WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 (UPI) -- NASA plans to launch a new exploration rover to Mars next fall, despite budget and technical concerns, a NASA official said Friday.

"All indications are that they're still on track for the '09 launch," Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program, said at a teleconference.

The space agency will review the mission's progress again in January, he said.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in charge of building the spacecraft, believes it needs an additional $100 million, on top of previous budget increases, to meet the current launch schedule.

The original $1.6 billion budget has already been increased to $1.9 billion, McCuistion said.

Agency officials are working with the White House and Congress on budget challenges and monitoring progress on hardware and software development, McCuistion said.

The rover, officially known as the Mars Science Laboratory, is part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the red planet.

The rover -- a space exploration vehicle designed to move across Mars' surface -- will assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, able to support life, even of microorganisms, NASA says.

The rover plans to analyze dozens of samples scooped from the soil and drilled from rocks to determine the planet's present and past climate and geology, NASA says.

The exploration program includes three previous successful landers -- the two Viking landers in 1976 and Pathfinder in 1997.

Shark's pup called 'virgin birth'

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va., Oct. 10 (UPI) -- A female shark in a Virginia aquarium without any male companionship of her kind is responsible for a "virgin birth," a scientific journal reported Friday.

Tidbit -- an Atlantic blacktip shark at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center -- was found through DNA testing to have carried a pup that contained no genetic material from a male, the Journal of Fish Biology said.

The testing was conducted after Tidbit died in May 2007.The pup died in utero along with its mother.

Tidbit's pregnancy is the second documented case of a virgin birth, or "parthenogenesis," wrote Demian Chapman, a shark scientist with the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Chapman documented the first virgin shark birth in a hammerhead at Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Neb., in May.

"I'm sure this happens in the wild, but haven't been able to prove it yet," Chapman told the Los Angeles Times.

Some scientists have suggested virgin births may be a last-ditch way for severely depleted shark populations to reproduce if their numbers fall so low that males cannot find females, the Times said.

Chapman is writing a book on sharks' often brutal and sometimes deadly sex acts.

"It's taken us a long time to figure out that a female doesn't need a male," Chapman told the Times. "You couldn't blame them for reproducing asexually because the sex is often quite violent."

Bird flu survival tied to hands-on therapy

BLOOMFIELD, Conn., Oct. 10 (UPI) -- Chances of surviving a deadly avian flu pandemic would likely increase with hands-on therapy, even without antiviral drugs, a U.S. health newsletter says.

Integrative manual therapy in the area of the spleen and liver, for instance, would help fluid, blood and lymph flow appropriately, significantly boosting people's immune systems and helping them endure the feared pandemic, The Burnham Review said.

The avian H5N1 flu -- spreading from birds to other animals and people in Asia, Europe and Africa -- has claimed at least 245 human lives, the Geneva-based World Health Organization says.

Healthy young adults are at greatest risk, the WHO says.

Epidemiologists are afraid the next time the virus mutates, it could pass from human to human, resulting in a pandemic that could kill 60 percent of the people who catch it.

The precedent that experts fear is the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 100 million people worldwide -- often healthy young adults, The Burnham Review said.

The review said flu patients back then who received manipulative therapy had a 0.25 percent mortality rate, compared to a 6 percent U.S. average.

"The results are striking," Editor Kimberly Burnham told United Press International.

"Some gentle manipulative therapy resulted in a dramatic difference in mortality," said Burnham, who has a doctorate in integrative medicine from Westbrook University.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Julie Gerberding calls an avian flu pandemic "the most important (health) threat that we are facing right now."

Report: Global warming makes animals move

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 (UPI) -- Global warming is forcing animals to higher elevations, causing them to intrude on established populations, a U.S. scientific journal says.

Some mountain animals, left with smaller ranges to forage for food, face extinction while others are competing with animal populations in new habitats, Science reported.

"These kinds of changes have been going on forever," said James Patton, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.

"The only difference is ... the speed with which these changes are taking place," Patton told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Patton and colleagues surveyed 28 mammal species studied by late Berkeley ornithologist Joseph Grinnell beginning in 1914.

They found that since Grinnell completed his work, the central Sierra National Forest in California had seen continuous warming, with nighttime low temperatures averaging 5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than 90 years ago.

During the same period, more than half the species Grinnell studied shifted their ranges upward by as much as 1,600 feet, the researchers said.

Others that stayed put, such as the bushy-tailed wood rat and Allen's chipmunk, significantly shrank in number and face extinction, the researchers said.

Similar changes endanger plant and insect species in some of Earth's warmest places, a companion report by University of Connecticut entomologist Robert Colwell said.