Wednesday Morning Science Supplement

The discoveries were announced Wednesday by Washington D.C.-based Conservation International, which spent the past several months analyzing more than 600 animal species the group found during its expedition to the South Pacific island nation in July and August.

Of the animals discovered, 50 spider species, three frogs and a gecko appear to have never been described in scientific literature before, the conservation group said. The new frogs include a tiny brown animal with a sharp chirp, a bug-eyed bright green tree frog and another frog with a loud ringing call. One of the jumping spiders is shiny and pale green, while another is furry and brown.

“You just cannot figure these animals out,” Ryan says. “They’re not predictable.”

To help science try to solve that riddle and others, Ryan and several other lobstermen have allowed the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration to tag their traps with devices that measure temperature and currents.

They’re concerned about how the milder winter freeze may affect the environment. But they’re also trying to come to terms with a contradiction – the same climate factors that might keep lake ice from freezing might make freezing more likely if lake levels drop due to evaporation.

Scientists at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich., say global climate change can be at odds with regional climate patterns. Accurately measuring ice cover across a lake system that spans 94,000 square miles in two countries is no small task, they say.

Politicians and the public, business and industry will have to weigh in along the way, but for now a proposed finding by the EPA that global warming is a threat to public health and welfare is under White House review.

The threat declaration would be the first step to regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and could have broad economic and environmental ramifications. It also would probably spur action by Congress to address climate change more broadly.

The volcano has been relatively quiet since, but that is not expected to continue, said Stephanie Prejean, a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. The last time Redoubt erupted was in 1989, when there were more than 20 explosions as magma pushed to the surface and formed domes that later collapsed and sent ash plumes into the air.

“This is very typical for volcanoes of this type,” Prejean said. “These domes ooze out of the earth. They are very thick, like toothpaste.”

Two hundred years after his birth, academics have uncovered new details of his comfortable existence at the University of Cambridge before he embarked on the grueling five-year voyage that would transform science’s view of the world.

Six leather-bound ledgers unearthed in the university archives reveal how he lived in the most expensive rooms available to a student of his rank from 1828 to 1831.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, in a 52-page ruling, also ordered the FDA to allow 17-year-olds to buy the drug, called Plan B, without a prescription.

“The FDA repeatedly and unreasonably delayed issuing a decision on Plan B for suspect reasons,” the court said.

The African Center of Meteorological Application for Development (ACMAD), funded by the United Nations and based in Niger, works with forecasting agencies in 53 countries.

“While large-scale disasters like those in Asia, Ghana and Togo in 2007 get more media and donor attention, 800,000 people have been affected by small-scale floods in West and Central Africa in the last year,” said Youcef Ait-Chellouche, disaster management coordinator for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies for West and Central Africa.

The National Cancer Institute study is one of the largest to look at the highly controversial and emotive issue of whether eating meat is indeed bad for health.

Rashmi Sinha and colleagues looked at the records of more than 500,000 people aged 50 to 71 who filled out questionnaires on their diet and other health habits.

In its latest Global Tuberculosis Control report, released on Tuesday, the United Nations agency also doubled its estimate of how many HIV-infected people catch and die from tuberculosis, and warned especially deadly strains are continuing to spread in all corners of the world.

Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO’s Stop TB department, said that because tuberculosis bacteria thrive in stagnant air, “simply opening the doors” can reduce the chances that patients, inmates and others will become infected with the disease that killed about 1.8 million people in 2007.

Bob Stallman, president of the 6 million-member American Farm Bureau Federation, said in a letter to Congress that its members “carefully, judiciously and according to label instructions” use antibiotics to treat, prevent and control disease in animals.

“Antibiotic use in animals does not pose a serious public health threat,” said Stallman, who urged lawmakers to oppose the bill. “Restricting access to these important tools will jeopardize animal health and compromise our ability to contribute to public health through food safety” he added.

The findings from the long-running study counter fears that relying on just one embryo could drive up treatment costs and reduce a woman’s chances of giving birth to a full-term baby, the researchers said in the journal Human Reproduction.

“At a time when there is an intense debate in many countries about how to reduce multiple pregnancy rates and provide affordable fertility treatment, policy makers should be made aware of our results,” said Hannu Martikainen of the University of Oulu in Finland, who led the study.

First it had to be taken out of service and dismantled because of technical problems. And now one of the main investors in the project, which had a start-up cost of nine million euros (12.3 million dollars), has gone bankrupt.

The structure, five kilometres (three miles) out to sea off Povoa do Varzim in northern Portugal, was put into service officially in September by Economy Minister Manual Pinho after three years of development.

The survivors were among a pod of about 80 long-finned pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins that stranded in Hamelin Bay, south of the city of Perth, on Monday.

About 70 volunteers worked through the night to try to keep the remaining 17 animals alive, said conservation department spokeswoman Leanne O’Rourke, adding that despite efforts, some of the creatures had died.

Rescuers used trucks and cranes fitted with giant slings to move 11 long-finned pilot whales by road to sheltered waters for release, after they beached with about 80 others on Monday at Hamelin Bay, south of Perth city.

One of those moved was euthanased overnight after straggling in poor health near to shore, and an aerial patrol spotted six others again stranded near the city of Augusta early Wednesday.

Rescuers used trucks and cranes fitted with giant slings to move 11 long-finned pilot whales by road to sheltered waters for release, after they beached with about 80 others on Monday at Hamelin Bay, south of Perth city.

One of those moved was put to death by specialists after straggling in poor health near to shore, and an aerial patrol spotted nine others again stranded along an impassable coastal area Wednesday.

But some countries criticised the cornerstone outcome of the fifth World Water Forum as flawed while activists dismissed the event itself as a “trade show.”

The declaration, coinciding with World Water Day, was issued at the end of a three-day ministerial meeting, climaxing the biggest-ever conference on the planet’s freshwater crisis.

While Europe has managed to drastically cut some, but not all, of the most noxious pollutants over the past 20 years, emerging nations experienced the opposite trend with their fast economic growth, scientists at the UN’s meteorological agency said.

Their comments came ahead of World Meteorological Day on Monday, which this year has the theme “The Air We Breathe”.

As of 2010, the new buses are due to start plying the streets of the Norwegian capital.

“It’s a win-win situation: It’s carbon neutral, it hardly pollutes the environment, it’s less noisy and its endlessly renewable,” says Ole Jakob Johansen, one of the people in charge of the project at Oslo city hall.

In the drive to stop the site falling into ruin and preserve the memory of the 1.1 million overwhelmingly Jewish victims who died here during World War II, they face tall odds.

“This is our last chance,” warned Piotr Cywinski, director of the state-run museum.

A chunk of stimulus cash aimed at promoting a “smart grid” designed to foster renewable energy generation and let people and utilities better manage electricity use has IBM in alliances with a growing host of startups.

“Smart grid was starting to get hotter, but post-stimulus it is dead center at IBM and in the venture community we deal with,” said Drew Clark, director of strategy at IBM’s venture capital group.

The Canadian government announced a total allowable catch this year of 338,000 harp, hooded and grey seals, out of herds of more than 6.4 million.

The cull began as usual in the Magdalen Islands region of the Saint Lawrence Gulf and is expected to later expand northward to the east coast of Newfoundland province.

Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette is to present a motion to Canada’s parliament by April 1, when EU lawmakers are to vote on a ban, according to her office.

She told AFP sealing nations Russia, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland have “agreed in principle” to support her proposal.

The experiment involved “fertilising” a 300-square-kilometre (115-sqare-mile) area of ocean inside the core of an eddy — an immense rotating column of water — with six tonnes of dissolved iron.

As expected, this stimulated growth of tiny planktonic algae or phytoplankton, which it was hoped would take out of the atmosphere carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas blamed for climate change, and absorb it.

NASA and Microsoft will jointly develop a system to make high-resolution images and scientific data from Mars, the moon and elsewhere in the cosmos available for people to “explore” online at worldwidetelescope.org.

“Making NASA?s scientific and astronomical data more accessible to the public is a high priority for NASA,” said the US space agency’s science mission directorate associate administrator Ed Weiler.

The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions.

“Our finding is very significant,” said analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.

India’s chief climate negotiator, Shyam Saran, was in Washington for talks with the new administration of US President Barack Obama, whom he praised for putting a new emphasis on halting the warming of the planet.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu — hoping to ease concerns that climate action would worsen the US recession — has suggested slapping a tariff on imports from nations that do not require emissions cuts to “level the playing field.”

“My expectation is that the energy committees or other relevant committees in both the House and the Senate are going to be moving forward a strong energy package,” Obama said during a prime time news conference, his second since taking office.

“It will be authorized. We will get it done, and I will sign it,” Obama added.

China wants to become a “low-carbon society,” but can’t say when that will be achieved. And it doesn’t want to be held accountable for emissions it produces to make goods for export, said Li Gao , the director of China’s climate change office.

Li described China’s actions and plans on climate while the head of China’s negotiating team met with his American counterpart at the State Department . The meeting was part of the preparations for global negotiations on an agreement to reduce emissions in Copenhagen, Denmark , in December.

“This might mean that we are fundamentally wrong about the evolution of massive stars, and that theories need revising,” said Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

According to theory, the doomed star, about 100 times our sun’s mass, was not mature enough to have evolved a massive iron core of nuclear fusion ash, considered a prerequisite for a core implosion that triggers the sort of supernova blast that was seen.

Mission Control detected a lower than expected liquid flow into a urine processor as they attempted to recycle a batch of astronaut urine into pure drinking water in a test. The unexpected glitch initially forced astronauts to call off the attempt.

“This is a head-scratcher,” station commander Michael Fincke radioed down to Mission Control. “We’ll stand by to help unscratch our heads.”

Long-time Mars researcher Chris McKay of NASA’s Ames Research Center thinks it’s time to recast the exploration agenda for the red planet.

“The NASA Mars program is at a turning point,” McKay argues in the April edition of The Mars Quarterly, a Mars Society newsletter. A trio of factors are converging that should prompt a reset of the space agency’s pinball wizard of a red planet exploration program, he writes:

Individuals can go online to rank by preference the nine finalist names submitted by U.S. students in primary and secondary school, including Adventure, Amelia, Curiosity, Journey, Perception, Pursuit, Sunrise, Vision and Wonder. The naming poll will remain open from March 23-29.

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The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission was originally slated to land on the red planet this year, but has been delayed until 2011. The rover carries a complex suite of instruments that can examine the Martian surface for traces of life, with onboard chemistry labs and a laser that can zap rocks to sample their composition.

The eponymous host of “The Colbert Report” swept in as a dark-horse challenger after urging viewers to enter his name through a write-in option. When voting ended March 20, “Colbert” had amassed more than 230,000 votes to beat out second-place name “Serenity” by more than 40,000 votes.

“Come on, Serenity?” Colbert said on his March 10 show. “That’s not a space module, that’s a Glade plug-in.”

Scientists sent Salmonella bacteria to the International Space Station aboard two space shuttle missions in September 2006 and March 2008. The researchers found that when the bacteria were cultured in the microgravity environment of orbit, they became more virulent than those on Earth. The findings showed that the conditions in which the bacteria grows affect how dangerous it will become.

“This research opens up new areas for investigations that may improve food treatment, develop new therapies and vaccines to combat food poisoning in humans here on Earth, and protect astronauts on orbit from infectious disease,” said Julie Robinson, program scientist for the International Space Station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

They’ll test embryos discarded from in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments to find those with embryonic stem cells that will make O-negative blood, which is the one type that can be transfused into anyone without being rejected.

An adult has about 4-6 liters of blood (which transports oxygen through the body), white blood cells to fight infection, and platelets that clot to heal wounds. Many patients died of transfusions before 1901, when the Austrian Karl Landsteiner discovered the human blood types. Landsteiner found that antibodies against donor blood can cause deadly clumping.

Triceratops were ceratopsids, herbivorous dinosaurs that lived until the the very end of the Cretaceous Period. They have been found in enormous bone beds of multiple individuals, but all known Triceratops fossils up to now have been solitary individuals.

In fact, Triceratops is one of the best-known of all dinosaurs, with more than 50 total specimens discovered, so it looked pretty certain that they were anti-social and avoided hanging out with their own kind.

The world may be able to get a whiff of that ancient royal scent when researchers complete their investigation into the perfume worn by Hatshepsut, the powerful pharaoh-queen who ruled over ancient Egypt for 20 years beginning around 1479 B.C.

Analyzing a metal jar belonging to the famous queen , the team from the Bonn University Egyptian Museum in Germany recently found residue thought to be leftovers from Hatshepsut’s own perfume. Their next step will be attempting to “reconstruct” the scent, which was likely made from pricey incense imported from present-day Somalia.

Deep-sea corals, which are threatened by climate change and pollution like shallow water corals are, grow on seamounts (mountains rising from the seafloor that don’t reach the ocean’s surface) and continental margins at depths of about 1,000 to 10,000 feet (300 to 3,000 meters).

These corals play host to many other marine organisms, and are hotspots of ocean biodiversity. The largest coral reef system in the world is the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, Australia. Big reefs are also found in the Red Sea, along the coast of Mexico and Belize, the Bahamas and the Maldives.