By Julie Steenhuysen

Reuters

CHICAGO - A penguin species found in Argentina is under threat because climate change is forcing the birds to swim farther to find food, researchers said on Thursday.

Climate change has displaced fish populations, so Magellanic penguins must swim "an extra 25 miles further from the nest for fish," University of Washington professor Dee Boersma told reporters at the American Association of the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

While that might not sound like much, she said that while the penguins are swimming an extra 50 miles, their mates are sitting on a nest and starving.

"They are racing against their own physiology," Boersma told the meeting.

The penguins, which live on Argentina's Atlantic coast, are also laying their eggs three days later, she said.

"That means their breeding season is really short now and the chance of their chicks leaving at the wrong time, when there is not food out there, is getting greater and greater," she said.

Last summer, Boersma reported that the Punta Tombo colony she tracks about 1,000 miles south of Buenos Aires has fallen by more than 20 percent in the past 22 years, leaving just 200,000 breeding pairs.

She said some younger penguins are now moving their breeding colonies north to be closer to fish, but, in some cases, this is putting them on private, unprotected lands.

Twelve out of 17 penguin species are experiencing rapid population declines, she said.

Boersma, who has tracked Magellanic penguins in their breeding colony for the past 25 years, said they serve as a barometer of the effects of climate change.

"They keep us abreast of what is happening, not only in the ocean, but on land," she said.

"We really have to reduce our impacts," she said. "If we don't, both penguins and humans will suffer."

Have we hit the age of The Jetsons? Remember the fold up flying cars in the cartoon? Well soon you can buy one for your garage. Right now there are car crashes every day. I'm not sure I want the "average Joe" crashing his flying car into another flying car over my roof. Read on:

'Flying Car' Goes to Market

Irene Klotz, Discovery News

Jan. 22, 2009 -- A Boston-area company plans to begin flight tests this year of a two-seater airplane that moonlights as a car.

The aptly named Transition takes a stab at bridging the gap between automobiles and airplanes. Some people call it a flying car. The company designing and selling the vehicle prefers the term "roadable aircraft."

Either way, it boils down to this: You sit down behind the steering wheel, drive to the runway, unfold two wings and take off. You can fly 500 miles on a tank of gas -- regular unleaded -- and when you land, you simply fold up the wings and drive where you want to go. At the end of the day, you fly back, drive home and park inside your garage.

Terrafugia, of Woburn, Mass., is not the first firm to attempt what may be the ultimate hybrid.

"It's probably a concept that people have been dreaming up since there have been airplanes and cars," said Dick Knapinski with the Experimental Aircraft Association, a 55-year-old aviation group based in Oshkosh, Wisc.

A company called Aerocar of Longview, Wash., debuted one of the first flying cars in 1949. The company built six prototypes, one of which is sitting in the EAA's museum, but never went into production.

Terrafugia, founded in 2006 by a group of MIT students, has taken deposits for more than 40 Transitions and plans to begin deliveries in 2010, said Richard Gersh, vice president of business development.

The vehicles sell for $194,000.

Advances in materials and propulsion technologies are among the reasons why Terrafugia is in position for commercial success. But equally important, says Knapinski, is an easing of government regulations on private aircraft and pilot licensing.

In 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration created a new category of aircraft and license for sport aviation, an attempt to re-awaken interest in flying after steady drops in the number of licensed pilots.

In the United States, about 600,000 people are licensed to fly aircraft, a drop of 25 percent since 1980, Knapinski said.

"The FAA and the aviation industry realized there has to be a way to get people interested in flying. Even the airline pilots of today had to start somewhere with basic flying. There had to be an entry point that was practical and affordable," he said.

Sport pilot licenses don't require as many hours of training as private and commercial pilot licenses, though sport fliers are not eligible to take off and land at runways with air traffic control towers. The medical requirements for sport pilots also are less stringent than for other types of pilot licenses, matching what is needed for a driver's license.

"What the FAA and the government say by having that rule is that these vehicles have the same level of complexity as motor vehicles," Knapinski told Discovery News. "You fly in non-complex airspace at relatively low speed."

Regulations covering the new category of sport aviation aircraft likewise are reduced.

"It gives us an opportunity," said Terrafugia's Gersh. "We could never compete with Cessna or Boeing."

One of the biggest obstacles facing a company like Terrafugia in launching a personal aircraft is not technical in nature or even cost, added Knapinski. It's perception.

"The comfort level for a significant percentage of the population is not there," Knapinski said. "They just don't believe they can operate this type of machine."

Perhaps having an airplane under the same roof as the family car will be just the ticket.

For more info and photos see www.terrafugia.com

By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer

LOS ANGELES – Cleaner air over the past two decades has added nearly five months to average life expectancy in the United States, according to a federally funded study. Researchers said it is the first study to show that reducing air pollution translates into longer lives.

Between 1978 and 2001, Americans' average life span increased almost three years to 77, and as much as 4.8 months of that can be attributed to cleaner air, researchers from Brigham Young University and Harvard School of Public Health reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

Some experts not connected with the study called the gain dramatic.

"It shows that our efforts as a country to control air pollution have been well worth the expense," said Dr. Joel Kaufman, a University of Washington expert on environmental health.

Scientists have long known that the grit in polluted air, or particulates, can lodge deep in the lungs and raise the risk of lung disease, heart attacks and strokes. The grit — made of dust, soot and various chemicals — comes from factories, power plants and diesel-powered vehicles.

In 1970, Congress passed a revised Clean Air Act that gave the Environmental Protection Agency the power to set and enforce national standards to protect people from particulate matter, carbon monoxide and other pollutants.

The law is widely credited with improving the nation's air quality through such things as catalytic converters on cars and scrubbers at new factories.

For the study, scientists used government data to track particulate pollution levels over two decades in 51 U.S. cities. They compared these changes to life expectancies calculated from death records and census data. They adjusted the results to take into account other things that might affect life expectancy, such as smoking habits, income, education and migration.

On average, particulate matter levels fell from 21 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 14 micrograms per cubic meter in the cities studied. At the same time, Americans lived an average 2.72 years longer.

"We saw that communities that had larger reductions in air pollution on average had larger increases in life expectancies," said the study's lead author, C. Arden Pope III, a Brigham Young epidemiologist.

Pittsburgh and Buffalo, N.Y., which made the most progress cleaning up their air, saw life spans increase by about 10 months. Los Angeles, Indianapolis and St. Louis were among the cities that saw gains in life expectancy of around five months.

The study was partly funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and EPA.

"This finding provides direct confirmation of the population health benefits of mitigating air pollution," Daniel Krewski, who does pollution research at the University of Ottawa in Canada, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

In a statement, the EPA said such studies provide critical information that can help the agency set standards on particulates. EPA data show that average particulate levels nationally have fallen 11 percent since 2000.

Last year, government researchers reported that U.S. life expectancy has surpassed 78 years for the first time. They attributed the increase to falling mortality rates for nine of the 15 leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, accidents and diabetes.

Nearly 20 million tons of coal ash stored in ponds in 2005 with no federal oversight

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Millions of tons of toxic coal ash is piling up in power plant ponds in 32 states, a practice the federal government has long recognized as a risk to human health and the environment but has left unregulated.

An Associated Press analysis of the most recent Energy Department data found that 156 coal-fired power plants store ash in surface ponds similar to the one that collapsed last month in Tennessee.

Records indicate that states storing the most coal ash in ponds are Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Georgia and Alabama.

The man-made lagoons hold a mixture of the noncombustible ingredients of coal and the ash trapped by equipment designed to reduce air pollution from the power plants.

Over the years, the volume of waste has grown as demand for electricity increased and the federal government clamped down on emissions from power plants.

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor, Reuters

WASHINGTON - The warming climate is likely to put stress on crops and livestock alike and could cause serious food shortages for half the world's population, U.S. researchers predicted on Thursday.

The worst effects will be in the regions where the poorest people already live -- the tropics and subtropics, the researchers wrote in the journal Science. But temperate regions will see very warm average temperatures, they added.

"In temperate regions, the hottest seasons on record will represent the future norm in many locations," David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor, and Rosamond Naylor, director of Food Security and the Environment at California's Stanford University, wrote in their report.

The two combined direct observations with data from 23 global climate models.

They found a greater than a 90 percent probability that by 2100, growing-season low temperatures in the tropics and subtropics will be higher than the highest current temperatures.

"We are taking the worst of what we've seen historically and saying that in the future it is going to be a lot worse unless there is some kind of adaptation," Naylor said.

There have been some recent tastes of what is to come, such as a heat wave that struck Europe in summer 2003 and resulted in deaths and reduced food production, they said.

Record temperatures hurt key crops including maize and fruit and accelerated crop ripening by 10 to 20 days. Livestock were stressed, the soil was dryer and more water was used in agriculture, they said.

Italy experienced a record drop in maize yields of 36 percent from a year earlier, and in France maize and fodder production fell by 30 percent, fruit harvests declined by 25 percent and wheat harvests declined by 21 percent, they wrote.

"I think what startled me the most is that when we looked at our historic examples there were ways to address the problem within a given year. People could always turn somewhere else to find food," Naylor said. "But in the future there's not going to be any place to turn unless we rethink our food supplies."

Battisti said 3 billion people live in the areas that will be worst affected. The researchers urged investment in development of crop varieties that can withstand higher heat.

"You are talking about hundreds of millions of additional people looking for food because they won't be able to find it where they find it now," he said.

"The stresses on global food production from temperature alone are going to be huge, and that doesn't take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures."

In this 2006 photo released Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2008 by the New Zealand Science Media Centre shown is a yellow-eyed penguin. Australian and New Zealand researchers studying one of the world's rare and endangered penguins have uncovered a previously unknown penguin species that disappeared about 500 years ago.

By RAY LILLEY, Associated Press Writer

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – Researchers studying a rare and endangered species of penguin have uncovered a previously unknown species that disappeared about 500 years ago.

The research suggests that the first humans in New Zealand hunted the newly found Waitaha penguin to extinction by 1500, about 250 years after their arrival on the islands. But the loss of the Waitaha allowed another kind of penguin to thrive — the yellow-eyed species that now also faces extinction, Philip Seddon of Otago University, a co-author of the study, said Wednesday.

The team was testing DNA from the bones of prehistoric modern yellow-eyed penguins for genetic changes associated with human settlement when it found some bones that were older — and had different DNA.

Tests on the older bones "lead us to describe a new penguin species that became extinct only a few hundred years ago," the team reported in a paper in the biological research journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Polynesian settlers came to New Zealand around 1250 and are known to have hunted species such as the large, flightless moa bird to extinction.

Seddon said dating techniques used on bones pulled from old Maori trash pits revealed a gap in time between the disappearance of the Waitaha and the arrival of the yellow-eyed penguin.

The gap indicates the extinction of the older bird created the opportunity for the newer to colonize New Zealand's main islands around 500 years ago, said Sanne Boessenkool, an Otago University doctoral student who led the team of researchers, including some from Australia's Adelaide University and New Zealand's Canterbury Museum.

Competition between the two penguin species may have previously prevented the yellow-eyed penguin from expanding north, the researchers noted.

David Penny of New Zealand's Massey University, who was not involved in the research, said the Waitaha was an example of another native species that was unable to adapt to a human presence.

"In addition, it is vitally important to know how species, such as the yellow-eyed penguin, are able to respond to new opportunities," he said. "It is becoming apparent that some species can respond to things like climate change, and others cannot. The more we know, the more we can help."

The yellow-eyed penguin is considered one of the world's rarest. An estimated population of 7,000 in New Zealand is the focus of an extensive conservation effort.

By David Ljunggren

Reuters

OTTAWA - Canada's Conservative government is interested in negotiating a climate change pact with the incoming administration of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama, which looks set to take a tougher line on the environment than did President George W. Bush, an official said on Thursday.

Obama's election could cause problems for Ottawa, since he favors tougher emission cuts than the Conservatives and has expressed alarm over what he sees as excessive U.S. reliance on "dirty oil" -- much of which comes from Canada's tar sands.

Concluding a pact could placate Washington by agreeing on tougher emissions standards while recognizing the importance of the tar sands, located in the western province of Alberta. Extracting oil from the sands produces huge amounts of greenhouse gases.

Canada is the largest single supplier of energy to the United States, accounting for around 9 percent of U.S. oil consumption and 15 percent of U.S. natural gas consumption.

The two nations have worked together before on green issues, most notably in 1991, when they signed a landmark agreement to cut acid rain.

"We do want to explore the possibility of a Canada/U.S. agreement similar to what we did on acid rain in the early 1990s," said a spokesman for Environment Minister Jim Prentice. He would not give further details.

Obama's targets for emissions cuts are much tougher than those set by Canada's Conservatives, who -- like Bush -- walked away from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

The energy industry in Canada is immensely influential and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who comes from oil-rich Alberta, has long stressed that any measures designed to clean up the environment should not overly harm the oil patch.

He said on Thursday that he believed the incoming Obama administration would adopt tougher green policies "but will do so in a way that balances the environmental concerns with economic and energy concerns".

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers welcomed the idea of harmonized climate change regulations but warned against singling out the oil sands.

"We want clear and consistent policy that should be across the board and no discriminatory measures saying only here (the oil sands) and not there (the United States)," said Greg Stringham, a vice-president at the association.

Greenpeace campaigner Mike Hudema welcomed Obama's victory, saying it said could spell big changes for the oil sands.

"There is a growing movement to curb dirty oil imports and start building a clean energy future and it's time our governments get on board," he said in a statement.

But Harper, speaking to reporters in Toronto, suggested that Washington would have to balance its desire for more environmental regulations with Canada's importance as a key energy supplier.

"The United States faces major challenges if you're talking about energy security and Canada remains the most important and most secure U.S. source of energy. It's a reality for any president of the United States," he said.