Wednesday Morning Science Supplement

The $280 million mission was designed to answer one of the biggest question marks of global warming: What happens to the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide spewed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas? How much of it is sucked up and stored by plants, soil and oceans and how much is left to trap heat on Earth, worsening global warming?

“It’s definitely a setback. We were already well behind,” said Neal Lane, science adviser during former President Bill Clinton’s administration. “The program was weak and now it’s really weak.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that the risk of increased severe weather would rise with a global average temperature increase of between 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit and 3.6 degrees above 1990 levels. The National Climatic Data Center currently reports that global temperatures have risen 0.22 degree since 1990.

Now, researchers report that “increases in drought, heat waves and floods are projected in many regions and would have adverse impacts, including increased water stress, wildfire frequency and flood risks starting at less than (1.8 degrees) of additional warming above 1990 levels.”

Representatives from more than a dozen nations, including the U.S., China, Britain and Russia, were to rendezvous at a Norwegian research station with American and Norwegian scientists coming in on the last leg of a 1,400-mile (2,300-kilometer), two-month trek over the ice from the South Pole.

The visitors will gain “hands-on experience of the colossal magnitude of the Antarctic continent and its role in global climate change,” said the mission’s organizer, Norway’s Environment Ministry.

In October 2003, China became the third country to put a man in space with its own rocket, after the former Soviet Union and the United States. And the government has made expanding the nation’s presence in space, and eventually reaching the moon, a cornerstone of its bid to rise as a technological power.

But the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense has decided contributions from the country’s universities, institutes and other “qualified” institutions are needed for crucial parts of the lunar effort, which aims to put an unmanned buggy on the moon by 2012, the Guangming Daily reported.

Researchers at Mexico’s Crocodile Museum in Chiapas reported in a biology newsletter they had some success with the method, using it to permanently relocate 20 of the reptiles since 2004.

“We said, ‘Hey, we might as well give this a try,” Lindsey Hord, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s crocodile response coordinator, said on Tuesday.

The statue, about life-size at 149 cm (five feet) tall, was found north of the smallest of Giza’s three main pyramids, the tomb of the fourth dynasty Pharaoh Mycerinus, who ruled in the 26th century BC, the ministry said in a statement.

The man was wearing a shoulder-length wig and was seated in a simple chair, his right hand clenched on his knee and holding an object. His left hand was resting on his thigh.

It took four years for two mathematicians from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of California, Davis, to develop the computer model’s theory and perform the computations.

“Even though we’ve artfully stripped down the model over several years so that it’s as simple and efficient as possible, it still takes us a day to grow one of these things,” Wisconsin researcher David Griffeath said in a statement.

They made motor neurons out of induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells — a type of cell made from ordinary skin cells that resembles human embryonic stem cells.

Scientists hope that iPS cells might offer a substitute for embryonic stem cells and a short-cut to tailored medical therapy for a range of diseases.

A Danish team found that the odds of epilepsy more than doubled after mild brain injury or skull fracture and was seven times more likely in patients with serious brain injury.

The risk remained even 10 years on, more so in people older than 15, Jakob Christensen and colleagues at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark and colleagues wrote in the journal Lancet.

The antibodies — immune system proteins that attach to invaders such as viruses — also might be used to protect front-line workers and others at high risk in case a pandemic of flu broke out, the researchers said.

In tests on mice the viruses neutralized several types of influenza A viruses, including the H5N1 avian influenza virus, the researchers reported in Sunday’s issue of the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

“To truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy,” Obama told lawmakers in his maiden speech to Congress.

“So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.”

Efforts to toughen environment laws have not done enough to fix the widespread problems for China’s air, lakes and rivers, Zhang Lijun said on Tuesday, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

“The general situation of environmental pollution does not allow us to be optimistic,” Zhang was quoted telling a national meeting on pollution control in Shanghai.

The scheme, to start as early as the fiscal year beginning in April, aims to promote solar power as part of efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions that drive global warming, an industry ministry official said.

“Japan has already led solar power technology in the world,” the official told AFP. “With the scheme, we would like to firmly secure the lead.”

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) began distributing three million dollars of emergency food supplies to some 120,000 people in the southeastern tribal area bordering India and Myanmar last May, after the rat population exploded.

The rats — some weighing as much as 1.5 kilogrammes (3.3 pounds) — feed on bamboo forests in the hilly region.

The US high court heard petitions in two separate, but similar cases: Burlington Northern v. United States and Shell Oil v. United States.

In the Shell Oil case, the US government is trying to recover the cost of cleaning up a polluted California site, where Brown & Bryant Inc. stored pesticides until an environmental investigation led to its bankruptcy in 1988.

Published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study updated a 2001 assessment by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change that looked at temperature changes and the risks they pose.

“Today, we have to assume that the risks of negative impacts of climate change on humans and nature are larger than just a few years ago,” said Hans-Martin Fussel, one of the authors of the report.

The paper, by scientists from Mexico, the United States and the Netherlands, backs a 2001 probe that sparked a row over the safety of genetically-modified (GM) crops.

Green activists say GM crops are a potential hazard, arguing that their genes could spread to related plants through cross-pollination.

The two officials of the Biaoxin Chemical Company were arrested on charges of causing large-scale environmental pollution that forced water supplies for large parts of Yancheng city to be cut off, Xinhua news agency reported.

The plant has also been ordered closed, it said.

Sanctions that began coming into effect in December include torching vehicles carrying charcoal and arresting people transporting the product, law-and-order officials say.

The measures have sparked an outcry among the poorest residents of this desolate west African country, who claim they cannot afford to buy gas to cook their daily meals.

“The lynx has no natural enemy except man,” said Georgi Ivanov, an ecologist working on a project to monitor lynx numbers in western Macedonia’s Galicica National Park, where 30 such cameras have been set up.

Poaching is one of the biggest threats to the survival of this Balkan subspecies of the European lynx, the largest wild cat found on the continent.

Part trade fair and part family day out, the week-long jamboree is expected to draw half-a-million visitors to an exhibition centre in Paris and allow city dwellers to reconnect with French farming traditions.

It is also a highly political event, an annual opportunity for a string of Paris-based politicians to have themselves photographed with one of the 650 prize cattle, 550 sheep and 140 horses on show.

David Archer , a leading climate researcher who teaches at the University of Chicago , has written a new book that looks at carbon dioxide’s “long tail” and what it means for changes on Earth in the future.

If the world continues its heavy use of coal over the next couple of hundred years until it’s essentially used up, it would take several centuries more for the oceans to absorb about three-quarters of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. In those centuries, there would be a “climate storm” that Archer says would be significantly worse than the forecast from now to 2100.

The handy cleaning occurred earlier this month and was discovered by engineers scanning data from Spirit’s power subsystem.

“We will be able to use this energy to do significantly more driving,” said Colette Lohr, a rover mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “Our drives have been averaging about 50 minutes, and energy has usually been the limiting factor. We may be able to increase that to drives of an hour and a half.”

The dancing lights have appeared above most thunderstorms throughout history, but researchers did not start studying them until one accidentally recorded a sighting on camera in 1989.

“Lightning from the thunderstorm excites the electric field above, producing a flash of light called a sprite,” said Colin Price, a geophysicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. “We now understand that only a specific type of lightning is the trigger that initiates sprites aloft.”

Cosmic inflation theory proposes that the early universe passed through a phase of exponential expansion, ballooning almost instantaneously from less than the size of an atom to about golf-ball size.

The theory is widely accepted. It’s tied up with the big bang theory of how the universe started and predicts the existence of gravity waves, as well as fluctuations in the density and temperature of radiation left over from the big bang (called the cosmic microwave background, or CMB) and the mass density of the universe. However, unlike CMB and mass density observations, gravity waves have remained elusive.

Peculiar geological formations are supporting floating plumes and purple mats of microbes dwelling in enclaves of the Great Lake, researchers report. The odd biology is more akin to what is found in some of Earth’s most extreme environments.

The mats are located about 66 feet (20 meters) below the surface of Lake Huron – the third largest of North America’s Great Lakes – where researchers have found sinkholes made by water dissolving parts of an ancient underlying seabed.

Now two were spotted in exceedingly rare and unrelated events this month.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department caught and collared a wild jaguar in Arizona for the first time, officials said Thursday. While a handful of the big cats have been photographed by automatic cameras in recent years, the satellite tracking collar will now help biologists learn more about this animal’s range.

The first phase began more than 4.55 billion years ago, as the solar system started developing. Chemical elements came together, forming about 250 simple minerals that in turn coalesced into planets. On Earth, the second phase stretched from 4.55 billion to 2.5 billion years ago, starting with the violent collision that formed the Moon. Earth’s temperature and pressure varied wildly; plate tectonics began churning the planet’s surface; and volatiles appeared, such as water and carbon dioxide, helping to redistribute the elements. Those changes enabled the evolution of some 1,250 new minerals.

Finally, during the past 2.5 billion years, biological processes – particularly photosynthesis – have profoundly affected mineral composition by oxygenating the atmosphere and thus promoting oxidation of ores. Malachite, turquoise, and nearly 3,000 other minerals could occur only on a living planet, Hazen says.

Now scientists say the eyes rotate, allowing the barreleye to see directly forward or look upward through its transparent head.

The barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) is adapted for life in a pitch-black environment of the deep sea, where sunlight does not reach. They use their ultra-sensitive tubular eyes to search for the faint silhouettes of prey overhead.

The bizarre new species, Histiophryne psychedelica, made a brief splash a year ago when sport divers about 30 feet offshore of Ambon Island, Indonesia, photographed a shallow-water fish not seen before in 20 years of diving there.

Ichthyologist Ted Pietsch of the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture received pictures of the fish and guessed it belonged to the Histiophryne genus. Now he has confirmed this using genetic and morphological data, and fully described the freaky fish as a new species.