Scientists said Sunday that the Clostridium difficile epidemic from 2002 to 2006 — an outbreak of gastrointestinal illness that spanned hospitals across the globe — was caused by two closely-related strains of the bacterium and not one, as had been previously believed.

Trevor Lawley of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England and coauthors from other institutions sequenced the genomes of C. difficile samples collected between 1985 and 2010, mainly from hospital patients. 

Analyzing the samples, they found the two lineages of the bacterium,which they named FQR1 and...

The Mexican gray wolf—although listed as endangered—has languished in bureaucratic limbo with no plan to recover the species, according to a lawsuit filed Monday by the Center for Biological Diversity.

The case seeks to overturn a 2009 rejection of a scientific petition that would have classified the Mexican wolf as an endangered subspecies of gray wolf. Designating the Mexican wolves in Arizona and New Mexico as a distinct subspecies would require federal authorities to come up with a specific plan to increase the number for the animal.

The animals were reintroduced to the...

Ferrying a load of soybeans from Seattle to China in 2004, the engine of Malaysian freighter Selendang Ayu lost power and the vessel broke in half on rocks off Unalaska Island in the middle of the Alaskan archipelago.

A ferocious Bering Sea storm thwarted rescue efforts, resulting in the loss of six crew members, and the vessel spilled 350,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil. The oozing fuel killed thousands of seabirds, closed local fishing and contaminated miles of shoreline -- all inside the sensitive habitat of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.

On the eight anniversary of the spill,...

It's been exactly 40 years since NASA's last manned lunar mission, Apollo 17, launched from the Kennedy Space Center. This week, the National Research Council released a report that said that the space agency was losing its edge and needed to hone its goals.  (See related items at left for Los Angeles Times coverage.)  But a team of former NASA officials and other backers hope to bring back some of the old Space Age glory with a new commercial space venture, Golden Spike. 

At an announcement in Washington on Thursday, former Apollo flight director Gerry Griffin and former NASA science chief...

It has been decades since the last major breakthrough of a popular, easy-to-use and effective form of birth control. The pill has been available since 1960 and the IUD since 1965. Condoms have been around for centuries, although today’s latex versions are improvements over those fashioned from sheep guts.

But some innovative research is underway in Kim Woodrow’s bioengineering lab at the University of Washington.  She and her students have produced electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers that can quickly dissolve and release drugs to prevent unplanned pregnancy and...

What should the future of our space program be?

The National Research Council had unpleasant medicine for NASA in its just-released report on the vision and direction of the agency.

A panel of 12 independent experts concluded, among other things, that the program lacks clear direction from the White House and Congress about what its goals should be, and that NASA cannot do everything it aims to without more money. More cash is an unlikely prospect in the current economic climate, the panel also said. So the government and the agency have to decide what they want NASA to focus on.

The report...

Energy development on public lands and waters pumped more than $12 billion into federal coffers in 2012, $1 billion more than the previous year, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.

"These revenues reflect significant domestic energy production under President Obama's all-of-the-above energy strategy and provide a vital revenue stream for federal and state governments and American Indian communities," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement.

Money from the extraction of oil, gas and coal from federal land is divvied up several ways, including substantial deposits into...

The Union of Concerned Scientists has figured out how Americans can cut their oil consumption in half within 20 years.

Sound impossible?

Not really, according to scientists and engineers who have done calculations for us non-math majors.

It all boils down to making a few choices to conserve and deploying existing technology or technology already in the pipeline, says the Union of Concerned Scientists, best known in the 1970s and 1980s for warning us off the nuclear arms race.

With the threat of global nuclear annihilation in decline, the nonprofit science advocacy group has retooled to offer...

It's not just the stars that twinkle in the dark of night. The Earth is twinkling too.

NASA has released new, spectacular images of our planet at night, from a satellite orbiting 512 miles above the Earth's surface. The agency stitched some of these images together to create a composite image of the entire planet. They call it the Black Marble.

But the cobweb of city lights that stretch over the planet is just one of the images that the super sensitive light sensor captured.  It also sent back images of Auroras over Antarctica, volcanoes and natural gas flares.

Photos: Dazzling images of the...

A fast-changing Arctic broke records for loss of sea ice and spring snow cover this year, as well as summertime melt of the Greenland ice sheet, federal scientists reported Wednesday.

“The Arctic is an extremely sensitive part of the world,” said Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As it warms, she said, “we see the results with less snow and sea ice, greater ice sheet melt and changing vegetation.”

Speaking at the fall meeting of American Geophysical Unionin San Francisco, Lubchenco and other scientists unveiled the...

When a team of academic researchers blended wildfire data with satellite images from the Great Basin, they confirmed what public land managers and ranchers have seen on the ground for years: cheatgrass, an invasive grass accidentally introduced by settlers more than a century ago, is fueling bigger, more frequent wildfires in that empty stretch of the West.

Comparing regional land cover maps with the dates and boundaries of Great Basin wildfires, the researchers found that fires in areas dominated by cheatgrass consistently ranked as the largest or second largest. Of the 50 biggest fires...