Wednesday Morning Science Supplement

Without offering a timetable, Kerry on Tuesday rejected assertions that it had become politically impossible for the Senate to finalize the first US nationwide plan to curb carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

“I’m excited. I know that’s completely contrary to any conventional wisdom,” said Kerry, a close ally of President Barack Obama and chief architect of the legislation.

Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature harshly condemned the draft plan which aims to unlock stalled talks when the 85-nation International Whaling Commission (IWC) meets next month in Florida.

While Greenpeace called it “a dangerous throwback to the 20th century when whales were hunted to near extinction”, the WWF said it “could legitimise ?scientific? whaling by Japan in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary”.

“Sales of electronic products in countries like China and India and across continents such as Africa and Latin America are set to rise sharply in the next 10 years,” the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said in a report.

“And unless action is stepped up to properly collect and recycle materials, many developing countries face the spectre of hazardous e-waste mountains with serious consequences for the environment and public health.”

The answer is sleep, according to several studies presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

A study conducted by researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) found that 68-year-old adults, on average, did better on a simple memory test if they got more sleep.

But where some researchers are forging ahead with the new science of tinkering with the atmosphere to change the climate, many others are warning that geo-engineering is untested, potentially dangerous and distracting the world from reducing greenhouse gases.

Geo-engineering is based on the principle that making tweaks to the atmosphere, such as seeding the clouds to make them brighter and more reflective, could bring down global temperatures.

“It’s very unfortunate the Australian side has indicated it will take action in an international court,” Katsuya Okada told reporters on the second and final day of a visit to Australia.

“Should court action become a reality, then Japan will seek to represent its case to the IWC (International Whaling Commission) supporting the fact that its activities are legal and within the convention.”

US President Barack Obama earlier this month said he planned to drop the costly Constellation space programme, a budget move that would kill off future moon exploration if it is approved by Congress.

In contrast, China has a fast-growing human spaceflight project that has notched one success after another, including a spacewalk by astronauts in 2008, with plans for a manned lunar mission by around 2020.

“Feed Indonesia, then feed the world,” was the recent call from President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono after the government announced plans to fast-track development of vast agricultural estates in remote areas like Papua and Borneo.

Between now and 2030 Indonesia expects to become one of the world’s biggest producers of rice, maize, sugar, coffee, shrimp, meats and palm oil, senior agriculture ministry official Hilman Manan said.

Up to 120 million e-bikes are estimated to be on the roads in China, making them already the top alternative to cars and public transport, according to recent figures published by local media.

“This is the future — it’s practical, it’s clean and it’s economical,” said manufacturer Shi Zhongdong, whose company also exports electric bikes to Asia and Europe.

In Finland, a deep geological repository where spent nuclear fuel will be disposed of is due to come onstream in 2020, said experts who addressed a forum at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Sweden will follow three years after its Nordic neighbor, and “France plans to start operating a deep geological repository for vitrified high-level waste from reprocessing in 2025,” Roland Schenkel, deputy director general of the European Commission’s Joint Research Center, said.

Rudd said Australia had collected video and photographic evidence about Japan’s annual Antarctic hunting expeditions, threatening to take its major trading ally to court before the next whaling season.

He told the Channel 7 TV station that Australia would “work with the Japanese to reduce, through negotiation, their current catch to zero”.

Scientists say temperatures should be limited to a rise of no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial times if devastating climate change is to be avoided.

Yearly greenhouse gas emissions should not be more than 40 and 48.3 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2020 and should peak between 2015 and 2021, according to new modeling released on Tuesday by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

After 217 orbits around Earth and 5.7 million miles (9.17 million km), commander George Zamka circled Endeavour high over the Kennedy Space Center to burn off speed, then nosed the 100-ton ship onto a canal-lined runway at 10:20 p.m. EST.

Ending the space shuttle fleet’s 130th mission, Endeavour landed three miles from where it blasted off on February 8.

The team at Children’s Hospital Boston and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute were working with a new type of cell called induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells, which closely resemble embryonic stem cells but are made from ordinary skin cells.

In this case, they wanted to study a rare, inherited premature aging disorder called dyskeratosis congenita. The blood marrow disorder resembles the better-known aging disease progeria and causes premature graying, warped fingernails and other symptoms as well as a high risk of cancer.

It’s a simple question that NASA can’t answer so easily anymore. The veteran space shuttle fleet is months from being mothballed and the White House has nixed a previous plan to fly to the moon.

For the first time in decades, NASA has no specific space destination for its next stop, although it has lots of places it wants to go. Future space flight, NASA officials say, now depends on new rocket science and where it can take us.

The discovery included two complete skulls from other types of sauropods – an extremely rare find, scientists said.

The fossils offer fresh insight into lives of dinosaurs some 105 million years ago, including the evolution of sauropod teeth, which reveal eating habits and other information, said Dan Chure, a paleontologist at the monument that straddles the Utah-Colorado border.

Only one flight remains for Endeavour, the baby of the shuttle fleet. Overall, just four missions remain.

“We’ll go into it with our heads held high,” launch director Mike Leinbach said early Monday, a few hours after Endeavour landed in Florida. “A little bit sad note, but a great ending to a great mission.”

Since just before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005, dueling scientific papers have clashed about whether global warming is worsening hurricanes and will do so in the future. The new study seems to split the difference. A special World Meteorological Organization panel of 10 experts in both hurricanes and climate change – including leading scientists from both sides – came up with a consensus, which is published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

“We’ve really come a long way in the last two years about our knowledge of the hurricane and climate issue,” said study co-author Chris Landsea, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration top hurricane researcher. The technical term for these storms are tropical cyclones; in the Atlantic they get called hurricanes, elsewhere typhoons.

The plan envisions spending more than $2.2 billion for long-awaited repairs after a century of damage to the lakes, which hold 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the document, which Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was releasing at a news conference Sunday in Washington.

“We’re committed to creating a new standard of care that will leave the Great Lakes better for the next generation,” Jackson said in a statement.

Australia, a staunch anti-whaling nation, has long threatened international legal action. Two years ago, it sent a ship to Antarctic waters to follow the Japanese whaling fleet and collect videos and photographs it said might be used as evidence in an international forum.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Australia would prefer to use diplomatic means to persuade Japan to end its hunt.

Studies have found overlap in the brain’s processing of language and instrumental music, and new research suggests that intensive musical therapy may help improve speech in stroke patients, researchers said Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In addition, researchers said, music education can help children with developmental dyslexia or autism more accurately use speech.

Some estimates are that during that time, as many as 1 million people were exposed to well water at the base that contained trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, benzene and vinyl chloride.

The chemicals were dumped into storm drains, leaked from fuel tanks or were buried in pits across the base. They seeped through the groundwater and into wells that fed the base areas of Hadnot Point and Tarawa Terrace .

The study, based on 100,000 measurements over 25 years and a computer model tracking air-flow patterns, found that during the spring, ozone from Asia reaches Washington , Oregon , California and other states west of the Rocky Mountains .

For the first time, the study links ozone in the air above the United States with Asian pollution, said Dan Jaffe , a professor of atmospheric and environmental chemistry at the University of Washington-Bothell and one of the study’s authors.

A head-on collision was averted between a spent upper stage from a Chinese rocket and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) huge Envisat Earth remote-sensing spacecraft.

Space junk tracking information supplied by the U.S. military, as well as confirming German radar data, showed that the two space objects would speed by each other at a nail-biting distance of roughly 160 feet (50 meters).

Climate models have predicted that with the warming caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, California’s coastal fog would increase as a result of changing atmosphere and ocean circulation patterns.

But weather records that just recently became available have shown the opposite trend of a significant decrease in fog over the past 100 years.

Pew hand-picked 895 technology experts and critics and asked them to choose between 10 different Internet-related “scenario pairs” in a new online survey. Each pair offered two different 2020 scenarios with the same overall theme but opposite outcomes.

Some of the respondents worked or were affiliated with tech companies such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft, while others came from universities and federal organizations or were identified by Pew as “Internet veterans,” many of whom have been online for more than a decade.

Every color TV in homes around the world right now uses varying amounts of three colors – red, green and blue – to reproduce the billions of colors in any image. QuadPixel technology adds a yellow pixel, which Sharp says raises the number of reproducible colors into the trillions.

“A yellow sub-pixel enables more light to pass through the system, which requires less intensive backlighting,” Sharp explained in a statement to TechNewsDaily. “The obvious advantage here is a more environmentally friendly overall TV system thanks to lower power consumption. One of Sharp’s core principle is prioritizing technologies that are less power consuming and therefore have a smaller overall carbon footprint.”