The government and the House of Representatives heralded a new era of greater access to university education with the passage on Friday of the bill on higher education, but students across the country greeted the new legislation with protests.

The Rio+20 Summit produced a largely meaningless document that failed to address the daunting environmental challenges the world faces.

When Silent Spring was published in 1962, author Rachel Carson was subjected to vicious personal assaults that had nothing do with the science or the merits of pesticide use. Those attacks find a troubling parallel today in the campaigns against climate scientists who point to evidence of a rapidly warming world.

The North Carolina Senate has approved legislation that would prohibit the state from considering projected sea level increases in its coastal management strategy. But a scientist involved in the debate argues that ignoring these projections will wind up costing North Carolina — and the rest of the U.S. — far more.

A new higher education ranking focuses on evaluating quality by countries as a whole, rather than specific academic institutions. Here are some of the findings:

Climate scientist Michael Mann, who has faced years of attacks from climate-change skeptics, explains why he believes bad-faith assaults on science have no place in a functioning democracy and why the truth about global warming will inevitably gain wide acceptance.