  We use \textit{GALEX} (Galaxy Evolution Explorer) near-UV (NUV) photometry of
a sample of early-type galaxies selected in \textit{SDSS} (Sloan Digital Sky
Survey) to study the UV color-magnitude relation (CMR). $NUV-r$ color is an
excellent tracer of even small amounts ($\sim 1$% mass fraction) of recent
($\la 1$ Gyr) star formation and so the $NUV-r$ CMR allows us to study the
effect of environment on the recent star formation history. We analyze a
volume-limited sample of 839 visually-inspected early-type galaxies in the
redshift range $0.05 < z < 0.10$ brighter than $M_{r}$ of -21.5 with any
possible emission-line or radio-selected AGN removed to avoid contamination. We
find that contamination by AGN candidates and late-type interlopers highly bias
any study of recent star formation in early-type galaxies and that, after
removing those, our lower limit to the fraction of massive early-type galaxies
showing signs of recent star formation is roughly $30 \pm 3%$ This suggests
that residual star formation is common even amongst the present day early-type
galaxy population.
  We find that the fraction of UV-bright early-type galaxies is 25% higher in
low-density environments. However, the density effect is clear only in the
lowest density bin. The blue galaxy fraction for the subsample of the brightest
early-type galaxies however shows a very strong density dependence, in the
sense that the blue galaxy fraction is lower in a higher density region.
