Wednesday Morning Science Supplement

The controversy over the sharing of the mighty rivers at the root of Iraq’s ancient name of Mesopotamia — meaning “between the rivers” in Greek — is almost as old as the country itself.

But for Baghdad, the current shortage demands an urgent response from Turkey.

“For the first time in history, we have set in motion a national policy aimed at both increasing gas mileage and decreasing greenhouse gas pollution for all new trucks and cars sold in the United States,” Obama said Tuesday.

The president gathered 10 auto industry chiefs, from crippled US firms to foreign giants, plus union bosses and environmentalists, to celebrate the deal forged by his administration in secret talks over the past few weeks.

“Gulf countries have so far been less exposed to disasters but rising sea levels threaten Bahrain, Egypt and Djibouti. Many other Arab countries are stricken by earthquakes and drought,” Ban said in Bahrain.

“As a result of global climate change, weather-related hazards are on the rise and we must act decisively,” the UN secretary general said, urging governments to do more to reduce the risks, which affects most the poor.

The Pacific Heron — carrying a British police team to head off possible hijackers on its secretive two-month voyage — delivered a load of mixed-oxide or MOX fuel, a blend of plutonium and reprocessed uranium.

Several dozen anti-nuclear activists and concerned residents rallied at a pier of the Omaezaki fishing port as the ship docked under heavy police guard and cranes unloaded metal containers of the nuclear fuel.

Fueled by a passion for the large birds, the 57-year-old has repeated this ritual each morning for the past two decades at his property near the town of Valderrobres in the mountains of Aragon in eastern Spain.

Each day, “Vultureman”, as he calls himself, feeds the predators between 100 and 200 rabbits not fit for human consumption that he gets for free at a local slaughterhouse.

Now, the city’s health commissioner will be taking his crusade against unhealthy living national as the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

President Barack Obama announced Friday that he has picked the 48-year-old Frieden to lead the public health agency, where he will be faced with some immediate decisions on how to deal with the swine flu outbreak, including whether to produce a vaccine. Frieden also may play a role in health care reform.

The spending represents a first step toward a multiyear campaign to repair decades of damage to the battered ecosystem. It also seeks to ward off new threats by preventing exotic species invasions and cutting down on erosion and runoff.

Obama’s 2010 budget released in February requested the $475 million for a Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, focusing on the region’s most pressing environmental problems. When added to existing programs such as sewer system upgrades, it would push annual federal spending on the lakes past $1 billion.

“We are seeking the origins of the universe,” said Jean-Yves Le Gall, chairman and CEO of French satellite launcher Arianespace, which on Thursday launched the Herschel space telescope and a companion spacecraft from French Guiana.

The Herschel space telescope, the largest ever launched, will observe chunks of ice and dust left over from the formation of planets, playing a “complementary” role to the versatile Hubble, said Andreas Diekmann, director of the European Space Agency’s Washington office.

The eagles, perhaps finding less fish to eat, are flying to Maine’s remote rocky islands where they’ve been raiding the only known nesting colonies of great cormorants in the U.S. Snatching waddling chicks from the ground and driving adults from their nests, the eagles are causing the numbers of the glossy black birds to decline from more than 250 pairs to 80 pairs since 1992.

“They’re like thugs. They’re like gang members. They go to these offshore islands where all these seabirds are and the birds are easy picking,” said Brad Allen, a wildlife biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. “These young eagles are harassing the bejesus out of all the birds, and the great cormorants have been taking it on the chin.”

The endangered whales, possibly the largest animals ever to live on Earth, have yet to recover from the worldwide slaughter that eliminated 99 percent of their number, according to the American Cetacean Society. The hunting peaked in 1931 with more than 29,000 animals killed in one season.

The animals used to cruise from Mexico and Southern California to Alaska, but they had mostly vanished from Alaskan waters.

“It’s showtime for us now,” said program scientist Eric Smith.

Hubble – considered to be at its prime following five days of repairs and upgrades – was gently dropped overboard by the shuttle Atlantis astronauts, the last humans to see the 19-year-old observatory up close.

Experts praised the discovery for the level of detail it provided but said it was far from a breakthrough that would solve the puzzles of early evolution.

About the size of a small cat, the animal has four legs and a long tail. Nobody is claiming that it’s a direct ancestor of monkeys and humans, but it provides a good indication of what a long-ago ancestor may have looked like, researchers said at a news conference.

The bugs – reddish brown, flat and about the size of a grain of rice – suck human blood. They resist many pesticides and spread quickly in certain mattress-heavy buildings, such as hotels, dormitories and apartment complexes.

Two shelters have closed temporarily in Charlotte, N.C. , because of bedbugs, a Yahoo chat group dedicates itself to sufferers and countless bedbug blogs provide forums for news, tips and commiseration. State inspectors say that more emphasis may be needed to tackle the creatures.

Dismissing the vote as “bitter obstructionism,” Salazar said he wasn’t about to second-guess his decision on the Utah leases. “I have no regrets,” he told the subcommittee last week.

In the nearly four months since taking office, the Obama administration has moved quickly, relentlessly and without apology to roll back the natural resource and public lands policies of its predecessor. Though they have yet to lay out their own vision in detail, Salazar and other administration officials have left no doubt that they consider the Bush approach misguided and unfairly weighted toward timber, mining, oil and other interests.

About 11,000 years ago, more than 130 species, including most large mammals such as the woolly mammoth, saber-tooth cat and a 5-ton ground sloth, suddenly vanished from North America .

Scientists are still debating the reasons, but two leading suspects are excessive hunting by humans who’d newly arrived from the Old World and devastating human-borne diseases.

Atlantis spacewalkers John Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel spent 6 1/2 hours working on Hubble on Saturday to revive the observatory’s broken Advanced Camera for Surveys and install a powerful new spectrograph. It was the third of five spacewalks planned for their 11-day mission to overhaul Hubble for the last time.

NASA spokesperson Josh Byerly said engineers were unable to revive the camera’s high-resolution channel, one of three science-collecting channels it used to observe the universe before a crippling electrical short in 2007. That electrical short shut down the camera’s high-resolution and wide-field imager channels, though a third mode – a solar blind channel for studying objects in the far ultraviolet realm of the light spectrum – was later regained.  

Atlantis astronauts Michael Massimino and Michael Good were already expecting a challenging day to repair a long-broken spectrograph on the 19-year-old Hubble. The instrument was never designed to be fixed in orbit.

Ultimately, the astronauts completed their repair work on Hubble’s ailing Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), which failed in 2004. But it was a long, tough haul that prevented the spacewalkers from finishing all their tasks.

Atlantis astronauts John Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel spent just over seven hours adding some final upgrades to 19-year-old Hubble more powerful than ever before. It was an emotional day for the astronauts, as they became the last people ever to touch the iconic space telescope.

“This is a really tremendous adventure that we’ve been on, a very challenging mission,” said Grunsfeld, a self-described Hubble hugger making his third trip to the telescope, as he finished his work. “Hubble isn’t just a satellite, it’s about humanity’s quest for knowledge.”

With smooth precision, astronaut Megan McArthur hauled the refurbished space telescope out of Atlantis’ cargo bay and gingerly placed it back in orbit. The shuttle’s thrusters fired and it slowly pulled away from the 19-year-old Hubble after nearly a week of work to extend the telescope’s life through the next five to 10 years.

“Houston, Hubble has been released,” Atlantis commander Scott Altman radioed Mission Control. “It’s safely back on its journey of exploration as we begin the steps to conclude ours.”

The eighth captured the view for the rest of us: an IMAX 3D camera.

The 70 mm camera, best known for producing the large format movies that museums and science centers project on giant screens, was flown on the orbiter to document the fifth and final crewed mission to service the telescope for “Hubble 3D”, to be released by Warner Brothers in the spring of 2010.

After repairing the 19-year-old Hubble, Atlantis astronauts fired their shuttle’s engines on Tuesday to lower part of their orbit out of the space telescope’s 350-mile (563-km) high neighborhood as a precaution against debris hits.

They also took a second look at their shuttle’s heat shield to make sure the protective panels lining its wing edges and nose cap were free of any new damage from space debris or micrometeorites. The survey is a now-standard late inspection, but NASA isn’t expecting any surprises.

The big news of late was a smashup of a commercial Iridium satellite with a defunct Russian spacecraft earlier this year. Then there was that 2007 anti-satellite test by China, purposely destroying one of its aging weather satellites. These events produced large debris fields in space – adding to the swamp of cosmic compost.

But I sense a line of research that needs exploring: The overall impact of human-made orbital debris, solid and liquid propellant discharges, and other space age substance abuse that winds up in a high-speed dive through Earth’s atmosphere.

Shuttle commander Scott Altman and his crew will take some hard-earned time off Wednesday and rest up from their exhausting service call to give the 19-year-old space telescope another five or 10 years of orbital life.

The astronauts set Hubble free on Tuesday after a five-day spacewalk marathon to boost its cosmic vision and revive ailing science instruments. They are the last humans ever to see Hubble up close and left it more powerful than ever.

Land and aerial surveys indicate a population of between 15,730 and 41,373 female turtles use the nesting beaches in Gabon, West Africa.

Leatherbacks are of intense conservation concern around the world after populations in the Indo-Pacific crashed by more than 90 percent in the 1980s and 1990s. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists leatherback turtles as critically endangered globally, but detailed population assessments in much of the Atlantic, especially Africa, are lacking.