Sage grouse: No endangered species status
WASHINGTON, March 5 (UPI) -- An iconic bird living in western U.S. sagebrush country faces extinction but won't be named an endangered species, the U.S. Interior Department said Friday.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a conservative Democrat from Colorado, said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists had concluded the greater sage grouse, which dwells in the U.S. West and southern Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada, deserved inclusion on the endangered species list.
But other species faced more imminent threats, so the sage grouse is now designated "warranted but precluded," meaning the bird merits protection but won't receive it for now.
Instead, it will be placed on a list of "candidate species" for future inclusion on the endangered species list and its status will be reviewed yearly, Salazar said.
The decision will likely be a boon to oil and gas companies -- and Republican lawmakers from the West -- who argued that giving the bird federal protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act would prevent further drilling in Wyoming and other states where the ground-hugging bird lives, The Baltimore Sun reported.
The ruling leaves sage grouse protection largely in the hands of the states, the newspaper said.
"We must find common-sense ways of protecting, restoring and reconnecting the Western lands that are most important to the species' survival while responsibly developing much-needed energy resources,'' Salazar said in a statement.
Home building and energy development have dwindled the sage grouse population in 11 Western states to an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 from some 16 million 100 years ago.
Some scientists predict the birds could disappear in the next 30 to 100 years.
Discovery astronauts do practice countdown
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., March 5 (UPI) -- Astronauts did a mock countdown in space shuttle Discovery at its Florida launch pad Friday, a month in advance of a flight to the International Space Station.
The countdown -- coordinated with 150 to 200 engineers at the Launch Control Center at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral -- ended with a simulated main engine shutdown at T-Minus 4 seconds, NASA said.
The seven-astronaut crew then practiced an emergency exit, crossing the Orbiter Access Arm at the 195-foot level of the launch tower and climbing into metal baskets that whisked them down a 1,200-foot slide-wire, Florida Today of Melbourne, Fla., reported.
The crew, led by mission commander Alan Poindexter, includes pilot James Dutton and mission specialists Clay Anderson, Rick Mastracchio, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Stephanie Wilson and Naoko Yamazaki of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Dutton, Metcalf-Lindenburger and Yamazaki will be making their first flights into space.
Discovery is set to blast off at 6:26 a.m. EST April 5 with a load of science experiments and a large pressurized container called a multipurpose logistics module used to transfer cargo to and from the space station.
It will be the next-to-last flight for Discovery, the oldest shuttle in service. Only four shuttle missions remain.
Discovery is set to make the final shuttle flight Sept. 16.
Warming data said stronger than IPCC claim
LONDON, March 5 (UPI) -- Evidence of manmade global warming is stronger than the besieged U.N. climate panel claimed, with rainfall changes altering the Earth, British scientists said.
"The fingerprint of human influence has been detected in many different aspects of observed climate changes," Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the Hadley Center for Climate Research run by Britain's meteorological office, said in remarks quoted by the Financial Times. "Natural variability, from the sun, volcanic eruptions or natural cycles, cannot explain recent warming."
Stott spoke on behalf of an international research team, led by Britain's Met Office, that analyzed more than 100 scientific papers to update the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report.
The 2007 report seized worldwide attention after asserting human activity was warming the planet in ways that could greatly disrupt human affairs and nature.
The panel, which won a Nobel Peace Prize for its report, is now accused by climate skeptics, conservative politicians and some mainstream scientists of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest.
The latest review, published in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, pointed to human-made warming evidence that was not clear in 2007.
This includes climate change in the Antarctic, which covers some 20 percent of the Southern Hemisphere and is the last continent where regional warming has been demonstrated, the research review said.
The subtropical Atlantic Ocean is also becoming warmer and saltier, which could modify ocean currents, the research suggested.
The ocean warming is also increasing evaporation, boosting humidity in the atmosphere and changing rainfall patterns. This means less rainfall in the tropics and more at higher latitudes, the Financial Times cited Stott as saying.
Researcher: People are very predictable
BOSTON, March 5 (UPI) -- People's travel habits are so predictable they can be accurately calculated in advance up to 93 percent of the time, says a Boston physicist.
Chaoming Song, a Northeastern University physics doctoral student, said cellphone analysis showed how predictable people are.
"The most surprising thing to us is the lack of variability in predictability across the population, meaning that most all the users have same degree of predictability," regardless of their gender, age, or language spoken, Song said on the LiveScience Web site.
Song is lead author of a study published in the journal Science.
Song and colleagues at Harvard University and China's Chengdu University of Technology tracked the movements of 50,000 anonymous European cellphone users over three months every time the users received a call or text message.
They found most users stayed within 6 miles of their home, while the most predictable users stayed within 2 1/2 miles, making an average of one phone call every 2 hours.
They also found the likelihood the phone users would be at their No. 1 most-visited location was 70 percent.
"So at any point during the day, if the scientists were to predict a participant was at this popular spot, they'd be correct 70 percent of the time," LiveScience said.
Frequent travelers were no less predictable than homebodies, the study found.
Participants were somewhat less predictable on weekends and when they were traveling to and from work or on their lunch break -- but they were still predictable.
The findings could help with traffic and disease control, Song and his colleagues write in their paper.
"At a more fundamental level, they also indicate that, despite our deep-rooted desire for change and spontaneity, our daily mobility is, in fact, characterized by a deep-rooted regularity."
