Wednesday Morning Science Supplement

US President Barack Obama, who champions aggressive action against global warming, invited negotiators from 17 other major economies including developing powers such as China and India to meet in Washington.

The talks came as the clock ticks to a December meeting in Copenhagen that is meant to approve a new global treaty to slow down the planet’s rising temperatures.

Gore told the first conference devoted to melting ice, held in the Norwegian town of Tromsoe ahead of the UN meeting in Copenhagen in December, that melting was worse than the worst-case scenarios presented by experts a few years ago.

“This conference is a global wake-up call,” Gore said. “The scientific evidence for action in Copenhagen in December is continuing to build up week by week.”

“It’s quite strange to have these two boats in front of each other,” says Angela Walk, a 37-year-old tourist guide for one of nine Icelandic companies that offers whale-spotting tours off the coast of this island in the middle of the North Atlantic.

Walk, a native of Germany who settled in Iceland 12 years ago, says her company “is against whaling.”

Obama laid out a deck of initiatives in a speech at the National Academy of Sciences, where he vowed to implement what he described as the largest-ever US investment in scientific research and a dramatic reversal of the ideology-driven policies of his predecessor George W. Bush.

The clarion call for the country to regain its position as the world leader in scientific research and innovation came as the Obama administration faced its first major global health crisis with a deadly swine flu outbreak in Mexico and the United States that threatens to burst into a pandemic.

President Barack Obama “and his entire administration are committed to addressing this issue and we will act,” Clinton told delegates from major European countries, China, India, Indonesia and other powers.

“The United States is fully engaged and ready to lead and determined to make up for lost time both at home and abroad,” she told a forum Obama set up to build political momentum for the climate talks in December in Copenhagen.

“The president has laid out ambitious goals for climate policy,” said Michael Levi, climate change expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In addition to measures promoting environmentally-friendly industries contained in Obama’s economic stimulus package, the US Environmental Protection Agency earlier this month declared carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases a health risk, a landmark U-turn that could impact climate change regulation.

Now climate change has laid siege to this natural oasis, dramatically speeding up the erosion of the 270 kilometre-long (168 miles) Atlantic coastline and threatening local communities.

A study published in 2006 by the European LIFE program identified 13 coastal communities as erosion “hotspots”.

“Our teams have managed to confiscate monkeys, crocodiles, young tigers and various types of snakes of different sizes,” Salman Abdulnabi, an official at the ministry of municipalities, told AFP.

The problem reared its head last week when a stray wild cat caused panic by entering a company building in the capital Manama. The cat, a lynx, was later caught.

The Asian Development Bank study focused on Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Those countries are especially vulnerable because they have large coastal populations facing rising sea levels and rely heavily on rice and other agriculture products which could suffer from water shortages as well as floods. Vietnam was found to be the most vulnerable.

“Climate change seriously threatens Southeast Asia’s families, food supplies and financial prosperity,” said Ursula Schaefer-Preuss, the ADB’s vice president for knowledge management and sustainable development. “If Southeast Asian nations delay action on climate change, their economies and people will ultimately suffer.’

The wheezing sounds of her suckling grew louder as a pair of state wildlife officials drew closer to a rock outcropping sheltering the black bear cub and her mother in the gray light of the March morning.

Myron Means, a bear biologist with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, loaded a tranquilizer dart into an air rifle and took aim at the mother, who only stared back as he pulled the trigger.

Now the bird on which the rooster cartoon character was modeled is among 66 types of old-fashioned chickens the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy is trying to save from extinction as factory-raised cross varieties command 90 percent of the market.

“When we can identify something in danger, we need to protect it,” says Barbara Bowman of Sonoma County, an original board member of Slow Food USA who has a dozen of the last 510 Delaware breeding stock chickens in existence. “The old breeds provide really sturdy genetics that we have to guard.”

Lieutenant General Larry James, who heads U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Functional Component Command for Space, said the Air Force was working to respond to an increasingly complex and congested space environment, but many challenges remained.

He said the Air Force was adding dozens of analysts and more computer processors to better track satellites and space junk after a dead Russian military communications satellite and a commercial U.S. satellite owned by Iridium crashed in space on February 10.

The mummies were the first to be found in the sand-covered desert rock surrounding the mud-brick Lahun pyramid, believed to be built by the 12th dynasty pharaoh Senusret II, who ruled 4,000 years ago. The team expects to announce more finds soon.

The site was first excavated more than a century ago.

“As we continue to investigate cases here, I expect that we will see deaths in this country,” said Richard Besser , the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , during a press conference on Tuesday.

Besser’s prediction reflects the growing threat posed by the mysterious swine flu virus and the inability of health officials both here and abroad to contain its spread.

Dark energy is a bit like anti-gravity. Where gravity pulls things together at the more local level, dark energy tugs them apart on the grander scale.

Its existence isn’t proven, but dark energy is many scientists’ best guess to explain the confusing observation that the universe’s expansion is speeding up. Experts still don’t know what’s driving this force, but the quest to learn more about dark energy is one of cosmologists’ top priorities.

This week, the scientists are analyzing the patterns of the new swine flu virus’s spread and trying to predict its next moves. The researchers “should have preliminary findings by the weekend,” team leader Peter Daszak of the Wildlife Trust told LiveScience.

Daszak and his colleagues cautioned in February 2008 that infectious disease-fighting resources are not effectively deployed around the globe and that the U.S. government has not always accurately investigated how flu strains will arrive here.

The reason: Vaccines must be developed from the specific flu strain, tested for safety, sent to manufacturers for mass production, and then distributed around the world. By the time this is done, the first wave of a pandemic flu might already be over, said Iain Stephenson, a doctor in the Infectious Diseases Unit of the Leicester Royal Infirmary in England.

Scientists do not know if the current swine flu outbreak originating in Mexico will become a pandemic. But health officials in the United States and around the world have already taken emergency steps to thwart the virus’ spread out of concern it could go global in a deadlier fashion.