Taylorville Illinois Energy Center, a proposed "clean coal" power plant. Image credit:Illinois Times Southern Illinois has vast, easily accessible coal reserves. That coal may be sulfurous and wet and salty; but ,Southern Illinois also has good geologic features for CO2 sequestration, plus Presidential root tendrils are there. These aspects explain, in a last-year kind of way, why Obama's Energy Department supports this $3.5 billion fantasy. (Several major conceptual design changes have been made since the Bush Ad...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo via OneThirtyBPM.com Musician Paul McCartney isn't shy about taking a stand for animal rights -- the vegetarian superstar has talked about his journey to a meat-free diet and supported Meatless Mondays -- and now he's speaking up for another group: the monkeys that NASA uses to predict how space travel will affect humans. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

photo: Graham Racher via flickr Go chimps, go! An interesting new paper in the journal Primates documents how a group of chimpanzees in Bossou, Guinea have been successfully deactivating snares set by human bushmeat hunters. Though not always successful, the scienti...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo credit: on_ovington + Baby formula could contain unsettling amounts of aluminum&emdash;more than 40 times the amount found in breast milk, according to one recent study. + Another scary side-effect of tainted baby formula: Breasts in female infants. + 85 percent of so-called kid-friendly drinks and snacks could contain Read the full story on TreeHugger

photo: Mr. T in DC via flickr A bit of a sustainable seafood smackdown is ongoing: In a new opinion piece in the journal Nature scientists from the University of British Columbia, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and other institutions have called out the Marine Stewardship Council for not doing a good job at marine stewardship. As is to be expected, MSC strongly disagrees. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger