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Two rare white tiger cubs were killed by their mother in Orissa’s Nandankanan zoo, an official said Wednesday. The two-day-old cubs were found dead by zoo veterinarians on Tuesday.

“It was their mother who killed the cubs. Either it was an accident or she killed the cubs deliberately,” a senior official of the zoo told. He said one of the cubs bore injuries on its tail while the other’s nose was bleeding.

In 2007 also, the 13-year-old tigress gave birth to two cubs and killed them. After the death of the cubs, the population of tigers in the zoo has come down to 28, of which 11 are white. These include one white cub and three normal coloured cubs.

“Other cubs are in good health and their mothers are caring,” the official said. Nandankanan zoo is located in Khurdha district, 20 km from here, and spread over an area of 425 hectares.

It houses over 1,200 wild animals and offers a white tiger safari, first of its kind in the world.

In a new research, scientists at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC), Canada, have shown that global warming can actually change the molecular structure of organic matter in soil.

“Soil contains more than twice the amount of carbon than does the atmosphere, yet, until now, scientists haven’t examined this significant carbon pool closely,” said Myrna J. Simpson, principal investigator and Associate Professor of Environmental Chemistry at UTSC.

“Through our research, we’ve sought to determine what soils are made up of at the molecular level and whether this composition will change in a warmer world,” she added.

Soil organic matter is what makes dirt fertile and able to support plant life – both of which are especially important for agriculture. Organic matter retains water in the soil and prevents erosion.

Natural processes of decomposition of soil organic matter provide plants and microbes with the energy source and water they need to grow, and carbon is released into the atmosphere as a by-product of this process.

Warming temperatures are expected to speed up this process, which will increase the amount of CO2 that is transferred to the atmosphere.

“From the perspective of agriculture, we can’t afford to lose carbon from the soil because it will change soil fertility and enhance erosion,” said Simpson.

“Alternatively, consider all the carbon locked up in permafrost in the Arctic. We also need to understand what will happen to the stored carbon when microbes become more active under warmer temperatures,” she added.

Until Simpson’s research, scientists didn’t know much about soil’s molecular composition.

Part of the reason is that, from a chemical perspective, soil is difficult to analyze due to its many components, including bacteria, fungi and an array of fresh, partially degraded, or old plant material.

Simpson’s team, which includes research collaborators Professors Dudley Williams and Andre Simpson, is uniquely positioned to address this new frontier.

The team uses a NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) facility to gain a detailed view of soil’s molecular structure and reactivity.

In their current study, Simpson’s team used an outdoor field experiment in the valley behind the UTSC campus to ensure natural ecosystem processes were preserved.

Electrodes warmed the test soil between three and six degrees through winter and summer seasons, over a 14-month period. Throughout the test period, the team analyzed the molecular composition of soil samples.

A new research has suggested that the changes in sea level will affect the salinity of estuaries, which influences aquatic life, fishing and recreation.

The research was done by researchers from Penn State University and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, who are studying the Chesapeake Bay to see how changes in sea level may have affected the salinity of various parts of the estuary.

“Many have hypothesized that sea-level rise will lead to an increase in estuarine salinity, but the hypothesis has never been evaluated using observations or 3-D models of estuarine flow and salinity,” said Timothy W. Hilton, a student in meteorology at Penn State University.

“The Chesapeake is very large, the largest estuary in the U.S. and it is very productive,” said Raymond Najjar, associate professor of meteorology. “It has been the site of many large fisheries and supported many fishermen. A lot of money has gone into cleaning up the bay and reducing nutrient and sediment inputs. Climate change might make this work easier, or it could make it harder,” he added.

The Chesapeake is naturally saltier near its mouth and fresher near the inflow of rivers.

The researchers, who also included Ming Li and Liejun Zhong of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, studied the Chesapeake Bay, using two complementary approaches, one based on a statistical analysis of historical data and one based on a computer model of the bay’s flow and salinity.

They looked at historical data for the Susquehanna River as it flows into the Chesapeake Bay from 1949 to 2006.

The flow of this fresh water into the bay naturally changes salinity. After accounting for the change in salinity due to rivers, the researchers found an increasing trend in salinity.

The team then ran a hydrodynamic model of the Bay using present-day and reduced sea level conditions.

The salinity change they found was consistent with the trend determined from the statistical analysis, supporting the hypothesis that sea-level rise has significantly increased salinity in the Bay.

“Salt content affects jelly fish, oysters, sea grasses and many other forms of aquatic life,” said Hilton. “Our research improves our understanding of the influence of climate change on the Bay and can therefore be used to improve costly restoration strategies,” he added.

Canada’s Conservative government, shifting positions in the wake of Barack Obama’s election as U.S. president, said on Wednesday that it would work to develop a North America-wide cap-and-trade system to limit emissions of greenhouse gases.

The Conservatives, who walked away from the Kyoto protocol on climate change after taking power in 2006, have until now focused on cutting the intensity of emissions rather than imposing outright curbs.

“We will work with the provincial governments and our partners to develop and implement a North America-wide cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases,” the government said as it unveiled plans for the new session of Parliament.

Obama favors much tougher greenhouse gas reduction targets than those set by the Conservatives, and says he will start a cap-and-trade system.

Environment Minister Jim Prentice told reporters that Canada’s policy in part reflected Obama’s election.

Green groups said the Conservatives’ new positioning is largely academic as Canada would likely go along with whatever approach the new U.S. administration takes because the U.S. economy is around 10 times the size of Canada’s.

“I think we will be forced into a North American-wide cap-and-trade system that will basically be dictated by Washington…. It’s the only system that can work. We’ve got an integrated economy,” said Stephen Hazell, executive director of Sierra Club Canada.

The Conservatives’ approach to climate change to date has been much closer to that of President George W. Bush.

The Kyoto protocol committed Canada to cutting emissions by 6 percent from 1990 levels by 2012, a target the Conservatives say is totally unrealistic.

Last year Ottawa released a plan calling for a 20 percent cut in 2007 emissions by 2020. This compares with Obama’s much more stringent target of cutting emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Last week, Prentice said a U.S. cap-and-trade system could coexist with a Canadian approach of targeting emissions intensity.

“I think the Canadian government is just trying to con the Canadian public into believing that it’s going to do something about climate change,” said John Bennett, chief spokesman for the Green Party.

He said Canadian and U.S. environmentalists would “make very clear to the U.S. administration that it’s apples and oranges” when it comes to comparing both plans.

Although Canada is the single largest supplier of energy to the United States, Obama’s team has expressed reservations about U.S. imports of oil from the oil sands in the western province of Alberta.

The process of removing oil from the sands produces vast amounts of emissions

Alberta — the bedrock of the Conservative party — strongly opposes the idea of a cap-and-trade system, and Ottawa’s plan was quickly attacked by provincial Premier Ed Stelmach as too risky.

“We’ve just come through the world’s worst financial crisis where people were not telling the truth about the risk … who’s thinking here?” said Stelmach, complaining that Alberta was not told in advance about the announcement.

Stelmach said the province would continue to pursue its own plans that focus on efforts to capture carbon emissions and store them underground.

Ottawa also said it would set an objective that 90 percent of electricity needs by 2020 be met “by non-emitting sources such as hydro, nuclear, clean coal or wind power.”

It also said it would reduce various regulatory barriers to make it easier to build natural gas pipelines into the Arctic, which has rich reserves.

A city of brittle stars off the coast of New Zealand, an Antarctic expressway where octopuses ride along in a flow of extra salty water and a carpet of tiny crustaceans on the Gulf of Mexico sea floor are among the wonders discovered by researchers compiling a massive census of marine life.

“We are still making discoveries,” but researchers also are busy assembling data already collected into the big picture of life in the oceans, senior scientist Ron O’Dor said.

The fourth update of the census was released Sunday ahead of a meeting of hundreds of researchers that begins Tuesday in Valencia, Spain. More than 2,000 scientists from 82 nations are taking part in the project, which is to be completed in 2010.

A discovery that delights O’Dor is that many deep-ocean octopuses share an Antarctic origin. As the Antarctic got colder, ice increased and octopuses were forced into deeper water, he said in a telephone interview.

Salt and oxygen are concentrated in the deeper waters, he said. This dense water then flows out, carrying along the octopuses that have adapted to the new conditions, enabling them to spread to deep waters around the world.

Deep-water octopuses worldwide, he pointed out, lack the ink sack that allows their shallow-water cousins to shoot out a camouflage screen.

After all, if they live where it is dark, ink is unnecessary, said O’Dor, a Canadian member of the research team.

Patricia Miloslavich, a senior scientist from Venezuela, is pleased with newly discovered mollusks, from snails to cuttlefish to squids.

Once the census is complete, the plan is to publish three books: a popular survey of sea life, a second book with chapters for each working group and a third focusing on biodiversity.

O’Dor said also researchers are working with the online scientific journal PLoS ONE, which is open to anyone and thus would make the results readily available.

Scientists at this week’s sessions will hear about the discovery of what the researchers call a brittle star city off the coast of New Zealand.

The brittle stars, animals with five arms, have colonized the peak of a seamount — an underwater mountain — where the current flows past at about 2.5 miles per hour. The current delivers such an ample food supply that thousands of stars can capture food simply by raising their arms.

Researchers found a carpet of small crustaceans inhabiting the head of the Mississippi Canyon in the Gulf of Mexico. There are as many as 12,000 of these small crustaceans per square yard.

Among the other findings being reported at the meeting:

European Union leaders were deeply divided on Thursday over calls by Poland, Italy and other countries to dilute and delay an ambitious programme to fight global warming to take account of the looming economic downturn.

On the second and final day of the bloc’s summit in Brussels, the leaders were expected to confirm their approval of a USD 2.3 trillion emergency bailout for the banking sector and call for a concerted global approach to revamp the world’s financial system to prevent a repeat of the crisis that devastated money markets in recent weeks.

As the financial turmoil spills over into the real economy with signs that a prolonged global recession is looming, the leaders indicated support to the banking sector could be extended to other sectors.

Poland and six other Eastern European nations infuriated other EU nations with a surprise demand that the bloc drop a December target for adopting plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020.

They say the financial crisis has made it too difficult for European industry to take on the burden of adapting to a clean economy. Italy also threatened to veto the climate change plan unless its industries are given more protection.

“Our companies are in no state to take on costs like those we thought about last year,” Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told reporters last evening.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy who currently heads the EU was adamant that the economic crisis should not derail the climate change targets adopted last year. He said the bloc’s credibility was at stake.

The text message from the elephant flashed across Richard Lesowapir’s screen: Kimani was heading for neighboring farms.

The huge bull elephant had a long history of raiding villagers’ crops during the harvest, sometimes wiping out six months of income at a time. But this time a mobile phone card inserted in his collar sent rangers a text message. Lesowapir, an armed guard and a driver arrived in a jeep bristling with spotlights to frighten Kimani back into the Ol Pejeta conservancy.

Kenya is the first country to try elephant texting as a way to protect both a growing human population and the wild animals that now have less room to roam. Elephants are ranked as “near threatened” in the Red List, an index of vulnerable species published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The race to save Kimani began two years ago. The Kenya Wildlife Service had already reluctantly shot five elephants from the conservancy who refused to stop crop-raiding, and Kimani was the last of the regular raiders. The Save the Elephants group wanted to see if he could break the habit.

So they placed a mobile phone SIM card in Kimani’s collar, then set up a virtual “geofence” using a global positioning system that mirrored the conservatory’s boundaries. Whenever Kimani approaches the virtual fence, his collar texts rangers.

They have intercepted Kimani 15 times since the project began. Once almost a nightly raider, he last went near a farmer’s field four months ago.

It’s a huge relief to the small farmers who rely on their crops for food and cash for school fees. Basila Mwasu, a 31-year-old mother of two, lives a stone’s throw from the conservancy fence. She and her neighbors used to drum through the night on pots and pans in front of flaming bonfires to try to frighten the elephants away.

Once an elephant stuck its trunk through a window into a room where her baby daughter was sleeping and the family had stored some corn. She beat it back with a burning stick. Another time, an elephant killed a neighbor who was defending his crop.

“We had to go into town to tell the game (wardens) to chase the elephants away or we’re going to kill them all,” Mwasu remembered.

But the elephants kept coming back.

Batian Craig, the conservation and security manager at the 90,000 acre Ol Pejeta conservancy, says community development programs are of little use if farmers don’t have crops. He recalled the time when 15 families had their harvests wiped out.

“As soon as a farmer has lost his livelihood for six months, he doesn’t give a damn whether he has a school or a road or water or whatever,” he said.

Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants, said the project is still in its infancy — so far only two geofences have been set up in Kenya — and it has its problems.

Collar batteries wear out every few years. Sometimes communities think placing a collar on an elephant implies ownership and responsibility for the havoc it causes. And it’s expensive work — Ol Pejeta has five full-time staff and a standby vehicle to respond when a message flashes across a ranger’s screen.

But the experiment with Kimani has been a success, and last month another geofence was set up in another part of the country for an elephant known as Mountain Bull. Moses Litoroh, the coordinator of Kenya Wildlife Service’s elephant program, hopes the project might help resolve some of the 1,300 complaints the Service receives every year over crop raiding.

The elephants can be tracked through Google Earth software, helping to map and conserve the corridors they use to move from one protected area to another. The tracking also helps prevent poaching, as rangers know where to deploy resources to guard valuable animals.

But the biggest bonus so far has been the drop in crop raiding. Douglas-Hamilton says elephants, like teenagers, learn from each other, so tracking and controlling one habitual crop raider can make a whole group change its habits.

Mwasu’s two young daughters play under the banana trees these sultry evenings without their mother worrying about elephants.

“We can live together,” she said. “Elephants have the right to live, and we have the right to live too.”

Half to three-quarters of major Antarctic penguin colonies could be damaged or wiped out if global temperatures are allowed to climb by more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to a report released on Wednesday.

A two degree hike would threaten 50 percent of breeding grounds of emperor penguins, and 75 percent of Adelie penguin colonies, said the study, released by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) at the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona.

The United Nation’s panel of climate change scientists has warned that earth’s average temperature could increase more than two degrees Celsius by century’s end even if major efforts are made curb greenhouse gases, and twice as fast under “business-as-usual” scenarios.

A reduction in the sea ice is also likely to have a knock-on effect on the abundance of krill, which is a vital food source for penguins, concludes the report.

“Penguins are very well adapted to living in the cold and extreme conditions of Antarctica,” said the WWF’s Juan Casavelos, noting that warming has already contributed to a reduction in populations.

“If temperatures increase by another two degrees these icons of the Antarctic will be seriously threatened,” he said.

A two-degree increase above pre-industrial temperatures is widely viewed among scientists as the threshold beyond which climate change will have severe consequences for Earth’s ecosystems, including for humans.

While curbing global warming is the only viable long-term solution, conservationists have called for an expanded network of marine protected areas to reduce pressure on penguins, and for tighter management of krill and finfish fisheries the Southern Ocean.

The past decade in the northern hemisphere was the hottest in 1,300 years, scientists said.

The research was based on the makeup of corals, sediment and ice. Information on tree rings was not included in the research; otherwise the past decade would have been called the hottest in past 1,700 years.

Global surface temperatures have increased about 0.740C (plus or minus 0.180C) since the late-19th century, and the linear trend for the past 50 years of 0.130C (plus or minus 0.030C) per decade is nearly twice that for the past 100 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website.

The warming has not been globally uniform. The recent warmth has been greatest over North America and Eurasia between 40 and 700N. Lastly, seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001 and the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1995, it said.

Human activity has been increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The global concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere today far exceeds the natural range over the last 650,000 years of 180 to 300 parts per million by volume (ppmv). According to the IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES), by the end of the 21st century, we could expect to see carbon dioxide concentrations of anywhere from 490 to 1260 ppm (75-350% above the pre-industrial concentration), the website said.

Although it is difficult to connect specific weather events to global warming, an increase in global temperatures may in turn cause broader changes, including glacial retreat, Arctic shrinkage, and worldwide sea level rise.

The ozone hole is larger in 2008 than the previous year but is not expected to reach the size seen two years ago, the World Meteorological Organisation said Tuesday.

“In 2008, the ozone hole appeared relatively late. However, during the last couple of weeks it has grown rapidly and has now passed the maximum size attained in 2007,” the WMO said in a statement.

The hole in the layer over the Antarctic was discovered in the 1980s. It regularly tends to form in August, reaching its maximum size late September or early October before it fills again in mid-December.

The size it reaches is dependent on weather conditions.

Experts warned that such is the damage to the ozone layer, which shields the Earth from harmful ultra-violet rays, it will only attain full recovery in 2075.

“It would take decades for the hole to disappear and for it to return to the situation before 1980. We are looking at 2075,” Geir Braathen, who is the World Meteorological Organisation’s expert on the subject said to a news agency.

On September 13, the hole covered an area of 27 million square kilometers, while in 2007, the maximum reached was 25 million square kilometers, said the WMO.

“Since the ozone hole is still growing, it is too early to determine how large this year’s ozone hole will be,” it said further.

Ozone provides a natural protective filter against harmful ultra-violet rays from the sun, which can cause sunburn, cataracts and skin cancer and damage vegetation.

Its depletion is caused by extreme cold temperatures at high altitude and a particular type of pollution, from chemicals often used in refrigeration, some plastic foams, or aerosol sprays, which have accumulated in the atmosphere.

Most of these chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), are being phased out under the 1987 Montreal Protocol, but they linger in the atmosphere for many years.