Wednesday Morning Science Supplement

Obama, hosting India’s leader at the White House a week after visiting top global polluter China, said recent progress meant the world was “one step closer to a successful outcome in Copenhagen.”

Countries must “reach a strong operational agreement that will confront the threat of climate change while serving as a stepping-stone to a legally binding treaty,” he told a press conference with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

In the widest overview on global warming since a landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in 2007, the authors said manoeuvering room for tackling the carbon crisis was now almost exhausted.

The 64-page “Copenhagen Diagnosis” aims at the December 7-18 UN conference in Denmark, tasked with forging a planet-wide deal on greenhouse-gas emissions.

The surface level is plunging by a metre (three feet) a year and nothing has yet been done to reverse the decline because of a lack of political cooperation as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The shoreline has receded by more than a kilometre (around a mile) in some places and the world-famous lake, a key tourism destination renowned for the beneficial effect of its minerals, could dry out by 2050, according to some calculations.

As it is, humanity each year uses resources equivalent to nearly one-and-a-half Earths to meet its needs, said the report by Global Footprint Network, an international think tank.

“We are demanding nature’s services — using resources and creating CO2 emissions — at a rate 44 percent faster than what nature can regenerate and reabsorb,” the document said.

“While salt might not save the world alone, we believe osmotic power will be an important part of the global energy portfolio,” the head of state-owned power group Statkraft, Baard Mikkelsen, told reporters.

Statkraft, which claims to be the biggest renewable energy company in Europe, is running the osmotic power plant prototype in a former chlorine factory on the banks of the Oslo fjord, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) south of the Norwegian capital.

Rudd said Australia had to get “real” about climate change by introducing the cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions, as the opposition coalition agonised over supporting the bill being debated in the Senate.

“Climate change and our action on it will go way beyond any of our lives… it’s a fundamental existential question for the future,” Rudd told reporters.

Authorities in Beijing have made methane capture a government priority both in the name of safety, as the gas is responsible for many of the deadly blasts in China’s dangerous mines, and environmental protection.

China is the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases and the extraction of coal, the source of more than 70 percent of the Asian giant’s energy, accounts for a significant proportion of those emissions.

The official refused to be drawn on specific numbers but the announcement was expected to be in line with legislation being debated in the US Senate that envisages a reduction of up to 20 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.

He indicated that President Barack Obama would announce the target in the next few days along with a decision on whether he will fly to the Danish capital to give added impetus to efforts to seek a global treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

The walk, delayed by an hour so that the seal of the water bag inside astronaut Robert Satcher’s space suit could be fixed, wrapped up at 1906 GMT for a total of five hours 42 minutes.

NASA downplayed what it called a “drink valve malfunction” with the water bag — located inside the suits to allow astronauts to drink during their walks — with space station flight director Brian Smith describing it as “no big deal.”

In a statement, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said two beams circulating simultaneously led to collisions at all four detection points during the afternoon and evening.

“It’s a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time,” said CERN director general Rolf Heuer. “But we need to keep a sense of perspective. There’s still much to do before we can start the LHC physics programme.”

UN climate chief Yvo de Boer has already said it would be impossible to conclude a comprehensive climate treaty during the talks opening in Copenhagen on December 7.

However, ahead of a meeting with EU ministers in Brussels, he told AFP that “I think we will have a very specific agreement.”

At an altitude of 3,000 metres (9,800 feet), Dali Zhemoshan is the highest wind farm in China, where renewable energy has become a priority for a government keen to reduce its carbon emissions and which has taken full advantage of the global trade in carbon credits.

“Wind resources in Yunnan province are not the best in the country,” says Zhai Cheng, a project manager at the farm for the Chinese group Sinohydro.

According to the report by the environmental watchdog, up to 55 billion roubles (1.9 billion dollars) a year is spent on repairs to infrastructure and pipelines damaged by changes in the permafrost in western Siberia.

“For Russia, the biggest threat of the permafrost melt is to oil and gas company infrastructure,” said Vladimir Chuprov, who heads Greenpeace’s energy programme in Russia.

This “Darwin Year” — so named because February 12 was the 200th anniversary of the British naturalist’s birth and November 24 the 150th anniversary of his book — has seen a flood of books, articles and conferences debating his theory of evolution.

While many covered well-trodden ground, some have taken new paths. But no consensus is in sight, probably because Darwinian evolution is both a powerful scientific theory describing how life forms develop through natural selection and a basis for philosophies and social views that often include atheism.

A total of 17,650 species of animals, also including shrimps, corals, starfish or crabs, have been identified in the frigid, sunless waters down to about 5 km (3 miles) deep.

“The diversity of life in the deep sea is much, much greater than we’ve believed,” said Robert Carney of Louisiana State University, who co-leads a study of the ocean depths as part of a wider international Census of Marine Life (COML).

Their study of the unusual cannibalistic practice shows evolution in real time in the human population, and might lead to a treatment for similar brain-wasting conditions, the researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Kuru once wiped out entire generations of women in remote Papuan villages. It was traced to a now-defunct mortuary ceremony in which women and children ate the brains of their dead relatives.

The area is not a major shipping lane and few sailors are out in November – spring in the southern hemisphere – but ships that traverse the area have little hull protection and could be significantly damaged by a collision with an iceberg, which typically has 90 percent of its mass under water.

“It’s an alert to shipping to be aware these potential hazards are around and to be on the lookout for them,” Maritime New Zealand spokeswoman Sophie Hazelhurst said of an official navigation warning issued for the area south of the country.

The $10 billion Large Hadron Collider showed it could raise the energy of the proton beams whizzing around the massive machine by an initial 20 percent.

“It was just a preliminary test,” said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN. “It’s all going very well.”

Carbon dioxide concentrations this fall are hovering at around 385 parts per million, on their way to a near-certain record high above 390 in the first half of next year, at the annual peak.

“For the past million years we’ve never seen 390. You have to wonder what that’s going to do,” said physicist John Barnes, the observatory director.

After a doctor found he was wrongly diagnosed as being in a vegetative state, and worked out a way for him to communicate, Houben said he now feels reborn.

“And just like with a baby, it happens with a lot of stumbling,” the 46-year-old Belgian wrote, tapping out the words in Dutch for Associated Press Television News on Tuesday as an aide guided his hand.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.

And it’s not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month’s climate summit in Copenhagen:

For others beyond this manufacturing graveyard, however, Ukraine’s economic collapse has produced a potential multibillion-dollar bonanza. In an era of climate change regulation and carbon trading, Ukraine, ironically, is profiting from the smokeless smokestacks of its industrial shutdown.

How well and how long it will profit is an under-the-radar issue complicating negotiations for a worldwide climate accord being sought at a 192-nation conference in Copenhagen next month.

The University of East Anglia, in eastern England, said in a statement Saturday that the hackers had entered the server and stolen data at its Climatic Research Unit, a leading global research center on climate change. The university said police are investigating the theft of the information, but could not confirm if all the materials posted online are genuine.

More than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists is included in about 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents posted on Web sites following the security breach last week.

Officials say the global epidemic probably peaked in 1996 and that the disease looks stable in most regions, except for Africa. Last year, HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 72 percent of all 2.7 million new HIV cases worldwide.

Daniel Halperin, an AIDS expert at Harvard University, said it was good news the rate of new infections was dropping and that access to AIDS drugs was helping to cut the death rate. Earlier this year, the U.N. announced there are now 4 million people on lifesaving AIDS drugs worldwide, a 10-fold increase in five years.

Scientists recently collected 32 DNA samples of Asian carp between the barrier and Lake Michigan in waterways south of Chicago, although the fish have yet to be spotted in the area, said Maj. Gen. John Peabody of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

If the feared bighead and silver carp have got through the $9 million barrier, the only remaining obstacle between the carp and Lake Michigan is a navigational lock on the Calumet River. Some DNA was found as close as 1 mile south of the lock and 8 miles south of the lake.

And a smaller, 3-foot-long relative with buckteeth was chomping plants and grubs in the same region.

The three new species, along with new examples of two previously known ancient crocodiles, were detailed Thursday by researchers Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago and Hans Larsson of McGill University in Montreal. They spoke at a news conference organized by the National Geographic Society, which sponsored the research.

“Others are catching up fast,” said Marty Hauser , vice president for Washington operations at the Space Foundation , an advocacy organization headquarters in Colorado Springs . “Of particular note over the past decade is the emergence of China’s human spaceflight capabilities.”

Russia now leads the world in space launches. China recently became the third nation, after the United States and Russia , to send its own astronauts out for a spacewalk.

The new rule, which was proposed earlier this month, would be the first time since 1971 that the EPA has tightened controls on sulfur dioxide to protect the public health.

“This would be an important step to ensure the health of the American public,” said Dr. Alan H. Lockwood , a professor of neurology and nuclear medicine at the University of Buffalo . “Tens of thousands of Americans die each year from inhaling pollutants from coal burning.”

“Moving Beyond Earth,” which replaces the prior Rocketry and Space Flight gallery that originally opened just before the start of the space shuttle era in 1979, seeks to tell the story of the U.S. Space Transportation System (STS, the original name of the shuttle system) and the accompanying efforts to build a space station with an approach mimicking NASA’s own history.

“The gallery is in its first stage,” explained curator Valerie Neal. “What you see here today is essentially a footprint for what will be a fully built-out gallery in the next two years. We are approaching this incrementally, just as NASA approached the International Space Station. We are not doing it all at once, we’re phasing it in, element by element.”

Not only would the deep space sojourn shake out hardware, it would also build confidence in long-duration stints at the moon and Mars. At the same time, the trek would sharpen skills to deal with a future space rock found on a collision course with Earth.

In Lockheed Martin briefing charts, the mission has been dubbed “Plymouth Rock – An Early Human Asteroid Mission Using Orion.” Lockheed is the builder of NASA’s Orion spacecraft, the capsule-based replacement for the space shuttle.

Add to the list a new map of the red planet’s valleys. The map shows extensive valley networks around the equator and in the southern hemisphere, suggesting a warmer Mars long ago, with extensive rainfall that would have fed an ocean in the northern hemisphere.

“All the evidence gathered by analyzing the valley network on the new map points to a particular climate scenario on early Mars,” Northern Illinois University geography professor Wei Luo said. “It would have included rainfall and the existence of an ocean covering most of the northern hemisphere, or about one-third of the planet’s surface.”

The date is Dec. 9, 1965: Residents see a ball of fire shooting through the darkening evening sky and then, seemingly, the object – purportedly shaped like a jumbo-sized acorn after impact – makes some sort of controlled crash into the woods. From there, the strangeness factor escalates with purported military personnel isolating the area from curious onlookers and toting something out of the locale on a flatbed truck.

A meteorite? A wayward classified aircraft? Reentering space hardware of Earthly origin? An alien craft from afar?

Pork chops or burgers cultivated in labs could eliminate contamination problems that regularly generate headlines these days, as well as address environmental concerns that come with industrial livestock farms.

However, such research opens up strange and perhaps even disturbing possibilities once considered only the realm of science fiction. After all, who knows what kind of meat people might want to grow to eat?

A question asked less often: What happened when they disappeared?

A new study, based partly on dung fungus, provides some answers to both questions. The upshot: The landscape changed dramatically.

Revealed via cameras towed deep in the sea, sonar and other technologies, a stunning 17,650 species are now known to thrive in an eternal watery darkness. This menagerie of weird creatures, ranging from crabs to shrimp to worms, somehow manage a living in a frigid black world down to roughly 3 miles (5 km) below the ocean waves.

Most of these creatures have adapted to diets based on meager droppings from the sunlit layer above, while others live on sulfur and methane, or bacteria that break down oil, or the sunken bones of dead whales and other implausible foods.

Last week the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force unleashed a maelstrom with its recommendations that women need mammograms less frequently, with regular breast-cancer screening starting at age 50, not 40, and only biennially, not yearly.

The Task Force said it was responding to data showing that routine mammograms starting at age 40, as long recommended, rarely save lives and more often result in a misdiagnosis – detection of a breast cancer that’s either benign or growing too slowly to be of worry. This, in turn, leads to unnecessary anxiety and debilitating treatment.