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A mysterious and deadly bat disorder discovered just two winters ago in a few New York caves has now spread to at least six northeastern states, and scientists are scrambling to find solutions before it spreads across the country.

White-nose syndrome poses no health threat to people, but some scientists say that if bat populations diminish too much, the insects and crop pests they eat could flourish. Researchers recently identified the fungus that creates the syndrome’s distinctive white smudges on the noses and wings of hibernating bats, but they don’t yet know how to stop the disorder from killing off caves full of the ecologically important animals.

“The cause for concern is that this is going to race across the country faster than we can come up with a solution,” said Alan Hicks, a wildlife biologist with New York state’s Department of Environmental Conservation.

“Now that is entirely possible.”

Bats with white-nose burn through their fat stores before spring, driving some to rouse early from hibernation in a futile search for food. Many die as they hunt fruitlessly for insects.

White-nose syndrome spread fast last winter to dozens of caves in New York and southern New England, within a roughly 150-mile radius of the caves west of Albany, N.Y., where it was first found. Early observations show it has reached farther still this winter, even before cave inspections and bat counts begin in earnest this month.

Bats with white-nose syndrome were found recently in northern New Jersey’s Morris County and in an old iron mine in Shindle, Pa., more than 200 miles away from the outbreak’s epicenter. In addition, the Pennsylvania Game Commission on Tuesday said that hundreds of little brown bats, a species devastated by white-nose syndrome, were found dead from the disorder outside two mines in the northeastern part of the state.

The syndrome may have spread as far as 450 miles from the epicenter, to the John Guilday Caves Nature Preserve in West Virginia. The National Speleological Society has temporarily shut down the preserve as a possible white-nose sighting is investigated.

So far, there are 40 confirmed white-nose sites in the Northeast, said Jeremy Coleman, who is tracking the disorder for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Cortland, N.Y.

Death tolls for the tiny creatures are hard to pinpoint, but some estimates run into the hundreds of thousands.

The news was grim on a recent day when more than a dozen researchers lowered themselves by rope into a sprawling old limestone mine in New York’s Hudson Valley, about 80 miles north of New York City.

Bat counter Ryan von Linden’s headlamp swept across isolated clusters of the mammals hanging off the rock ceiling. A chorus of squeaks echoed in the blackness.

“There are not as many as there are supposed to be,” von Linden whispered. “Not even close.”

With a precise total pending, Hicks estimated the cave’s count of Indiana bats, an endangered species, was down 15 to 35 percent from last year’s roughly 19,000. Researchers said the number of little brown bats also appeared to be down, although they didn’t have enough specifics from prior years to measure the drop exactly.

Hoping to glean more information on the syndrome, the researchers plucked 14 groggy little brown bats from the rock, weighed them, measured them, snipped a bit of their hair and stuck tiny radio transmitters to them to track their activity levels.

Bats’ nocturnal habits and some species’ ability to carry rabies can give the flying mammals a fearsome image. But they can pollinate plants and play an important role in checking the populations of mosquitoes and insects that can damage wheat, apples and dozens of other crops.

Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Wildlife Health Center this fall established that the sugary smudges on infected bats are a previously undescribed fungus that thrives in the refrigerator-like cold of winter caves. The center is still working to determine whether the fungus causes the disorder, but biologists are already focusing on potential ways to combat the fungus.

Since the fungus grows in the cold and damp, they could try to lower humidity levels in at least some crucial caves, though that could create other problems for those ecosystems.

Researchers also are looking at the possibility of a fungicide or even fungus-killing bacteria that could spread from bat to bat. Ward Stone, New York state’s wildlife pathologist, said he has been able to culture bacteria that live on big brown bats and kill the white-nose fungus in a lab.

Tests need to be performed to see whether any of the options are realistic. And time is “our biggest enemy,” said David Blehert, head of microbiology at the USGS center in Madison, Wis.

EU regulators will discuss again in a few months whether to allow meat and milk products from cloned animals into the food chain, despite local consumer opposition and inconclusive data, officials said on Friday.

Animal cloning has been around for years. Dolly the cloned sheep was born in 1996, for example. Now, scientists estimate the EU has 100 cattle clones and fewer pig clones alive. Race horses have also been cloned.

Many consumer and religious groups strongly oppose the technology, which takes cells from an adult and fuses them with others before implanting them in a surrogate mother. They say scientists don’t know its effects on nutrition and biology.

But advocates of livestock cloning say the technology will help produce more milk and lean, tender meat by creating more disease-resistant animals. They insist it is safe.

Europe has yet to take a position on the technology as far as cloning of animals for food is concerned, which the European Commission says has not yet occurred in the European Union. Denmark is the only EU country to have adopted any cloning law.

After holding a closed-door debate recently on food deriving from cloned animals that ended in stalemate, the Commission delayed discussing the subject further, asking the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) for more in-depth scientific advice.

A ban, if not properly justified, could lead to problems for the EU at the World Trade Organization, officials said.

LACK OF DATA

The trouble is that available scientific data and samples are too few. EFSA has given two opinions and admits its own uncertainty; although in July, the agency said cloned animal products might not be safe and needed further study.

It was clear there were significant animal health and welfare issues for surrogate mothers and clones that could be more frequent and severe than for conventionally bred animals, it said. But the evidence was still too little, it added. “The college (the 27 EU commissioners) decided that the status quo has to be preserved until we have further scientific studies on certain issues on which EFSA and other agencies could not express an opinion because of a lack of information and data,” a Commission official told reporters.

“We want to be sure we do not create problems so that is why we are having discussions with our trading partners,” she said.

EU experts were in close contact with authorities in Canada, Japan and the United States, the three main countries so far involved in cloning, or examining the technology.

Based on the views to be given by EFSA, when ready, the EU commissioners planned to hold another debate on cloning that would probably take place within three months, she said.

In October, a survey conducted at the Commission’s request showed that most EU citizens had reservations about cloning animals for food, while 67 percent saw cloning as justified if used to preserve rare animal species.

Developments in the U.S. food market have especially worried EU experts, after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ruled in January 2008 that meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats was as safe as products from traditional animals.

Commercial airline crews reported more than two dozen emergency landings, aborted takeoffs or other hair-raising incidents due to collisions with birds in the past two years, according to a confidential database managed by NASA.

An Associated Press review of reports filed voluntarily with NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System show that bird-airliner encounters happen frequently, though none as dramatic as the one involving a US Airways jet that ditched safely into the Hudson River on Jan. 15 because a run-in with birds took out both of its engines.

Since January 2007, at least 26 serious birdstrikes were reported. In some of them, the aircraft’s brakes caught fire or cabins and cockpits filled with smoke and the stench of burning birds. Engines failed and fan blades broke. In one case, a birdstrike left a 12-inch hole in the wing of a Boeing 757-200.

The NASA data does not include details such as the names of crews, airlines, and in many cases, the airports involved — confidentiality designed to encourage greater reporting.

“That’s only touching the tip of the iceberg,” said former National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia. “Clearly, we don’t have knowledge of the full width and breadth of this problem.”

From 1990 to 2007, there were nearly 80,000 reported incidents of birds striking nonmilitary aircraft, about one strike for every 10,000 flights, according to the Federal Aviation Administration and the Agriculture Department. But those numbers also are based on voluntary reports, which aviation safety experts say almost certainly underestimates the size of the problem and fails to convey the severity of some incidents.

In some cases reported to the NASA database, crews said they could smell birds burning in the engines — “a toxic smell like burning toast (or) popcorn” wrote a flight attendant on an MD-80 airliner that had just taken off last March. After returning to the airport for an emergency landing, it was discovered the aircraft had suffered a birdstrike on a previous landing that had gone undetected.

The pilot of a Boeing 767-200 reported aborting a takeoff after the cockpit “filled with the smell of cooking bird.” The plane had “ingested” birds in the right engine on a prior landing, but mechanics had thought the birds had passed through the engine and had given the flight the go-ahead to takeoff again.

Among other cases detailed in the NASA database:

_In March 2007, the pilot of a Boeing 777-200, a wide-bodied airliner that typically seats over 280 passengers, reported a birdstrike in the right engine shortly after a takeoff, causing strong engine vibrations. The pilot shut down the engine and asked to divert to another airport for an emergency landing, dumping as much of the plane’s 160,000 pounds of fuel as possible to reduce the plane’s landing weight and cut its risk of breaking apart.

_In June 2007, a Boeing 757-200 at Denver International Airport was forced to abort a takeoff at between 150 mph and 160 mph after a flock of birds the size of grapefruit flew into the path of the plane. Some birds were sucked into both engines, the pilot reported.

_In July 2008, the pilot of a Boeing 737-300 in the midst of a 139-mph takeoff roll spotted a hawk with a 4-foot wing span on the runway. As the bird flew past the left side of the plane, the crew heard a “very loud bang” and there was engine surge. The pilot aborted the takeoff at great strain to the aircraft’s brakes, which caught fire. Fire trucks doused the flames. No one was hurt.

_In May 2008, the pilot of a regional airliner reported that he arrived at his plane to get ready for a flight and found the windshield “covered in blood, guts and feathers from an obvious birdstrike” during a previous flight. When he complained to the airline’s maintenance department, he said, he was told the previous flight crew was responsible for reporting the incident or cleaning up the mess themselves. “At no time should an aircraft ever be left with obvious birdstrike debris and no indication that someone has taken the necessary steps to ensure that the aircraft is safe to operate,” the pilot’s complaint said.

More common than aborted takeoffs are reports of planes that had to circle back to their departure airports or divert to other fields for emergency landings because a bird had damaged an engine shortly after takeoff.

Former NTSB Chairman Jim Hall said the safety board has been warning for decades that birds “are a significant safety problem.” The board sent a series of bird-related safety recommendations to the FAA in 1999, including required reporting of birdstrikes by airlines and the development of a radar system that can detect birds near airports.

A decade later, reporting is still voluntary and there is no bird-detecting radar except limited testing at a handful of airports.

FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said developing a reliable bird-detecting radar has proved difficult. Some of the systems tested by the agency picked up insects as well as birds.

“We’ve been working on this,” Brown said, “and haven’t developed a system yet we feel we can make operational in a commercial aviation environment that’s going to give us the kind of solid, reliable data we’re looking for.”

Brown said the FAA decided nearly 20 years ago on a voluntary birdstrike reporting system to encourage greater cooperation. She said the agency also agreed not to make airport-specific birdstrike data public because it didn’t want to discourage airports from reporting incidents. She said an airport that was diligent about reporting incidents might look like it had a greater bird problem than an airport that wasn’t as thorough.

More rain on the Antarctic Peninsula is speeding a melt of glaciers such as the Sheldon, which has retreated 2 km (1.2 miles) in 20 years and is nudging up world sea levels, a leading expert said.

“Rain is very corrosive to glaciers and at least in part the reason this glacier is retreating,” David Vaughan, a British Antarctic Survey glaciologist, said on an inflatable speedboat in a bay that had been blanketed by ice for thousands of years.

“The glacier has retreated since 1989 and left this open water. That’s the same pattern for 87 percent of 400 glaciers along the Antarctic Peninsula,” he told Reuters.

The ice cracks and growls as the 70-metre-high (230 feet) ice cliffs at the front of the Sheldon glacier slide downhill, some of the ice a bluish white. Icebergs sometimes split off into the sea, where penguins and seals swim.

The front edge of the Sheldon — a small glacier by Antarctic standards — has receded 2 km since 1989, apparently because of global warming blamed on greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels, Vaughan said.

Temperatures were above freezing with clear skies on Friday and Thursday. Rain spattered the glacier on Wednesday and has fallen several times this month.

Vaughan said rain was becoming more frequent in summertime on the peninsula, the northernmost part of Antarctica that sticks up towards South America. The peninsula is warming faster than anywhere else in the southern hemisphere.

SEA LEVEL RISE

And the thaw of Sheldon, near the British Rothera reseach station and other peninsula glaciers, is part of a wider melt adding to world sea levels.

“It doesn’t add up to much on its own but by the time we’ve added Patagonia, Alaska, all those other areas where glaciers are receding, we have 1 millimetre (0.04 inch) at least (a year) of sea level rise around the globe,” Vaughan said.

Adding in other factors including that water expands as it warms up, ocean levels are rising 3 mm a year — or 30 cm (11.8 inches) a century. And the rate is accelerating after a gain of 17 cm in the 20th century.

Vaughan, a leading member of the U.N. Climate Panel, said there were worrying signs that vast glaciers to the south were also starting to spill more water into the sea.

“The concern is … that the much bigger glaciers (further south) are going to start doing the same thing,” he said. The large Pine Island glacier about 500 km to the south has also accelerated.

The peninsula covers a fraction of Antarctica, a frozen continent bigger than the United States that contains most of the world’s fresh water.

More than 190 governments have agreed to work out by the end of 2009 a new U.N. treaty to fight global warming, partly fearing that rising sea levels could swamp low-lying Pacific Islands or flood coastal cities from Amsterdam to Sydney.

Average temperatures on the peninsula have risen by up to 3 Celsius (5.4 F) in the past 50 years against a world average of 0.7 Celsius in the past century.

Seven astronauts are gearing up to launch toward the International Space Station next month to deliver a final piece of the outpost’s power grid, the last major American-built addition to the orbiting laboratory.

The spaceflyers are slated to lift off aboard the space shuttle Discovery on Feb. 12 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., to deliver the last starboard piece of the space station’s metallic backbone-like truss and unfurl a pair of expansive U.S. solar wings from its tip.

The new addition is the fourth set of U.S. solar arrays to feed the station’s electrical grid and will give the orbital laboratory a wingspan that will rival an American football field in length once attached. The starboard-side wings will also make the station an even brighter target for skywatchers on Earth hoping to glimpse the outpost’s path across the night sky.

“It’s the start, for us, to a very exciting year,” NASA shuttle program manager John Shannon told reporters on Friday.

Commanded by veteran spaceflyer Lee Archambault, Discovery’s STS-119 mission is NASA’s first of up to six planned shuttle flights for 2009. They include one final flight to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope and a series of space station construction missions.

“We’re of course very proud to be on this mission.” said Archambault, who added that he helped give the space station a symmetrical look during his first spaceflight in 2007, which also delivered new solar wings. “Since then NASA has unbalanced it, so we’re getting a chance to balance it again.”

Four spacewalks are planned to install the 32,000-pound (14,514-kg) starboard-side solar arrays and upgrade the station’s exterior during Discovery’s flight.

Three spaceflight rookies and four veterans make up Archambault’s crew. The crew includes teachers-turned-astronauts Joseph Acaba and Richard Arnold II, as well veteran astronaut Koichi Wakata, a two-time spaceflyer for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency who will become Japan’s first long-duration astronaut when he joins the space station’s Expedition 18 crew during Discovery’s two-week mission.

Wakata helped install the first section of the space station’s 11-segment main truss back in 2000 during his last spaceflight. Now he’ll help attach its final piece, then stay aboard to take charge of the outpost’s Japanese Kibo laboratory.

Discovery may also carry a spare part of the space station’s new water recycling system, an intricate - and sometimes icky - assembly that filters astronaut wastewater, sweat and urine back into drinking water.

Astronauts installed the recycling system aboard the station last November despite glitches with a balky urine distillation component. That component failed again just before Christmas. Engineers and astronauts are trying to revive the device, but would need the spare from Earth if they fail, said NASA’s space station program manager Mike Suffredini.

The urine recycler is part of a $250 million life support system that must work if the space station is to sustain larger, six-person crews for the long-term.

Suffredini said he is confident that engineers will overcome the urine recycler’s glitches and have a spare ready in time if required. Even if the unit is not operational by May, the space station can still support the jump to six-person crews with the help water shipments aboard NASA shuttles this year, he added.

2009 is expected to bring the space station to the brink of completion. In addition to Discovery’s February flight and the planned Hubble Space Telescope flight in mid-May, NASA space shuttles are expected to deliver the final segment of Japan’s Kibo laboratory this summer, a vital batch of spare parts and supplies and a new connecting node and viewport.

“Last year was a banner year for the station and a huge success,” Suffredini said. “This year will be no less exciting.”

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic company has denied claims that one of the craft in its space tourism project is suffering difficulties with its rudder.

Branson had unveiled the Virgin Galactic White Knight 2 craft to carry space tourists in California in July last year.

According to a report in the Telegraph, Flight International has reported that White Knight Two, the mother ship, ran into trouble when making a series of ariel maneuvers.

White Knight Two is being used to carry SpaceShipTwo, the rocket which will take passengers into space.

The journal cited an unnamed source as providing the information about the supposed difficulties during the test flight at the Mohave Desert in California.

It claimed that Peter Siebold, the test pilot, was unable to keep the aircraft on the runway.

But, this was denied by Will Whitehorn, Virgin Galactic’s president.

“There are no issues we know of at all at this stage which will affect the programme or the overall design. It is beyond ridiculous. There is no problem with the flight,” he said.

“It was a highly successful test flight and everything is going to plan,” he added, saying that the next test flight would take place in a fortnight.

“We will begin testing the Space Ship Two rocket planes in August and are optimistic that we will be flying into space with passengers by the end of the year,” Whitehorn further added.

Virgin Galactic expects to start commercial space flights next year, with passengers paying 150,000 pounds for the trip.

Soil rich in diamond dust discovered across North America reinforces a theory that falling meteors caused the extinction of mammoths and other animals, said a study in the journal Science.

“These discoveries provide strong evidence for a cosmic impact event at approximately 12,900 years ago that would have had enormous environmental consequences for plants, animals and humans across North America,” said Douglas Kennett of the University of Oregon, who led the research.

The findings appear to bolster the theory set out in 2007 that several comets hitting the Earth triggered a 1,300-year-long ice age, causing the extinction of several species of animals and fragmented the prehistoric human Clovis culture.

The Clovis people lived off of hunting and gathering in an area across what is now the United States, Mexico and Central America.

The peak of the Clovis era was from 13,200 to 12,900 years ago and scientists say the Clovis may have entered North America across a land bridge from Siberia.

One of the diamond-rich sediment layers found by the researchers is located directly above Clovis materials at a site in Murray Springs, Arizona, the researchers said.

The nanometer-sized diamonds are produced under high temperatures and high pressure from cosmic impacts that have been found in meteorites.

The sediments full of diamond dust were also found at digs at five other sites, in Bull Creek, Oklahoma; Gainey, Michigan; and Topper, South Carolina in the United States and Lake Hind, Manitoba; and Chobot, Alberta in Canada.

Nanodiamonds can be produced on Earth but only as a result of high-explosive detonations or chemical vaporization.

The study appears in the January 2 edition of the journal Science.

Space shuttle Endeavour returned home to NASA’s spaceport Friday, nearly two weeks after landing back on Earth.

Endeavour was forced to take a detour to California at mission’s end on Nov. 30 because of stormy weather at Kennedy Space Center, the main landing site. More bad weather further stalled the trip home. The shuttle didn’t leave Edwards Air Force Base, where it ended up, until Wednesday.

Endeavour was anchored atop a modified jumbo jet for the cross-country trip. The trip cost $1.8 million.

Endeavour and its crew of seven spent 16 days in orbit, most of that at the international space station. The astronauts renovated the inside of the space station and installed a recycling system for turning urine into drinking water.

Using a novel population of stem cells, researchers at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC have successfully repaired damaged heart muscle in an animal model.

The stem cells, according to researchers, were derived from human skeletal muscle tissue.

Led by Johnny Huard, PhD, the researchers transplanted stem cells purified from human muscle-derived blood vessels into the hearts of mice that had heart damage similar to that which would occur in people who had suffered a heart attack.

Dr. Huard, director of the Stem Cell Research Center at Children’s Hospital’s John G. Rangos Sr. Research Center said that the transplanted myoendothelial cells repaired the injured muscle, stimulated the growth of new blood vessels in the heart and reduced scar tissue from the injury, thereby dramatically improving the function of the injured left ventricle.

“This study confirms our belief that this novel population of stem cells discovered in our laboratory holds tremendous promise for the future of regenerative medicine. Specifically, myoendothelial cells show potential as a therapy for people who have suffered a myocardial infarction,” said Huard.

He added: “The important benefit of our approach is that as a therapy, it would be an autologous transplant. This means that for a patient who suffers a heart attack, we would take a muscle biopsy from his or her muscle, isolate and purify the myoendothelial cells, and re-inject them into the injured heart muscle, thereby avoiding any risk of rejection by introducing foreign cells.”

He also claimed that the myoendothelial cells used in this study were more effective at repairing the injured cardiac muscle and reducing scar tissue than previous approaches that have used muscle cells known as myoblasts.

At six weeks after injection, the myoendothelial cell-injected hearts functioned at 40 to 50 percent more effectively compared with hearts that had been injected with myogenic cells (myoblasts).

The results of the study are published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

If you are among those who try experimenting with new things-whether it’s food, places or even your job-then there are chances that your neural connection between ventral striatum and hippocampus is particularly well developed, say Bonn scientists.

Both, ventral striatum and hippocampus are centres in the brain and perform different functions. While the reward system that governs how to take action is located in the striatum, the hippocampus is responsible for specific memory functions.

Michael X. Cohen and Dr. Bernd Weber from Bonn have hypothesised that in innovation-oriented people, both of these centres apparently interact particularly well.

They say that if the hippocampus identifies an experience as new, it sends the corresponding feedback to the striatum, where certain neurotransmitters are then released which lead to positive feelings.

With people who constantly seek new experiences, striatum and hippocampus are evidently wired particularly well.

Till date, it’s been quite difficult to make the individual ‘wiring’ of the brain visible, but the new method of using modern MRI has actually revolutionised the exploration of the brain.

“In principle this was only possible using cross sections of the brain of deceased people, which in addition had to be stained in a complex process,” explained Weber.

With modern MRI, its possible to determine in which directions the water in the tissue diffuses.

“With this hazard-free method we can work on completely new issues related to the function of the brain,” said Cohen enthusiastically.

In the current study the researchers focused on the ‘wiring’ of the striatum. Also, the test candidates had to choose descriptions that characterised their personality best from a questionnaire, e.g. “I like to try out new things just for fun or because it’s a challenge” or alternatively “I prefer to stay at home rather than travelling or investigating new things.”

On the other hand, descriptions such as “I want to please other people as much as possible” or “I don’t care whether other people like me or the way I do things,” were about social acceptance. Even in this case, researchers noticed a link.

“The stronger the connection between frontal lobe and ventral striatum, the more distinctive the desire for recognition by that person’s environment,” said Weber.

But, that wasn’t something unexpected. For example, it is known that people with defects of the frontal lobe violate social norms more frequently.