Wednesday Morning Science Supplement

BP, which leases the Deepwater Horizon platform, has been operating four robotic submarines some 1,500 meters (5,000 feet) down on the seabed to try to cap two leaks in the riser pipe that connected the rig to the wellhead.

But the best efforts of the British energy giant have yielded no progress so far, and engineers are frantically constructing a giant dome that could be placed over the leaks as a back-up plan to try and stop the oil spreading.

The British energy giant — which leases the stricken Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible platform — is desperately trying to prevent a massive slick from growing and spreading to Louisiana’s ecologically fragile coast.

Satellite images on Sunday showed the slick had spread by 50 percent in a day to cover an area of 600 square miles (1,550 square kilometers), although officials said almost all the oil was just a thin veneer on the sea’s surface.

The iconic vehicles with their flamboyant paint designs are much loved as a symbol of national ingenuity because Filipinos created them from surplus US military jeeps after American forces left at the end of World War II.

However, six decades later, they are also becoming known as environmental vandals because their huge diesel-powered motors are one of the major contributors to air pollution and ensuing health problems in Philippine cities.

“Vesuvius is the biggest public safety problem there is in Italy, because entire towns lie in the area of the volcano and would be invaded by an eruption,” Guido Bertolaso said.

“For the time being the volcano is quiet, but we know very well that the day Vesuvius wakes up the situation will be absolutely dramatic,” he told a news conference.

A rocket carrying the Ikaros — an acronym for Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun — will blast off from the Tanegashima space centre in southern Japan on May 18.

“Ikaros is a ‘space yacht’ that gets propulsion from the pressure of sunlight particles bouncing off its sail,” Yuichi Tsuda, space systems expert at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), told journalists.

The 33.9 kilometre (21 mile) Saemangeum seawall encloses 401 square kilometres (160 square miles) of seawater or tidal mudflats, about two thirds the size of Seoul.

“Saemangeum is the largest-ever engineering project in this country and will change the country’s landscape,” said President Lee Myung-Bak at the televised inauguration.

The archipelago of 234 million people and more than 200 volcanoes is estimated to possess around 40 percent of the world’s geothermal energy potential, or around 28,000 megawatts (MW).

It already has plans to double its geothermal energy output but analysts say the high costs associated with converting underground heat into electricity is an obstacle to investment.

The sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands stretching from the Indian to the Pacific Oceans contains hundreds of volcanoes, estimated to hold around 40 percent of the world’s geothermal energy potential.

But so far only a tiny fraction of that potential has been unlocked, so the government is seeking help from private investors, the World Bank and partners like Japan and the United States to exploit the power hidden deep underground.

“It’s nice to be at a tea party,” British pop icon Sting said Sunday, referring to the vocal conservative and predominantly white activist movement that is vehemently opposed to President Barack Obama’s administration and health care reforms in particular.

“A green tea party, where people know what’s going down, for a change,” Sting added as he took the stage to close out nine hours of music and pleas to save the planet, organized in honor of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.

More than any other instrument, the Hubble has stimulated a modern-day infatuation with deep space, beaming to Earth the most spectacular images ever taken of faraway galaxies and the births and deaths of stars — and along the way helping scientists make some of the most important discoveries of our time.

Hubble was launched aboard space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990 and deployed into orbit the following day.

“I should’ve been admitted to hospital but they were full with dengue patients and had no bed for me. I was so weak I couldn’t stand,” said Choy, now 38 and a private investigator.

“I’m hardly ever sick but I thought then I was going to die.”

A team of Australian and Japanese scientists, in a study published in Sunday’s issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, found that the current is a key part of a global ocean circulation pattern that helps control the planet’s climate.

Scientists had previously detected evidence of the current but had no data on it.

“I would call it a European mess because we did not focus on figures and facts,” Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said on Monday.

“Europe was using a theoretical mathematical approach and this is not what you need. We needed some test flights to go into the atmosphere and assess the level of ashes and take decisions,” he told Reuters in an interview.

The survey, part of a 10-year Census of Marine Life, turned up hosts of unknown microbes, tiny zooplankton, crustaceans, worms, burrowers and larvae, some of them looking like extras in a science fiction movie and underpinning all life in the seas.

“In no other realm of ocean life has the magnitude of Census discovery been as extensive as in the world of microbes,” said Mitch Sogin of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, head of the marine microbe census.

Despite a 1986 moratorium on whaling, Japan, Norway and Iceland catch whales for various IWC-sanctioned purposes, including scientific research – which opponents such as Australia and conservation activists say are a cover for commercial whaling.

The proposal, to be debated at the IWC’s meeting in June in Morocco, seeks a compromise by allowing whaling nations to hunt without specifying commercial or otherwise – but in lower numbers than they are now. Small indigenous groups could continue to hunt in limited numbers.

The fish survived whatever killed the dinosaurs and have struggled against habitat destruction and overfishing. Now many of its 25 species are endangered, but a small pocket in upper Wisconsin boasts of having one of the world’s largest concentrations of the fish.

The success is because of the state’s strict spearing limits, poaching laws, restocking efforts and the popular – and well-protected – spring spawning, which mostly finished last week.

The continent’s air traffic control agency also assembled experts to determine whether national air authorities reacted appropriately to the ash threat, which airlines insist did not warrant a lengthy closure of large chunks of airspace. The experts will carry out a comprehensive review of the actual threat to aviation posed by the ash cloud and how effective closing an airspace really is.

The closure of a large chunk of European airspace due to the April 14 volcanic eruption in southern Iceland caused the cancellation of more than 100,000 flights and left 10 million passengers stranded.

The remarkable sight happened in part because mass flight groundings prevented busy airspace from being crisscrossed with plumes of jet exhaust that create a semi-permanent haze – and other effects beyond the white contrails themselves.

Just as city lights make it necessary for us to go to the desert to appreciate the true glitter of stars, so has modern aviation dulled us to what the noontime sky can really look like – until the erupting volcano in Iceland offered a reminder.

Not anymore.

On Thursday, 40 years after that first Earth Day in 1970, smog levels nationwide have dropped by about a quarter, and lead levels in the air are down more than 90 percent. Formerly fetid lakes and burning rivers are now open to swimmers.

Happy Earth Day, Mexico City.

With its scofflaw drivers, gridlocked traffic and cobblestoned downtown, Mexico City isn’t the most bicycle-friendly place. But residents are being asked to take the risk for Madre Tierra as part of a larger campaign that leaders hope will clean up this 700-year-old metropolis.

Guido Bertolaso, who heads Italy’s civil protection agency, said that, while Vesuvius is more commonly considered the nation’s most worrisome volcano, it is Ischia, which last erupted some 700 years ago, that is experiencing a buildup of magma.

“If I had to say which is the volcano with the most loaded gun barrel, I’d say it’s not Vesuvius but the island of Ischia,” Bertolaso told a news conference in Rome.

Is it safe to fly again?

Mother Nature has given Europe a lesson in risk, aviation technology, scientific uncertainty and economics. And how these fields intersect is messy.

Scientists fear tremors at the Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FYAH-lah-yer-kuhl) volcano could trigger an even more dangerous eruption at the nearby Katla volcano – creating a worst-case scenario for the airline industry and travelers around the globe.

A Katla eruption would be 10 times stronger and shoot higher and larger plumes of ash into the air than its smaller neighbor, which has already brought European air travel to a standstill for five days and promises severe travel delays for days more.

The touchdown was delayed by rain and fog that dissipated as the sun rose, allowing Mission Control to take advantage of the morning’s second landing opportunity.

Shuttle commander Alan Poindexter held a small U.S. flag as he stood in front of Discovery, two hours later, and described the “beautiful entry.”

And just try to get them to mail back a form.

The worldwide Census of Marine Life has four field projects focusing on hard-to-see sea life such as tiny microbes, zooplankton, larvae and burrowers in the sea bed.

Taking cues from European cities in the vanguard of the green movement, such as Copenhagen , Paris and Barcelona, Mexico City has set up an urban bike-sharing system, moving faster and with greater ambition than most U.S. metropolises have.

The city has docked 1,114 red aluminum bicycles at 85 stations in four districts of the urban core. Residents who pay an annual fee equivalent to about $24.50 can ride the bikes for half-hour periods as many times as they wish. Plans are for sixfold growth in the shared bicycle fleet by 2012.

The council said the oceans were 30 percent more acidic than they were before the Industrial Revolution started roughly 200 years ago, and the oceans absorb one-third of today’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Unless emissions are reined in, ocean acidity could increase by 200 percent by the end of the century and even more in the next century, said James Barry , a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California and one of the study’s authors.

The plan doesn’t propose to phase out commercial whaling, even though whales in many areas have not rebounded in numbers and face other threats. Environmental groups say it’s far too weak and could open the way to more commercial whaling fleets launching from Russia and other countries.

The whaling moratorium brought a sharp drop in the number of whales hunted and killed when it went into effect. In recent years, however, the three whaling nations have been killing whales in increasing numbers. Last year, the three countries that hunt for whales despite the ban – Japan , Iceland and Norway – killed about 1,700 whales, including minke, fin, sei, gray and Bryde’s whales.

Cathy Zoi, the assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, owns between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of stock in Landis+Gyr, a Swiss-based manufacturer of special electric meters used in creating an efficient “smart” grid of electricity use.

Her husband, Robin Roy , owns options on at least 120,000 shares of Serious Materials, a leading manufacturer of energy efficient windows that has been singled out for praise by both President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden . As an officer of the company, Roy receives options on another 2,500 shares every month and will continue to do so until October 2012 .

The black-and-white winged-orbiter, mounted to an orange external fuel tank and twin white solid rocket boosters, left the voluminous building – the largest one-story building in the world – just before midnight  atop a mobile launcher platform and crawler transporter tracked vehicle.

Atlantis’ trip to the launch pad came just a day after the successful landing of its sister ship Discovery on Tuesday to wrap up a 15-day flight to the International Space Station.

Between 2004 and December 2007, Cassini had surveyed 22 percent of Titan’s surface. Scientists analyzed images taken by the spacecraft’s high-resolution Radar Mapper instrument, and found 49 impact craters.

“Impact craters are created on every planet because of asteroids, comets and other debris that collide with their surfaces,” said Charles Wood, senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Az, and lead author of the study. “Analyzing impact craters is a standard technique to tell you the history of the world.”

The Hubble Space Telescope launched on April 24, 1990 with a flawed mirror, but survived for two decades in large part because of five repair missions by space shuttle astronauts. Its cosmic gaze has led to breakthrough discoveries about the universe and embedded stunning views of the cosmos in the hearts and minds of the public.

“Hubble has done all those things and become an icon of science because it can produce glorious images,” said Rick Fienberg, an astronomer and press officer of the American Astronomical Society.

But it wasn’t always the crown jewel of space-based astronomy. In fact, just after it reached orbit on April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was on the verge of becoming a national embarrassment. It had a flawed mirror and took fuzzy pictures that were a far cry from the crisp views deep into the universe that astronomers expected.

Ed Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for science, was there at the beginning. It was he who – as Hubble’s program scientist at the time – broke the news the press and the world that Hubble’s main mirror had a major defect – a spherical aberration caused by a manufacturing error. It would take three years before NASA was ready to mount a repair mission in 1993, but Weiler was also there on Dec. 18 of that year when the first new images from Hubble reached Earth.

On Thursday, NASA’s beleaguered Spirit rover could become the longest-running mission on the surface of Mars, surpassing the Viking 1 lander’s record of six years and 116 days of operation on the Martian surface – if it’s still alive, that is.

Spirit fell silent on Mars on March 31, when it skipped a planned communications session with Earth. It may be hibernating through the harsh Martian winter. But even if Spirit doesn’t survive, its robotic twin Opportunity is poised to break the Mars mission record in early May.

Endeavour was initially targeted for a July 29 launch with a crew of six astronauts in order to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the space station.

The spectrometer will be installed on the exterior of the space station to study high-energy cosmic rays in the hunt for elusive antimatter and dark matter.

The moon’s polar craters are of particular interest to researchers because resources, including water ice, exist at these lunar structures. The moon’s orientation to the sun keeps the bottoms of polar craters in permanent shadow, allowing temperatures there to plunge below minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 240 degrees Celsius), cold enough to store volatile material like water for billions of years.

“However, our research suggests that, in addition to the wicked cold, explorers and robots at the bottoms of polar lunar craters may have to contend with a complex electrical environment as well, which can affect surface chemistry, static discharge, and dust cling,” said William Farrell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the lead author of the study.

The idea centers on how matter and energy falling into a black hole could in theory come out a “white hole” in another universe. In such a situation, both the black hole and the white hole are mouths of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, popularly known as a wormhole.

With that in mind, theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski at Indiana University conjectured that when a black hole forms upon the collapse of a dying star, a universe is born at the same time from the white hole on the other side of the wormhole.

The new WWF report details the 123 newly identified species that have been discovered since February 2007 when the three countries that make up Borneo agreed to conserve 85,000 square miles (220,000 square kilometers) of tropical rainforest, designated as the Heart of Borneo (HoB).

That’s a rate of discovery of three species per month. Previously, scientists have estimated that there are about 2 million known species of life on Earth, and anywhere from 5 million to 100 million species that remain undiscovered.

With powerful bodies, sharp minds, and the ability to work together like packs of wolves, killer whales, also called orcas, can hunt down and kill virtually anything – including great white sharks and the largest creature to ever live, the blue whale. Orcas are actually not whales at all, but the largest of all dolphins.

Scientists had suspected more than one species of killer whale had existed for quite some time, based on marked differences in behavior and subtle physical variations. In the North Pacific alone, three distinct types of killer whales were recognized:

The asphalt was spewed into the sea 40,000 years ago and hardened, scientists explained today. The domes are located about 10 miles (16 kilometers) off the Santa Barbara coastline of California, at the bottom of the Santa Barbara Channel.

The largest of the domes lies at a depth of 700 feet (220 meters), too deep for scuba diving, which is why they hadn’t been seen until now.

Insights into how chimpanzees respond to the death of one of their own are rare. One such instance came with the final hours of Pansy, a chimp more than 50 years old who lived in a Scottish safari park.

In the days leading up to the elderly chimp’s peaceful demise in 2008, her group was very quiet and moved to sleep near her, the researchers found. Immediately before Pansy died, others groomed and caressed her often. One male chimpanzee, Chippie, apparently tested her for signs of life as she died by closely inspecting her mouth and moving her limbs.

Many of the more famous records of the Mayan civilization come from the writing and images about royals carved into monuments.

“But the commoners had their own way of recording their own history, not only their history as a family, but also their place in the cosmos,” said Lisa Lucero, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois who led a new study of objects embedded in the floors of Mayan homes occupied more than 1,000 years ago in central Belize.