Wednesday Morning Science Supplement

Financial aid from the 27 country EU and other rich, but major polluting countries, to help developing nations confront the challenge of global warming has become a key issue, six weeks before the world climate summit in Denmark.

“We need to find a solution on financing, the internal burden-sharing,” Sweden’s European Affairs Minister Cecilia Malmstroem said Monday. “We need to do that very soon. I think our children cannot wait for us to get the figures right.”

After a series of delays due to the weather, the launch of the Ares I-X from Cape Canaveral in Florida was abandoned for the day and officials said they would try again in a four-hour window from 8:00 am (1200 GMT) Wednesday.

“Overall, the weather will improve,” a NASA official said after Tuesday’s efforts were called off.

Yet while some see them as the ultimate environmentally-friendly automobiles, the high production cost means that affordable hydrogen-powered fuel-cell cars are still more of a dream than reality.

Manufacturers such as Honda, however, are making a renewed push behind the vehicles, which run on electricity generated by a reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, belching out nothing more harmful than water vapour.

“Today, we begin the formal legislative process to lead the world in rolling back the urgent threat of climate change,” said Democratic Senator John Kerry, the lead author of a Senate bill to create a “cap-and-trade” regime.

Obama, showing during a trip to Florida that he will not wait for lawmakers to act, was to unveil the largest-ever upgrade of the US electricity grid, in a 3.4-billion-dollar bid to unleash a new era of renewable energy consumption.

Many of the thousands that gathered on the steps of Sydney’s iconic Opera House to kick off the event waved placards bearing the logo 350, a figure scientists believe is the maximum parts per million of CO2 that the atmosphere can bear to avoid runaway global warming.

In New York’s Times Square, a crowd of demonstrators gathered as giant screens beamed in images from around the world. Organizers told the activists that events had taken place in “more than 180 countries” at 5,200 events.

Galileo’s “optick tube” magnified a meagre nine-fold and was not even conceived for astronomy.

Indeed, when the gadget was first demonstrated, Venetian senators were so smitten with its military potential that they doubled Galileo’s salary and awarded him life tenure in the city-state’s most prestigious university.

While cooking, farming and studying after sunset were once a struggle using inefficient kerosene or paraffin lamps, the solar lantern now provides a cheap and practical source of light.

The simple device, which is charged during the day from a communal rooftop solar panel, uses between five and seven watts of power and has a battery that lasts up to eight hours.

The Food and Drug Administration did not ask the panel for a recommendation on whether it should approve the company’s bid for approval for treating anthrax infection. The FDA said recent inspections raised questions about tests used to measure the drug’s absorption in people, making it impossible to judge if the product was fit for approval.

Anthrax is a bacterium that can cause a potentially fatal lung infection if inhaled. Letters carrying powdered anthrax killed five people in 2001, and experts fear it could be used again in a biological attack.

The gene therapy helped improve worsening eyesight caused by a rare inherited disease called Leber congenital amaurosis, or LCA, which makes most patients blind by age 40.

Twelve treated patients, including Corey, now have better vision, their doctors told a joint meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Pan-American Association of Ophthalmology in San Francisco on Saturday.

The Royal Society said in a report the world faced a “grand challenge” to feed another 2.3 billion people by 2050 and at the same time limit the environmental impact of the farm sector.

The world will have to increase food output by 70 percent and invest $83 billion annually in developing countries by mid-century, the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization said earlier this month.

The industry’s long-standing campaign to rebrand itself as green is gaining footing as part of the effort to curtail greenhouse gases.

Nuclear power still faces daunting challenges, including the fate of highly radioactive reactor waste. Reactors remain a tempting target for terrorists, requiring ever vigilant security measures.

The analysis released late Friday by the office of Sen. Barbara Boxer, who heads the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, generally mirrors the cost projected by the EPA when it examined similar legislation that the House passed in the summer.

The Democratic bill calls for cutting greenhouse gases from power plants and large industrial facilities by shifting energy use away from fossil fuels, especially coal. It would cap emissions and allow trading of pollution allowances to mitigate the cost.

For nearly a year, construction workers and engineers in this sleepy Florida town of citrus trees and cattle farms have been building the nation’s largest solar panel energy plant. Testing will soon be complete, and the facility will begin directly converting sunlight into energy, giving Florida a momentary spot in the solar energy limelight.

The Desoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center will power a small fraction of Florida Power & Light’s 4-million plus customer base; nevertheless, at 25 megawatts, it will generate nearly twice as much energy as the second-largest photovoltaic facility in the U.S.

Under current plans, NASA has picked the wrong destination with the wrong rocket, the panel’s chairman said. A test-flight version of the rocket, the new Ares I, is on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, awaiting liftoff later this month for its first experimental flight.

Instead, NASA should be concentrating on bigger rockets and new places to explore, the panel members said, as they issued their final 155-page report. The committee, created by the White House in May to look at NASA’s troubled exploration, shuttle and space station programs, issued a summary of their findings last month, mostly urging more spending on space.

Just 57 percent think there is solid evidence the world is getting warmer, down 20 points in just three years, a new poll says. And the share of people who believe pollution caused by humans is causing temperatures to rise has also taken a dip, even as the U.S. and world forums gear up for possible action against climate change.

In a poll of 1,500 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, released Thursday, the number of people saying there is strong scientific evidence that the Earth has gotten warmer over the past few decades is down from 71 percent in April of last year and from 77 percent when Pew started asking the question in 2006. The number of people who see the situation as a serious problem also has declined.

A battle over how to establish marine reserves along the coast has roiled the waters with the competing interests of environmentalists, fishermen and seaside businesses.

The difficulty of the task was evident Thursday, when the panel had to put off until next month its recommendation to the California Fish and Game Commission on its preference among three hotly debated plans for a Marine Protected Area in the Southern California Bight.

Federal law prohibits agencies from taking actions that may adversely affect critical habitat and interfere with polar bear recovery.

Assistant Interior Secretary Tom Strickland called the habitat designation a step in the right direction to help polar bears stave off extinction, while recognizing that the greatest threat to the bear is the melting of Arctic sea ice caused by climate change.

Washington is one of five states with metro markets selected to participate in the 36-month study, funded by a $100 million grant from the Department of Energy under the economic recovery program.

The first corridor that will be developed runs between Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz. , a distance of just over 100 miles. Others corridors could be developed between San Diego and Los Angeles , and Nashville , Knoxville and Chattanooga in Tennessee . Colin Reed , a spokesman for the EV, or Electric Vehicle, Project, said a corridor running along Interstate 5 between San Diego and Vancouver, B.C. , may not be possible because there are no major population centers in far northern California and southern Oregon

A one-year study by the National Research Council looked at many costs of energy production and the use of fossil fuels that aren’t reflected in the price of energy. The $120 billion sum was the cost to human health from U.S. electricity production, transportation and heating in 2005, the latest year with full data.

The report also looks at other hidden costs from climate change, hazardous air pollutants such as mercury, harm to ecosystems and risks to national security, but it doesn’t put a dollar value on them.

Many other polluters were forced to reduce emissions of toxic material such as mercury, arsenic and lead after the Clean Air Act was strengthened in 1990. Power plants, however, the largest source of mercury pollution, aren’t subject to nationwide rules.

The tougher rules will clean up more than just heavy metals because some kinds of pollution controls — scrubbers, for example — also remove other pollutants, such as soot.

The study, published Sunday in the magazine Nature Geoscience, concluded that the magma pool among the three mountains could be the “most widespread magma-bearing area of continental crust discovered so far.”

Other scientists dismiss the existence of an underground vat of magma covering potentially hundreds of square miles as “farfetched” and “highly unlikely.” Rather than magma heated to 1,300 to 1,400 degrees, some think it could be water.

Scientists say that’s the way life on our planet expanded from tiny single-celled microbes billions of years ago to the ponderous whales and lofty sequoia trees that are today’s biggest living things.

Rather than a gradual increase in maximum body size, as scientists used to think, they now think that growth was a two-step process. The first spurt happened about 1.85 billion years ago, and the second about 580 million years ago, long before dinosaurs walked the Earth.

There is an air of vagueness regarding next year’s Atlas Evolved Expendable launch of the unpiloted, reusable military space plane. The X-37B will be cocooned within the Atlas rocket’s launch shroud – a ride that’s far from cheap.

While the launch range approval is still forthcoming, SPACE.com has learned that the U.S. Air Force has the X-37B manifested for an April 2010 liftoff.

In a 155-page report entitled “Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation,” the 10-member committee expanded on the five potential options it drew up over the summer for NASA’s human spaceflight future, including more detail and data to be reviewed by President Barack Obama.

Committee chairman Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, said NASA’s plan to replace the space shuttle fleet with capsule-based Orion spacecraft and Ares I rockets – a prototype of which is poised to launch Oct. 27 – suffers from a lack of funding so severe the agency may now have the wrong vehicle for its mission.

Randy Bresnik, whose grandfather Albert was recruited by Earhart in 1932 to be her only authorized photographer, is set to take the scarf on shuttle Atlantis when it departs with supplies and spare parts for the International Space Station (ISS) in November.

“We are flying Amelia Earhart’s favorite scarf that she unfortunately did not take with her on her final mission,” revealed the STS-129 astronaut during an interview with collectSPACE.com. “Fortunately, she also decided not to take her photographer with her otherwise I might not be here today.”

The Ares I-X rocket is poised to launch on a suborbital test flight on Oct. 27 and rolled out to its launching pad earlier this week. It stands about 327 feet (100 meters) high – 14 stories taller than NASA’s space shuttles – and is equivalent in height to its namesake Ares I. The Ares I booster is designed to launch NASA’s Orion spacecraft slated to replace the shuttle fleet.

“It gives you a sense of the scale of what NASA does that our flight test rocket is larger than any other rocket in the world,” Ares I-X deputy mission manager Jon Cowart told SPACE.com.

The Ares I-X rocket, a suborbital prototype for a new booster designed to launch NASA’s planned shuttle replacement craft Orion, is slated to blast off Tuesday morning, weather permitting. But what exactly will the throngs of onlookers see at liftoff?

“It’s going to look pretty spectacular,” said Bob Ess, NASA’s Ares I-X project manager.

To ensure that they see the fruits of their labor, technicians have installed more than 700 sensors on the $445 million Ares I-X test vehicle. That electronic swarm should provide engineers with a smorgasbord of flight data, and has led to a few jokes regarding the sensor-studded rocket.

“It’s almost like flying a Christmas tree,” said Trina Patterson, a spokesperson for ATK Space Systems, an aerospace company based in Magna, Utah. The rocket is set launch at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT) Tuesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Scheduled to lift off Tuesday morning, weather permitting, from a modified shuttle launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Ares I-X development flight test will not enter space. Rather, the two-stage rocket will follow a 28-mile-high, five-minute flight profile while more than 700 sensors record the vehicle’s performance.

Only the Ares I-X first stage, a four-segment solid rocket booster borrowed from the shuttle program and amended with a simulated fifth segment to replicate the Ares I flight configuration, is to be recovered after it parachutes to an ocean splashdown. The second stage, which is made up of mockups including a simulated Orion crew exploration vehicle and launch abort tower, will be left to sink into the Atlantic.