Dennis Sparling spent more than a year making a 9-foot-tall sculpture of Leonardo Da Vinci. The 70-year-old sculptor dreams of taking it to an institution where he would teach sculpture and other disciplines with a curriculum focused on the life of Da Vinci, a man whose career spanned painting, sculpture, architecture, engineering and other disciplines.

Earlier this month Sparling put his sculpture in a trailer and drove down to Long Island, hoping to interest someone there in this Da Vinci project.

Anti-pipeline activists launched a "fish-in" at the Public Service Board office in Montpelier this afternoon. They want construction of a natural gas pipeline halted while state regulators review a 40 percent increase in the project's cost estimate.

Demonstrators outside the Public Service Board office wore fishing garb and sang protest songs while sitting in a land-bound canoe. One of the protesters was Burlington resident Andy Simon, who is a Vermont Gas ratepayer.

An economist who helped the Obama administration design the Affordable Care Act is coming to Vermont to help Gov. Peter Shumlin develop a proposal for single-payer health care. And his work will help decide which taxes Shumlin will propose using to raise the $2 billion needed to support the new system.

If you had to take a standardized test right now, how do you think you would score? Now imagine that test is in a language you can barely read. Since the English language dominates our educational system, a gap in English language ability is often equated with a gap in intelligence.

We’ll talk to Shawna Shapiro, assistant Professor of Writing & Linguistics at Middlebury College, and Susan Blethen, an ELL teacher at Burlington High School, about the challenges facing English language learners and what some educators are doing to bridge the gap.

The invasive water plant Eurasian watermilfoil has made its way into waterways around Vermont, and is nearly impossible to eradicate. At Dewey's Mills Pond, in Quechee, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, the state of Vermont and the town of Hartford have been working together since 2003 to keep the invasive species at bay. This Saturday, the Hartford Parks & Recreation Department is hosting a volunteer day, to help in the effort.

Summer is a great time to get on the bike. From new technology and gear, to ever-present concerns about safety, on the next Vermont Edition, we get an earful from cyclists who take to paved roads, back roads and mountain trails throughout the state. We talk with Emily Boedecker, executive director of Local Motion, which advocates for bike access and helps people get into the sport of cycling.

On busy summer weekends at the Ben and Jerry's Factory in Waterbury, crowded tours leave every 10 minutes. Tourists from all over the world laugh at the peppy video explaining the origins of the quirky ice cream company and groan at the tour guides' bad cow puns. After the tour of the factory floor, they wander up to the "Flavor Graveyard," where combinations that didn't make the cut are put to rest under the shade of big trees. Each "gravestone" eulogizes the flavor-gone-by.

On Monday, the public got a chance to weigh in on a plan to build a four-story glass and metal tower in Newport that would house bio-medical research and development.

The developers, Bill Stenger and his business partner Ariel Quiros, say the project will create as many as 500 jobs and will not harm the environment. But some Newport residents have some concerns about its impact on public health.

As a resident of Iowa, Jeff Cox has never voted for Bernie Sanders. But he’s hoping to have the chance to soon.

Cox is a longtime Democratic activist, and the point man for a Johnson County steering committee aimed at drafting Sanders for the 2016 presidential contest. And for Cox and other like-minded Iowans, whose early caucuses give them outsized importance when it comes to selecting major party presidential nominees, Vermont’s junior senator offers a progressive foil to the more centrist platform held by the early Democratic favorite.

The deadline for completing a reorganization plan for parts of the Agency of Human Services has been pushed back.

The decision came after an anti-poverty group established by the governor asked for the delay.

The reorganization follows the deaths of two children whose families were being monitored by the Department for Children and Families. 

The deaths prompted a legislative committee to hold public hearings on DCF.