Science News

NEW ORLEANS - After most of New Orleans sat submerged in water for weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the eight months since Oct. 1 have been the driest southern Louisiana has been during the 111 years that records have been kept, the state climatologist says.

WASHINGTON - A severe storm alert, an evacuation-route marker and a sign bearing the high-water mark of flooding in New Orleans are among about 60 objects around which the National Museum of American History plans to build an exhibit on Hurricane Katrina.

Weather around the U.S.A.

The last remnants of the season's first named tropical storm had largely moved out to sea early Thursday after sweeping past North Carolina's Outer Banks.

NEW ORLEANS - The federal government said Wednesday it will demolish some of the largest public housing projects in New Orleans, using the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to help improve poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Discovery's seven crew members put on their bright orange spacesuits and were strapped into the space shuttle for a practice countdown on the launch pad Thursday.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -  Seven astronauts aborted the launch of the space shuttle Discovery Thursday just seconds before a simulated liftoff Thursday during a dress rehearsal of their planned July 1 space shot.

A version of this essay was first presented at the National Society of Black Engineer's Annual Conference luncheon in Pittsburgh, PA this past April.

LOS ANGELES - A report released Tuesday blamed a design flaw for the 2004 crash of a NASA space probe carrying solar wind atoms back to Earth and criticized engineers for failing to detect the error.

JAKARTA (AFP) - Two earthquakes with magnitudes of 5.1 and 5.2 rocked the Indonesian province of Aceh but there were no immediate reports of damage or casualties, the meteorological office said.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Pro-whaling nations are expected to take control of the International Whaling Commission this week, giving them a majority of seats on the panel for the first time since it banned commercial hunting 20 years ago.

ATHENS (AFP) - The WWF slammed Greece over its environmental record, branding it "hostile" to environmental protection and citing failure in areas such as water and air quality and help for endangered species.

WASHINGTON - President Bush is creating a vast new marine sanctuary Thursday, extending stronger federal protections to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and its endangered monk seals, nesting green sea turtles and other rare species.

GENEVA (Reuters) - Toxic chemicals are harming Arctic animals including polar bears, beluga whales, seals and seabirds, the environmental group WWF said on Thursday.

WADA, Japan (AFP) - The Caribbean is rarely on the minds of this town on Japan's Pacific coast. But its 5,500 people now talk of little else, hoping a meeting that begins there will bring their tradition of whaling back into the mainstream.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A set of 110-million-year-old fossils from China is the earliest example of a modern-looking bird and strongly suggests ancestors of all living birds were waterfowl, researchers said on Thursday.

WASHINGTON - Separating the layers of sediment from an ancient lake was like turning the pages of a book to get a glimpse of life in the time of dinosaurs, an international team of scientists said Thursday.

Walking with the dinosaurs seems like a step into deep time - but the fossil mounds of the Pilbara region of Western Australia known as stromatolites are actually 58 times older. They may be the best evidence we have of our earliest ancestors. Our planet was something of an alien world 3.43 billion years ago when they formed, compared to today's relatively balmy, oxygenated conditions. So they are not only important in understanding our own origins but also in the search for past and present life on other worlds such as Mars.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - The first pictures showing a live specimen of a rodent species once thought to have been extinct for 11 million years have been taken by a retired Florida State University professor and a Thai wildlife biologist.

WASHINGTON - The best evidence yet for the oldest life on Earth is found in odd-shaped, rock-like mounds in Australia that are actually fossils created by microbes 3.4 billion years ago, researchers report.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU scientists should get a much-needed boost of public money over the next seven years even though Europe is likely to retain its cautious approach to stem cell research, EU lawmakers agreed on Thursday.

MOUNTAIN GROVE, Mo. - Every season, wine makers fight the same battles to protect their grapevines they have been fighting for thousands of years.

BUCHAREST (AFP) - The environmental organisation Greenpeace has warned there was a "risk of organic pollution" in the Danube delta's natural reserve, where several hectares of transgenic (genetically-modified) soya "are being grown illegally."

LONDON (Reuters) - A U.S. biotechnology firm said on Wednesday it had developed a new technique to produce genetically modified chickens that could be used to produce treatments for human diseases.

Scientists at Harvard and Children's Hospital Boston announced Tuesday they have the green light to clone human embryos that could generate stem cell lines for specific diseases. Embryonic stem cells are the precursor cells to almost every tissue in the body; growing them could provide replacement tissues for diseases.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered energy cooperation to oil-thirsty China and other countries on Thursday, seeking to win friends but avoiding direct mention of Iran's nuclear standoff with the West.

NEW YORK (AFP) - World oil prices rose modestly after the latest weekly snapshot of US energy inventories.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said on Wednesday that he will soon travel to Iraq to meet with that country's oil and electricity ministers, as directed by President George W. Bush earlier in the day.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US reserves of gasoline rose in the past week but crude oil stocks fell, the Department of Energy reported.

LEH, India (Reuters) - The Tibetan monk fingers his beads as he climbs up the stone steps of a 1,000-year-old monastery perched on a hilltop spur overlooking the Himalayas.

HONG KONG (AFP) - Acclaimed physicist Stephen Hawking has said that humanity is finally getting close to understanding the origin of the universe.

ST. LOUIS - No way was Rick Jones going to be a couch potato. An athlete and youth coach who works out regularly, Jones dreams of someday hiking the Grand Canyon. A painful, arthritic hip started to slow him down, but at 52, he refused. Then he heard about a new surgical hip procedure that could restore his active lifestyle.

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. - Officials are looking to capture some of Lake Tahoe's biggest polluters: Canada geese.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - The first pictures showing a live specimen of a rodent species once thought to have been extinct for 11 million years have been taken by a retired Florida State University professor and a Thai wildlife biologist.

HONG KONG - Famed physicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that Pope John Paul II tried to discourage him and other scientists attending a cosmology conference at the Vatican from trying to figure out how the universe began.