Publication of a landmark government study probing whether diesel engine exhaust causes lung cancer in miners — already 20 years in the making — has been delayed by industry and congressional insistence on seeing study data and documents before the public does.

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A group of 44 U.S. senators, all Republican but one, have signed on to proposed legislation that would authorize the Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL oil pipeline despite the refusal of President Obama to advance the project.

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In the last years of Martin Privot’s life, his family had to start selling his assets to pay for his nursing home costs. “He needed 24-hour care and couldn’t be left alone,” recalls his daughter Toni Footer. “My biggest fear was we would run [through his money] and wouldn’t be able to provide the care that he needed.”

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Nicotine replacement therapy may work fine in clinical trials, but not so much in the real world. That’s according to research published Monday in the journal Tobacco Control.

The study, by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Massachusetts, Boston, tracked 787 adults who had quit smoking.

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Hoping to defuse a three-decade-long feud over whale hunting, three academics are making an audacious proposal: the world should put a price on killing whales, and allow conservationists and whalers alike to bid on the right to take them.

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Gestures make it easier to learn a language, researchers discover

Language classes of the future might come with a physical workout because people learn a new tongue more easily when words are accompanied by movement.

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Oceanographers exploring some of the most remote deep-sea hot springs ever found have discovered what they say is a “riot of life” in a distinct biological zone that no one knew existed. They said the exploration, which occurred more than a mile down in the ocean just north of Antarctica, uncovered the most strikingly unique assemblage of life-forms found in decades, including thousands upon thousands of a species of crab never seen before, as well as new barnacle, anemone, snail and starfish species.

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Spaceship Earth enters 2012 belching smoke, overheating and burning through fuel at a frightening rate. It’s feeling pretty crowded, and the crew is mutinous. No one’s at the helm.

Sure, it’s an antiquated metaphor. It’s also an increasingly apt way to discuss a planet with 7 billion people, a global economy, a World Wide Web, climate change, exotic organisms running amok and all sorts of resource shortages and ecological challenges.

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In a milestone hailed by scientists as a key step toward finding another Earth-like world, astronomers Tuesday announced the discovery of two blazingly hot planets roughly the size of Earth some 950 light years distant.

The discovery “demonstrates for first time that Earth-size planets exist around other stars, and that we can detect them,” said Francois Fressin, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who led the discovery team.

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Survey finds improved search results after Google muffles ‘content farms’

Online search engines are meant to pick out high-quality sites amid the sea of knockoffs that repeat information produced elsewhere, but even they get overwhelmed. As recently as March, for example, the first 10 results from a Google search for “how to organize your desktop” contained nine links to pages churned out by “content farms” — Web sites that publish reams of articles that aim simply to attract clicks and advertising dollars.

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