things are finally looking up. But scientists and government officials still have much to learn about the accident and its long-term impact.

For the first time since the accident nearly three months ago, no oil from the Deepwater Horizon well is escaping into the Gulf of Mexico. Officials cautioned that testing is continuing.

In the latest setback in efforts to end the spill, pressure testing of the well was delayed after a hydraulic leak in the new cap prevented BP from fully closing it. The test was originally scheduled to start midday Tuesday but was pushed back to late Wednesday, and will now begin "as soon as we can," the company said.

After days of smooth operations, officials postpone a test to measure pressure within the well, saying they need more time to analyze what different results would mean and to minimize risk.

Now that the sealing cap has been installed, all eyes turn to the well-integrity test, which BP is starting today. The test will involve completely "shutting in" the well so the full pressure of the oil gusher can be measured, giving the scientists and engineers a read on the structural stability of the piping that lines the 13,000-foot-long well.

After days of preparation, BP's effort to replace the loose-fitting cap that has been collecting oil for the last few weeks with a sealing cap appears to have gone successfully.

Determining an oil spill's toll on wildlife is never an easy feat—and the challenging conditions of the current gulf spill make it all the more complicated. While most of the animals collected alive have been visibly covered in oil, the majority of those that have been found dead have had no oil visible on their bodies, making the cause of death difficult to ascertain.

The massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is already making history. The well has been hemorrhaging oil for more than two months and is without a doubt the largest offshore spill the U.S. has ever faced. Here's a numerical look at the magnitude of the disaster and the enormous response that has been staged.

The 'Avatar' director may be an expert in undersea robotics, but that's not the kind of knowledge that's needed to clean up the gulf.

Due to stalled progress and mixed messages, the results of BP's ongoing efforts to carry out a "top kill" to stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are increasingly unclear.

By law, BP was required to plan for the worst-case scenario if it wanted to drill the gulf. But the report that it filed—and that the government approved—is alarmingly short on solutions.

The deep water of the ocean is the largest habitat on earth but it's also the least understood, making the effects of this deep-sea spill without precedent. As a result, scientists say, the impacts of this spill are likely to go far beyond oiled birds and dead sea turtles.

Today, the EPA directed BP to choose a less-toxic (but equally effective) dispersant for use in combating both the oil slick on the surface and the oil plume gushing from the broken riser on the sea floor.

Kevin Costner has a machine that he says could help clean up the massive oil slick from the ongoing spill in the gulf. Developed with the help of his scientist brother, Dan Costner, the device uses centrifugal force to separate oil from water.

Deep beneath the gulf, robots are the key to stopping the oil spill.

Yesterday, BP reported that it had successfully inserted a specially designed tube into the leaking riser pipe and had begun drawing some of the leaking oil and gas through a mile-long pipe up to a tanker on the surface.

BP's diagram of the riser insertion tube plan for containing the leaking oil. After reevaluating its options to contain the oil gushing from the Deepwater Horizon well, BP is abandoning—at least for now—plans to use to the "top hat" containment dome to curtail the spill.

We still don't know exactly how much oil has been spilled into the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, because there is no way to directly measure the flow.

Methane hydrate threatens more than the oil-spill cleanup.

The failure of BP's first containment dome has Gulf Coast residents despondent and BP engineers scrambling. Fortunately, officials from the beleaguered oil company have several other plans in the works to contain and ultimately stop the oil flow.