news20100110jt1

[TODAY'S TOP STORIES] from [The Japan Times]

[NATIONAL NEWS]
Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010
Six held in H.K. over Ginza heist

HONG KONG (Kyodo) Hong Kong police said Saturday they have arrested six people — five from Hong Kong and one from mainland China — who were allegedly involved in the robbery of luxury watches and other items from a jewelry shop in Tokyo's Ginza shopping district during the New Year's holidays.

The six suspects are three men and three women aged between 36 and 53. Two were arrested Thursday at two public housing estates in Hong Kong, while another two were arrested Friday at another public housing estate.

"We have retrieved about 180 watches from five of the six parcels sent by express mail from Japan to Hong Kong," Adrian Kwan, organized crime superintendent, told reporters. "We believe objects in the other parcel have been sold on the market."

The value of the stolen properties amounts to about 18 million Hong Kong dollars ($2.32 million), he said.

The investigation revealed that three of the suspects allegedly broke into the Tenshodo jeweler in Ginza sometime between Dec. 31 and Jan. 2 and mailed the stolen items to Hong Kong on Monday. The three left Japan for Hong Kong the same day.

Kwan said police found the stolen items, including watches, rings, necklaces and bank notes, inside the suspects' homes and safe deposit boxes in banks, and among them 104 watches were confirmed stolen from the Tenshodo store in Ginza.

Kwan said the police will discuss the case with Japan's liaison officers in Hong Kong on Monday. There is no extradition treaty between Japan and Hong Kong.


[NATIONAL NEWS]
Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010
Locals don't want Futenma: Nakaima

NAHA, Okinawa Pref. (Kyodo) Okinawa Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima told Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirofumi Hirano on Saturday that prefectural residents are insistent that U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma be relocated outside Okinawa.

"Prefectural residents hope to see the air station moved outside of the prefecture. Please answer" their call, Nakaima told Hirano during their meeting at the Okinawa Prefectural Government office, officials accompanying the top government spokesman said.

After the meeting, Nakaima told reporters that he would not consider using Shimoji or Ie islands in the prefecture as a possible relocation site, as has been suggested.

Hirano, who chairs a new government panel on the issue, flew to the prefecture Friday to hear the opinions of the local government and prefectural residents on the matter.

He told the governor that the government is making efforts to reach a conclusion by May, but also suggested Okinawa may be asked to bear some of the burden, including accepting part of the air station's functions.

"We may have to ask for your decision," Hirano was quoted by the officials as telling the Okinawa governor.

Hirano later told reporters that while the panel will consider the issue from scratch, there may be cases in which the government may ask the local government for a "political decision" in the course of deliberations.

Nakaima also reiterated the prefecture's call for reviewing the 1960 Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement and for taking tentative measures such as moving some training programs at the U.S. air station to other sites before the eventual relocation.

As for the review of the status of forces agreement, Hirano said the government has been discussing the matter with the United States "based on a relationship of trust," according to the officials.

Later on Saturday, Hirano visited the Futenma base.


[NATIONAL NEWS]
Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010
Sea Shepherd denies claims Ady Gil armed, leaking fuel
Bloomberg

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has denied claims by the Japanese Institute for Cetacean Research that the environmental group's ship that was chasing whalers was armed, and that its wreck is now leaking fuel into the Antarctic Ocean.

The Ady Gil, a New Zealand-registered powerboat that is part of Sea Shepherd's protest against Japan's annual whaling expedition, was left to sink in Antarctica Friday after it was involved in a collision with the whalers' Shonan Maru No. 2 on Jan. 6.

The institute posted a video on its Web site that allegedly shows fuel leaking from the sunken Ady Gil.

"We removed all fuel and lubricants from the ship and notified authorities to let them know" it was sinking, Jeff Hansen, Australian director of the Sea Shepherd, said. The whalers "just need some way to try and get the heat off them. It's completely not true."

The institute's claims that the Ady Gil was armed are also untrue, Hansen said.

Sea Shepherd has filed a piracy claim against the captain and crew of the Shonan Maru No. 2 in the Netherlands, Agence France Presse reported, citing the environmental group's legal representative, Liesbeth Zegveld. It will also pursue a civil suit for damages to the Ady Gil, she said.

The sinking is a 1.5 million Australian dollar ($1.4 million) loss to the Sea Shepherd, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported Friday, citing founder Paul Watson.

The Australian government hasn't ruled out the prospect of taking legal action against the whalers, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard said in an interview on Channel Nine's "Weekend Today" program. The Shonan Maru No. 2 was in Australian waters when the collision occurred.

The Australian government has gathered evidence on the whalers that it is putting to the International Whaling Commission and the Japanese government, Gillard said.

New Zealand officials met with Japan's ambassador in Wellington to discuss the process of its investigation, and Tokyo has promised full cooperation, Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully said Friday.

news20100110jt2

[TODAY'S TOP STORIES] from [The Japan Times]

[ENVIRONMENT]
Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010
NATURAL SELECTIONS
Beware: Reading this may swamp your sea horses
By ROWAN HOOPER

Reading this column could be an unforgettable way to start the new year.

Why? Because as you peruse this piece you are losing something of your past. Sorry about that. It is probably nothing too important. In fact, I am doing you a favor by helping you erase some old, unwanted, unimportant memories clogging up your neurons.

How do I know? Read on.

It's all to do with a vital part of the brain called the hippocampus. Five hundred years ago, anatomists who dissected and described the brain were struck by a funny little curved structure they found deep in the temporal lobes on either side of the cerebral cortex. They thought they looked like sea horses -- so they named them collectively the hippocampus, the scientific name for sea horse, from the Greek hippos (horse) and kampos (sea monster).

For many years, no one knew what the hippocampus did. Now, though, it has been found to play an important role in the formation of memories. When Alzheimer's disease strikes, for example, the hippocampus is one of the first parts of the brain to be damaged. So understanding how it works is not only key to knowing how our own autobiography is recorded, but it will also help us deal with the "silver tsunami" of an aging population.

This breakthrough in our comprehension of the hippocampus comes because of new Japanese work that suggests our short-term memory -- go back to the beginning if you've already forgotten that I was talking about memory -- may depend on the ability of newly formed neurons in those parts of the brain to erase older connections.

At least that's what seems to happen in mice and rats.

Kaoru Inokuchi of the University of Toyama, and colleagues, found that new neurons in the brain cause other memories to decay — but overall memory size remains the same. It's like when your iPod is full of music, you have to delete some songs in order to put new ones in.

Inokuchi says the discovery shows a more important role than many anticipated for the erasure of memories.

In other words, though we can understand intuitively that memory creation is essential, Inokuchi's work is showing how we might need to prune away excess memories to make new ones.

His team suggest that the birth of new neurons promotes the gradual loss of memory traces from the hippocampus as those memories are transferred to elsewhere in the brain for permanent storage.

"All memories that are initially stored in the hippocampus are influenced by this process," said Inokuchi, although his team has at the moment only looked at how "brain-pruning" occurs in the context of fear memory.

What this suggests is that problems with making new neurons might lead to "space" problems -- just like when your iPod is full. In effect the brain's short-term memory may literally be full.

As Inokuchi puts it, we might experience difficulties in acquiring new information because the storage capacity of the hippocampus is "occupied by unerased old memories."

Scientists have known for some time that new neurons continue to form in the hippocampus of adults, even into old age. But it wasn't clear what those newborn brain cells actually do.

Inokuchi's team at the Mitsubishi Kagaku Institute of Life Sciences suspected that the incorporation of new neurons into pre-existing neural circuits might also disturb the structure of pre-existing information — and indeed, that is what their findings now show.

In the course of their investigations, the researchers irradiated rats' brains, which drastically reduced the formation of new neurons. They then found that neural connections in the hippocampus that would have otherwise naturally decayed were instead maintained.

Similar experiments that suppressed neurogenesis in the hippocampus by either physical or genetic means also showed prolonged persistence of fear memories.

On the other hand, voluntary exercise, which causes a rise in the birth of new neurons, speeded up the decay rate of hippocampus-dependent memory, but without any memory loss. Could this be another reason why exercise makes us feel better?

"Enhanced neurogenesis caused by exercise may accelerate memory decay from the hippocampus, and at the same time it may facilitate memory transfer to the neocortex," Inokuchi said. "Hippocampal capacity of memory storage is limited, but in this way exercise could increase the (brain's overall) capacity."

Inokuchi's work might explain a puzzling finding about giving up smoking. Nicotine has the effect of stopping new brain cells forming in the hippocampus, but it also has a stimulatory effect on the brain. So when you stop smoking, you lose that stimulation but still might have problems in the hippocampus as a result of your previous nicotine habit.

There is also the intriguing finding that people with the epsilon-4 variant of the gene APOE, which is the biggest risk factor for getting Alzheimer's, have smaller hippocampi than others. It is unclear, however, whether the smaller size is a cause or effect of Alzheimer's.

There is still much to learn about the mysterious sea horses of the brain.

Meanwhile, while writing this column, I have come across "Kaiba," an anime series by Masaaki Yuasa screened on the Wowow TV channel that's about a man who is the "king of memories." Kaiba is the Japanese word for hippocampus. Now, I wonder what I've forgotten in learning that?

The second volume of Natural Selections columns translated into Japanese is published by Shinchosha at ¥1,500. The title is "Hito wa Ima mo Shinka Shiteru (The Evolving Human: How New Biology Explains your Journey through Life)."

news20100110lat

[Today's Newspaper] from [Los Angeles Times]

[U.S. & World > Environment]
Associated Press
January 10, 2010
Northwest orcas rebound, but still endangered
Six births bump up the population of killer whales off Washington and southwest British Columbia. Keeping the number up will be hard, experts say.

Seattle - A little over a year after researchers feared a drop in the Northwest's endangered killer-whale population meant disaster, the number of orcas has bounced back with six new babies and no whales lost.

Though scientific evidence is skimpy, some whale experts say the good news might be the result of enough salmon for the black-and-white mammals to eat. Others say so little is known about orcas that the baby boom could be a result of any number of factors -- or simply a statistical fluke.

Whatever the reason, they're overjoyed about the new arrivals.

"We're all very happy to see so many births," said Susan Berta of the Whidbey Island-based Orca Network.

"We're all hoping that they find lots of fish to keep them healthy and keep the mothers in good condition so they can feed the calves," she said.

The Center for Whale Research says that in 2008, eight orcas in the three pods, J, K and L, that make up the southern resident population in Washington and southwest British Columbia went missing and were presumed dead, including two females of reproductive age and the 98-year-old matriarch of K Pod. With just one surviving birth that year, the total in the three pods as of December 2008 dropped to 82.

That alarmed researchers. "This is a disaster," Ken Balcomb, a senior scientist at the San Juan Island-based center, said in October of that year.

But in 2009, no deaths were reported and five new calves were spotted, giving a December total of 87. A sixth infant was born Jan. 3 while its family, J Pod, was near Seattle on a winter visit, making it 88.

Balcomb and Howard Garrett, director of the Orca Network, think food might have something to do with it.

The whales feed on salmon -- particularly chinook salmon, the largest and arguably tastiest of the Pacific species. Chinooks are listed as threatened or endangered in several Northwest waterways, including Puget Sound and the Columbia River.

"Unfortunately, [the whales are] very picky," Garrett said, with chinooks sometimes making up 80% of their diet. It sounds simplistic, Garrett said, but "the way that we can tag the population fluctuations is directly from the chinook runs."

Taken as a whole, the runs in the region have held steady over at least the last two years, he said.

It's not that simple, said Brad Hanson, a wildlife biologist with the federal Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. He said that for much of the year, little is known about what salmon stocks the whales eat and where.

The southern orcas can travel widely, from the north end of Canada's Vancouver Island to Northern California for the K and L pods.

Depending on the river, he said, some salmon stocks are up, some down, some about average. And orcas face the same problem that bedevils all fishermen: hitting the right run at the right time under the right conditions.

"There's just so many different variables involved," Hanson said.

The three pods in the southern resident community -- J Pod based in the San Juan Islands, K Pod in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and L Pod off the coast -- are genetically and behaviorally distinct from other killer whales. Besides sticking to this region, their sounds are considered a unique dialect, they tend to mate only within their community, and they usually gather each year to socialize in a "super pod" near the San Juans.

Orcas have a 17-month gestation period, so at least six of the whales were pregnant a year ago. From a distance it's hard to tell whether an orca is pregnant, so no one on land knew they were expecting when worries over the lost whales emerged.

Over the years, the Center for Whale Research has tracked the southern population, and the numbers have varied from a low of 71 in 1977 to a high of 97 in 1996. The current total of 88, which matches the total in 2007, is far below the 140 or so that lived here before dozens were captured for aquariums and parks in the 1960s and early '70s.

After a 20% drop in their numbers in the late 1990s, blamed by many on pollution and dwindling salmon stocks, the southern resident orcas were listed as an endangered species in 2005. Experts estimate a long-term steady population of about 200 would be needed to take them off the list.

Experts caution that one good year isn't a recovery. Young orcas have a rough life -- commonly, about 50% die in their first year, they say. Crucial to their long-term survival, the experts say, will be cleaning up the marine environment and eliminating the toxic chemicals that collect in the whales' bodies and restoring the region's once-massive salmon runs.

Still, Balcomb said: "I'm just optimistic that this year's bumper crop of babies will prove to be their investment in the future."


[Nation > Science]
By Amina Khan
January 9, 2010
Sierra's current height goes back 50 million years, study finds
The finding adds to a growing body of evidence that the mountain range is much older than previously believed, and has implications for evolutionary studies.

The Sierra Nevada reached their present height 50 million years ago -- 30 million years earlier than geologists once believed, according to a new study.

The research, part of a growing body of evidence that the Sierra Nevada are far older than once thought, has implications for understanding the evolution of the plants and animals in the West, as well as the likely climate of ancient North America.

The study, by scientists at Yale University and the Berkeley Museum of Paleontology, used 50 million-year-old chemical traces left on ancient leaves by microbes and raindrops to calculate the new height estimate for the Sierras at that time.

The western United States would have looked very different then, filled with lush forests of vines and magnolias. The Pacific Ocean would have lapped the foot of the Sierra.

"This is a time period where there would have been crocodiles in Wyoming," said lead author Michael Hren, a University of Michigan postdoctoral fellow who did the research while at Yale.

Sampling ancient flood-plain sites, the researchers found leaves preserved in the oxygen-poor sediments. They analyzed the waxes on the surface of those ancient leaves, measuring levels of normal hydrogen and its slightly heavier isotope, deuterium. This gave them an estimate of the elevation at which the leaves grew.

As clouds rise up the side of mountains, water droplets containing the heavier deuterium fall first, and droplets containing the lighter hydrogen later. The lower the proportion of deuterium on a leaf, the higher up the mountain that leaf must have been, the scientists surmised.

Hren also looked at soil carried down from the mountains to the ancient flood plains, checking for chemicals left by microbes that lived in the sediments. Cell membranes in these microorganisms changed composition depending on whether it was cool or hot -- providing a kind of ancient biological thermometer.

Using those data, the scientists estimated that the temperature had been 6 to 8 degrees Celsius warmer than today.

The idea that the Sierra Nevada were sitting at their current height 30 million years earlier than anticipated has implications for studies on the evolution of plants and animals, scientists said.

For example, with the mountains already in place so long ago, "how could animals migrate from California into the Great Basin?" asked Paul Koch, chairman of the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at UC Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the research.

For understanding evolution of U.S. flora and fauna, "it matters a lot," he said.

The finding also has implications for historical climate estimates across North America. "Climate models require that you understand elevation," Koch said. "In Kansas it matters for you to get the topography of the Sierra Nevada right. In Florida it matters."

The study, published in the journal Geology, also provides a more accurate tool for exploring the elevation of ancient landscapes, said Diane M. Erwin, a study coauthor from the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology. In the past, such estimates have been made by studying leaf shapes. Such estimates can be less accurate than the deuterium method.

Putting together different pieces of data to create a coherent picture of the past is what drew him to the work, Hren said.

"It's amazing to break open a rock and look at these amazingly preserved leaves that can tell you a story from 50 million years ago."

news20100110nyt

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Week in Review]
By KENNETH CHANG
Published: January 9, 2010
Feeling That Cold Wind? Here’s Why.
A bitter wind has been blowing over parts of North America, Europe and Asia. Some places have been colder than ever, like Melbourne, Fla., which dipped to 28 degrees last Thursday, a record low. Europe has been walloped by snowstorm after snowstorm.

What’s going on? Global cooling?

Nope. A mass of high pressure is sitting over Greenland like a rock in a river, deflecting the cold air of the jet stream farther to the south than usual.

This situation is caused by Arctic oscillation, in which opposing atmospheric pressure patterns at the top of the planet occasionally shift back and forth, affecting weather across much of the Northern Hemisphere.

What’s notable this year is that the pattern of high pressure over the Arctic is more pronounced than at any time since 1950.

In most years over the past few decades, the opposite has been true: there has been lower-than-average pressure over the Arctic, and higher-than-average pressure over the mid-latitudes — the middle of which cuts through Maine, across the Great Lakes and on to Oregon.

That pattern allows the jet stream to blow unimpeded from west to east and keeps the cold Arctic air largely north of the United States. The result tends to be warmer temperatures across much of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains.

No one is quite sure what drives these flip-flops in air pressure.

“I tend to think of it as a random thing,” said John M. Wallace, who is a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. “I don’t think we understand any reasons why it goes one way one year and the other way another year.”

What does seem clear is that these oscillations have nothing to do with global warming, or, for that matter, global cooling. For one, they’re not new. And this winter’s cold has not been global. Santa, by North Pole standards, has been experiencing a balmy winter.

“Pretty much all of the Arctic is above normal,” said Dr. Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. In some areas, the temperatures are as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

In terms of global average temperature, this winter’s arctic oscillation “probably roughly cancels out,” Dr. Meier said. (In fact, last year ranked as the fifth-warmest year on record since 1850, the United Kingdom’s Met Office says.)

And it is certainly not the coldest air that has descended on the United States. In a great blizzard that swept across the East Coast in 1899, even parts of Florida dropped to below zero.

“We’re not close to those types of things,” said Michael Vojtesak of the National Weather Service.


[Energy & Environment]
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: January 8, 2010
China Tries a New Tack to Go Solar
HONG KONG — As it moves rapidly to become the world’s leader in nuclear power, wind energy and photovoltaic solar panels, China is taking tentative steps to master another alternative energy industry: using mirrors to capture sunlight, produce steam and generate electricity.

So-called concentrating solar power uses hundreds of thousands of mirrors to turn water into steam. The steam turns a conventional turbine similar to those in coal-fired power plants. The technology, which is potentially cheaper than most types of renewable power, has captivated many engineers and financiers in the last two years, with an abrupt surge in new patents and plans for large power operations in Europe and the United States.

This year may be China’s turn. China is starting to build its own concentrating solar power plants, a technology more associated with California deserts than China’s countryside. And Chinese manufacturers are starting to think about exports, part of China’s effort to become the world’s main provider of alternative energy power equipment.

Yet concentrating solar power still faces formidable obstacles here, including government officials who are skeptical that the technology will be useful on a large scale in China.

Much of the country is cloudy or smoggy. Water is scarce. The sunniest places left for solar power are deserts deep in the interior, far from the energy-hungry coastal provinces that consume most of China’s electricity. Provinces deep in the interior have few skilled workers or engineers to maintain the automated gear that keeps mirrors focused on towers that transfer the heat from sunbeams into fluids.

Concentrating solar power “is not very suitable for China,” wrote Li Junfeng, a senior government energy policy maker, in a detailed e-mail reply to questions this week.

Yet the private sector in China is racing to embrace the technology anyway.

A California solar technology company and a Chinese power equipment manufacturer plan to sign a deal on Saturday for the construction of up to 2,000 megawatts of power plants using concentrating solar power over the next decade, executives from both companies said this week. That is equivalent to the output of a couple of nuclear power plants. They will start with a 92-megawatt plant in Yulin, a town in a semi-desert area of Shaanxi Province in central China.

The Chinese equipment manufacturer, Penglai Electric, hopes to work with other Chinese manufacturers to drive production costs down precipitously, clearing the way for exports, although these would require further approval from the California licensor of the technology, eSolar.

Eric Wang, the senior vice president for international business development at Penglai Electric, said that manufacturing mirrors, turbines, towers and other equipment in China instead of the United States could cut costs by at least half. That could make concentrating solar power more competitive with other forms of power generation around the world.

China’s Ministry of Science, the Beijing municipal government and the Chinese Academy of Sciences are already building Asia’s first concentrating solar power plant on the outskirts of Beijing, although it is only a pilot operation to generate 1.5 megawatts.

Preparations are also under way for the construction of a 50-megawatt concentrating solar power plant in Gansu Province in northwestern China, said Min Deqing, a renewable energy consultant in Lanzhou, the provincial capital of Gansu.

But while nuclear power, wind energy and photovoltaic solar panels have strong backing from China’s political leaders and enormous financing by government-owned banks, concentrating solar power still faces deep-rooted skepticism in senior ranks of the government.

Unlike in the United States, the roots of that skepticism do not lie in concerns about disrupting the habitat of rare species in sunny, desert areas — a worry that may block some attempts to build concentrating solar power plants in the Mojave Desert.

Mr. Li wrote that concentrating solar power works best when cheap water, cheap land and lots of sun are available in the same place — a rare combination in China. Mr. Li also expressed concern that concentrating solar power would prove more expensive per kilowatt-hour generated than photovoltaic solar power, a technology in which China is already the world’s low-cost supplier.

Mr. Li has a lot of influence on these issues. He is a deputy director general for energy research at the National Development and Reform Commission, the top economic planning agency in China. And he is the secretary general of the government-backed Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association, which helps oversee these industries’ operations in China.

But Mr. Li did say that he saw a limited role for concentrating solar power, particularly in places where it could be combined with other power plants, or where it could be combined with a way to store power overnight. Penglai and eSolar hope to do both.

Water consumption, mainly to condense the steam after it has been used to generate electricity, is another potential weakness of the technology. Water tends to be scarce in deserts, of course. Penglai and eSolar are leaning toward air cooling instead of water cooling, at the price of cutting the efficiency of their plant.

Mr. Gross said the eSolar technology could also be used to create extra heat during the day, with the heat being stored and used to generate power at night — a form of the electricity storage sought by Mr. Li.

Despite the government’s skepticism, renewable energy investors remain enthusiastic about the potential for concentrating solar power projects in China. K. K. Chan, the chief executive of Nature Elements Capital, a renewable energy investment fund in Beijing, said that he had been looking at such deals in recent months after concluding that the valuations for photovoltaic solar projects were unreasonably high, possibly because that technology had such strong government backing.

Mr. Min in Lanzhou said that while there was little data yet on the cost of concentrating solar power, the price tag was likely to fall in China. “Eventually, when 100 percent domestically produced mirrors are used,” he said, “the cost will be lower than solar panel power plants.”

news20100110gdn1

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Whaling]
Paul Watson: Sea Shepherd's stern 'warrior' defies Japanese whalers
Environmental campaigner Paul Watson has lost one of his boats in a confrontation but is determined to save the oceans from 'the greed of man'
John Vidal
The Observer, Sunday 10 January 2010 Article history

Friday, 10.30pm, 61 degress South 120 West. Captain Paul Watson is on the bridge of the Steve Irwin, steaming due west at 17 knots in heavy seas past the ice floes of Wilkes Land in northern Antarctica.

Roughly 100 miles ahead of the former Scottish Environment Protection Agency patrol boat, now painted black and flying the jolly roger, is the bulk of the Japanese whaling fleet – mother ship, four harpoon hunter vessels and a security patrol boat – with a licence to kill 935 minke, 50 fin and 50 humpback whales in the next few weeks. Behind the Irwin, near the French Antarctic base of Dumont d'Urville, is the Bob Barker, Watson's second ship. It in turn is being pursued by a second Japanese security ship. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the Southern Ocean is the Ady Gil, the third ship in Captain Watson's anti-whaling navy. The $2.5m space-age catamaran-style, biofuel-powered, ocean-going speedboat sank on Friday morning after being hit by the Shonan Maru 2, one of the Japanese whalers.

"Not hit. Deliberately rammed," corrects Watson, at 59 still the world's least compromising and most romantic environmentalist. On a satellite link he says: "The Gil was almost stationary in the water. [The Shonan Maru 2] changed course abruptly and steered straight into it. One crewman broke two ribs. It was a miracle that no one was killed."

I had travelled with Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society from Scotland to the Faroe islands in 1999. Watson was even then a notorious figure, not unlike Captain Nemo, the Jules Verne character who roamed the depths of the sea in his submarine, the Nautilus.

"Nemo understood that it did not matter what humans thought, because humanity was the problem. His duty was to save life in the sea from the greed of mankind. I understand that philosophy and I have lived it every day of my adult life," he said.

Back in 1999, his crew of young volunteers were disciplined and clearly in awe of their captain, who accepted no "consensus shit", "abided no drugs" or "friggin' in the riggin'", and who forbade meat-eating aboard his ship. Few had been on a boat before, but everyone had complete confidence in his skills as a mariner and his respect for, and command of, international maritime law. They also expected and hoped for peaceful confrontation and seemed prepared to go to whatever lengths Watson asked of them.

We hunted whalers night and day for a week, but found none. Instead we were buzzed by the Danish air force, boarded by customs officers and ordered by the police to keep away from the islands. When I eventually asked to be put ashore to talk to the Faroese, Watson willingly provided an inflatable and dropped me at midnight on a beach. I was arrested and then imprisoned for illegal entry within minutes. Sea Shepherd clearly has the power to scare communities by doing nothing at all.


Last week Watson was full of praise for the 77 people from 16 countries, including Japan, who are crewing his three ships this year. In 30 years of harassing industrial fishers, he has taken 4,000 volunteers to Antarctica, the Pacific and the Atlantic to try to stop whaling, sealing and illegal fishing. Few have returned anything other than inspired and committed.

The sinking of the Gil was just the latest skirmish in what has become an annual battle between the volunteers for the California-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which Captain Watson founded after leaving Greenpeace in the 1970s, and the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research, a scientific research body that has effectively become the Japanese government's whalers.

For the last nine years these two small navies have clashed dramatically in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, an area of 50 million square kilometres (19 million square miles) in which the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has banned all types of commercial whaling.

One year the whaling fleet was chased 3,000km (1,850 miles) through icebergs; another, two Sea Shepherd volunteers were captured and tied to the railings of a Japanese ship after they had been invited on board; three years ago the Japanese allegedly shot at Watson; there have been water cannon battles, and last year the Japanese escalated the war by throwing concussion grenades on the Sea Shepherd boats. Sea Shepherd responded by throwing bottles filled with non-toxic but foul-smelling butyric acid on the Japanese. Each year the accusations have flown and the language has become more colourful: "We are obsessed with stopping the cetacean Death Star, that vicious, cruel killing machine and her fleet of boats armed with explosive harpoons," says Watson.

But what precisely happened last week is still not clear. It has been the subject of official protests by both vessels, and will be investigated by the Australian and Japanese governments, and possibly one or more courts. From videos released by both Watson and the Japanese in the last 48 hours, it appears that the Shonan Maru 2 bore down on the Gil with its water cannon blasting and issuing warnings from its loudspeaker that it had "authority to repel". No one disputes that it then sliced through the bow of the Gil, scattering its crew of six.

The Japanese accuse Sea Shepherd of being "hostile eco-terrorists". "The Sea Shepherd extremism is becoming more violent. Their actions are nothing but felonious behaviour. Aiming directly to the Nisshin Maru crew, the activists have repeatedly fired illegal high-powered laser devices that can produce blindness when irradiated to the naked eye and have fired projectiles containing butyric acid, a substance highly hazardous to the human body including skin and eyes," said a spokesman for the institute.

Yesterday lawyers working on behalf of Sea Shepherd lodged papers in a Dutch court accusing the Japanese of "piracy and violence". They in turn dismissed his statements as lies and accused Sea Shepherd of pollution and using bows and arrows.

But the private war has become more public and visible thanks to the internet, and the "whale wars" now threaten diplomatic relations between Australia and New Zealand and Japan. Both antipodean countries are officially embarrassed by the incidents taking place, but have a public overwhelmingly on Watson's side.

This year the Japanese fleet's position was relayed to Sea Shepherd not unofficially by the Australian navy, as it has been in the past, but first by small boats near Tasmania, and then by outraged holidaymakers aboard the cruise ship Orion, which happened on the whaling fleet as it was refuelling.


Watson is adamant that he is no terrorist. "In 31 years harassing and confronting whalers, sealers and illegal fishers, we have never injured a single person, never been convicted of a felony, or been sued. Sea Shepherd does not condone, nor do we practise, violence," he says. "We agree with the assessment by Martin Luther King that violence cannot be committed against a non-sentient object. Sea Shepherd sometimes damages equipment used for illegal activities, but we have an unblemished record."

"We think [the Japanese] are re-enacting the Second World War," said Watson yesterday. "They see themselves as against the West and that no one will tell them what to do."

But he freely admits damaging property. In a lifetime of confrontations beginning with Canadian sealers, he has used "prop foulers" to sabotage ships, boarded whaling vessels, and sunk several in Iceland and Norway.

"We're not a protest organisation. We intervene against illegal activities, and as far as we're concerned Japanese whalers are poachers. The oceans are being pillaged and we are the only organisation out on the high seas trying to do something about it," he says.

He told me he acted by a martial code culled from the methods of ancient eastern and modern western warfare, and that he expected to die for his cause. He quoted films, read widely, wrote poetry and books, laughed a lot.

Watson claims to have co-founded both Greenpeace and Greenpeace International in the early 1970s (something that Greenpeace disputes), but proved far too much for them. "He was a great warrior brother, yet in terms of the Greenpeace gestalt he seemed possessed by too powerful a drive, too unrelenting a desire to push himself front and centre, shouldering everyone else aside," said his friend Robert Hunter, who died four years ago.

He sailed with Greenpeace many times, and skippered one of its boats in 1972. But he severed all links with the organisation in 1977, after being expelled from the Greenpeace board.

What he wrote in his autobiography 16 years ago holds just as true today, he says: "There are many people who say that what we do is futile, that there is no way to stop the rising tide of human-spawned destruction. There are many who condemn my crew and I for taking the law into our own hands and for taking on the barons of corporate profit. There are some who would like to see us jailed or even dead, so blinded are they to the conceit and folly of their own anthropomorphism.

"I don't care. I do what I do because it is the right thing to do. I am a warrior and it is the way of the warrior to fight superior odds."

CONTINUED ON newsgdn2

news20100110gdn2

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Whaling]
Paul Watson: Sea Shepherd's stern 'warrior' defies Japanese whalers
Environmental campaigner Paul Watson has lost one of his boats in a confrontation but is determined to save the oceans from 'the greed of man'
John Vidal
The Observer, Sunday 10 January 2010 Article history

CONTINUED FROM newsgdn1

A life of protests

Nuclear weapons

In 1969 Paul Watson protested against Russian nuclear testing with the Don't Make a Wave committee, which later evolved into Greenpeace. He then tried to disrupt nuclear tests in the Pacific.

Seals

Watson has opposed the Canadian seal hunt since 1983. He blocked the port at St John's in Newfoundland, and brought the hunt to a near standstill. The hunt was later banned for 10 years after he took Brigitte Bardot to pose with a baby seal on the ice.

Whaling

Watson has outraged the governments of Japan, Iceland, Norway and Denmark by sinking or ramming whaling ships. He has chased the Japanese whaling fleets in Antarctica for nine years, claiming to have prevented the deaths of thousands of whales.

Fishing

Since 2000 Watson's ships have patrolled the Galápagos and Cocos Islands to try to stop illegal fishing, causing consternation among fishing fleets and governments.


[Environment > Farming]
McDonald's seeks to cut cows' methane emissions
Three-year study by burger giant aims to reduce pollution from flatulent livestock
Elizabeth Day
The Observer, Sunday 10 January 2010 Article history

McDonald's has long been the butt of jokes about what goes into its burgers, but now it is to spend thousands of pounds investigating what comes out of its beef cows.

The fast food chain, which uses beef from 350,000 cattle a year for its burger meat, is to conduct a three-year study into methane emissions from cattle on 350 farms across Britain. Gas produced by flatulent livestock accounts for 4% of the UK's total carbon emissions. It is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse agent.

The company's announcement comes after the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, called for the food industry to look at ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as part of the government's 2030 food strategy, which was unveiled last week.

A study carried out in America in 2006 calculated that producing a single cheeseburger involves the emission of around 3.1kg of carbon dioxide.

"This ground-breaking project will help drive further reductions in our beef supply chain," Steve Easterbrook, chief executive of McDonald's UK, told the Observer. "At the same time it should also deliver real financial benefits to the farmer."

The initiative will be the first of its kind to provide accurate data from working farms and is being run by the E-CO2 Project, an independent rural consultancy and energy-auditing company. A sophisticated greenhouse gas calculator accredited by the Carbon Trust will measure results over a three-year period. The first readings are due in April and specialist consultants will advise farmers on the best ways to reduce emissions and increase efficiency. If successful, the initiative will be extended to McDonald's in Europe.

The scheme is expected to have ramifications beyond the fast-food industry. Although McDonald's buys beef from more than 16,000 British and Irish farmers, its restaurants use only the forequarter and flank in burgers. Other retailers and butchers that use different cuts from the same animal will benefit from the same greenhouse gas reductions.

The scheme is part of a broader attempt by Easterbrook to rebrand McDonald's in the UK as a more socially aware and environmentally friendly organisation. He became chief executive in 2005, when the company was reeling from the negative publicity generated by Morgan Spurlock's 2004 film, Super Size Me.

Spurlock ate only McDonald's food for 30 days and put on almost two stone. His cholesterol level shot up. According to Easterbrook, 42, the film was "absurd… it was a foolish thing to do. Don't do it. Don't eat a McDonald's three times a day, 30 days a month."

McDonald's employs more than 80,000 people in the UK, more than half of whom are under 21. An apprenticeship scheme was introduced this month and staff can work towards nationally approved qualifications equivalent to GCSE or A-level.

Easterbrook has met the prime minister and senior Tories to talk about its expansion. "Gordon Brown was actively engaged and seemed very interested," said Easterbrook. "Effectively, it is about how young people, when they come out of education, can be more workplace-ready."

However much work he might have done to make McDonald's appear more socially aware, questions still remain. As the father of three daughters, all under 12, does Easterbrook have any qualms about the company's attempts to market directly to children, with the inclusion of a free toy in the McDonald's Happy Meal, for instance?

"No, not at all. I mean the reality is I wouldn't do the job if I didn't feel it was a good job to do, whether I've got children or not."

Two years ago McDonald's was advertising on report cards of American primary school pupils. Isn't that problematic? "We've got pretty clear rules through Ofcom here anyway," he replied, pointing out that McDonald's in the US is run separately. "We don't get involved in schools at all unless we're invited."

Does he accept that McDonald's is partly responsible for rising levels of obesity? "I think that would be far too simplistic. There's a huge range of factors over the last 20 to 30 years that have caused society to change," he said.

news20100110gdn3

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[News > UK news > Weather]
The resurgence of El Niño means that 2010 could yet be the hottest year on record
Despite the big freeze Britain's climate is getting distinctly warmer – and we may feel it this summer
Robin McKie
The Observer, Sunday 10 January 2010 Article history

It may be a hard notion to accept after a week that has seen the nation paralysed by snow and ice. Nevertheless, meteorologists are adamant that our world is still getting warmer. Indeed, many now believe that 2010 may turn out to be the hottest year on record.

Britain may be shivering, the Met Office may have issued emergency weather warnings for the entire country and hundreds of trains and flights may have been cancelled, but our future is destined to be a hot and sticky one. And we are likely to feel the consequences sooner rather than later.

It is a point stressed by Doug Smith, a climate expert at the Met Office. "The hottest year on record was 1998 and some people have argued that if global warming is really taking place, we should have had an even warmer year since then. We haven't, I admit. And yes, the weather is absolutely terrible at present. However, I am sure things will change – and we won't have to wait long either."

Smith and other meteorologists say that for the past few years, temperatures have been prevented from soaring even higher than they did in 1998 thanks to one key factor: the El Niño warming of the Pacific. This phenomenon occurs at irregular intervals of between two and seven years and can last for months, pumping vast amounts of heat into the atmosphere. A strong El Niño occurred in 1998 and played a key role in heating the world to a record-breaking level. (El Niño is Spanish for "the boy", a reference to the birth of Christ, which relates to the fact that this warming period typically begins around Christmas.)

In recent years, however, the Pacific has cooled thanks to a corresponding ocean phenomenon, known as La Niña (Spanish for "the girl"). It depresses sea surface temperatures and has played a key role in limiting global warming since the turn of the century. As a result, global temperatures have been prevented from rising above their 1998 record level. That cooling has now stopped, however, and a new El Niño warming period has just started in the Pacific.

"If that keeps up for the next few months, it will result in a great deal of heat being pumped into the atmosphere," added Smith. "The signs are that it will. If so, our computer models indicate that this year is more likely than not to be the hottest on record. Even if it isn't, I am quite sure a record breaker will still occur in the next few years."

The headlines then will look very different from the "Britain in deep freeze" variety that have appeared over the past few days, though we should note a key caveat here. Soaring global temperatures do not guarantee hot weather for Britain. We may still get a poor summer, but that does not mean the world is not continuing to heat up, a point ignored by most climate-change deniers.

In fact, there is a world of difference between the British weather at any given time and the inexorable shift that is taking place in the climate of the planet, as Peter Inness, a Reading University meteorologist, makes clear. "Britain covers only a very small part of the globe. It takes up less than one thousandth of the world's surface. The temperature here is almost irrelevant when considering the issue of global climate change."

It is a point that should be kept in mind as councils struggle to grit roads, cars and vans slither on the ice, exams are disrupted, and farmers battle to get food to their animals. Yes, we are feeling the cold but many other parts of the world are having no such problem, as Richard Betts, head of climate impact at the Met Office, argues.

"It is true that Britain is having a spell of extremely cold weather, as is much of northern Europe and the United States. But at the same time, Canada and the Mediterranean region are having unusually warm weather for the time of year. We shouldn't get so absorbed with what is going on in our backyard."

This argument is also made by Inness – though rather more forcibly. "I think it is really stupid to say that the current cold weather proves that climate change is not happening. Climate refers to changes in the weather patterns over a 20- to 40-year period. What is happening in Britain at present represents little more than a point on a graph."

This takes us to the heart of the matter. Meteorologists may make errors with specific long-range forecasts. (This winter was more likely to be mild than severe, they thought.) There is no doubt about the overall trend. Each year, humanity pumps billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The inevitable result will be global warming and major, catastrophic climate change.

It is a bit like playing Pooh sticks, says Betts. "When you throw sticks off a bridge, you know they will all be swept downstream. You just don't know which one will move the fastest. It is the same with climate and the weather. We know the world is warming inexorably but we cannot say specifically which year is going to be the warmest. We can only indicate what are the general prospects of getting a record-breaking year. And despite the horrible weather at present, it is quite possible that we will get one this year."

news20100110sa

[Environment] from [scientificamerican.com]

[News > Evolution]
January 9, 2010
Accentuating the Positive: Researchers Closer to Pinpointing Beneficial Evolutionary Mutations in the Human Genome
By combining statistical tests, researchers can home in on narrow regions--and in some cases genes--that were selected for during human evolution
By Carina Storrs

Genetic mutations that enhance disease resistance or boost fitness in a particular climate have been positively selected over the course of human evolution. But current statistical methods to find these beneficial mutations, or variants, have only been able to home in on areas spanning several genes, which may cover a variety of other functions, as well.

And within these broad swaths of the human genome, there are a number of nonselected, or neutral, variants that also get preferentially inherited because they are on the same chromosome as the selected variant. "It's basically that a whole haystack of [mutations] gets pulled up when selection occurs and then you're trying to find which one was the driver—the needle," says Pardis Sabeti, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.

To narrow down the culprits for positive selection, Sabeti and her team of researchers developed an approach that combines statistical methods that differ in their specificity for selected variants into one powerful tool. Using the composite tool, the group analyzed mutations in regions from different chromosomes spanning hundreds of kilobases, or hundreds of thousands of nucleotides. The mutations occurred both inside of genes or in the parts of the genome that do not encode genes. Although the team optimized their method for selection that has taken place in the past 30,000 years, Sabeti says that with some tweaking, the approach could stretch back to the point when human populations began migrating out of Africa and diverging from each other 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. The first study using the team's composite method was published January 7 in Science.

Using this technique, the scientists could predict an area of the genome as narrow as a single gene, rather than several, that had likely been positively selected. For example, they found a single gene involved in eye color or skin pigmentation that was likely to be selected for from a region containing five genes.

"This approach allows you to much more precisely say what types of genes have been selected, and I think that's pretty powerful," says Joshua Akey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the study by Sabeti's group.

Prior to creating the composite method, different groups of evolutionary geneticists had been using methods that detected one of three different genetic patterns created by positive selection. Even though there had been murmurs in the field about combining different methods to try to improve the signal-to-noise (or needle-to-haystack) ratio, Sabeti says that nobody had actually tested this possibility. According to Akey, "What they did that is clever is say, 'We can use slightly different information that's captured by these different tests.'"

The first test, which Sabeti developed herself, excels at finding large regions of the genome that have undergone positive selection. Because of the regular rate at which sister chromosomes exchange genetic information with one another in a genomic region, it is possible to estimate that region's age compared with its ancestral sequence.

When a region obtains a selected variant, however, that variant generally gets spread rapidly throughout the human population, bringing the neighboring neutral variants on the chromosome along for the ride. This rapid spread is due to the fact that the selected variant makes a person more likely than those without it to reproduce and pass on the beneficial mutation to the next generation. When researchers identify an island of variants that is shared among people it signals that one or some of those variants confer an advantage.

Because this method leaves scientists with regions that could contain up to a million nucleotides and dozens of genes, Sabeti's group incorporated other methods that locate more fine-tuned signatures of positive selection. The researchers optimized a method that examines individual mutations within these islands, trying to determine the variants that are at high prevalence. In contrast to scanning for islands, this procedure's strength is its ability to score each variant for the likelihood that it is selected rather than neutral.

The third strategy that the scientists incorporated into their composite approach takes into account the demographic backgrounds of the genomes under analysis. Because groups of people living in different environments are faced with different selective pressures, variants responsible for allowing a selective advantage might reveal themselves when different populations are compared.

To test the power of the composite method, Sabeti's team subjected 178 genomic regions to the new approach. The sequence came from the HapMap 2 project, an international effort to sequence regions of the genomes from individuals of European, east Asian and west African descent, focusing on nucleotides that vary between these groups. So far, three million nucleotides from 270 people have been sequenced through this project.

The composite approach achieved resolution 100-fold better than any of the tests that it uses. In other words, whereas a single test could predict that there was a selected variant somewhere within a region of 1,000 total variants, the combined strategy narrowed down the likelihood to a region of 10 variants.

Sharon Grossman, who conducted the research along with Sabeti and other researchers, says she was surprised that the approach is so much more powerful than single tests. "A lot of people had assumed that it wouldn't work because they thought that if you had a high score by one [test] that you'd have a high score by all of them," she adds. Although the different tests could all give a high score to a selected variant, they differed in their abilities to give a neutral variant a low score. As a result, Grossman says that the new method has a low false positive rate.

In addition to identifying a pigmentation gene that shows signs of positive selection, the researchers found that a gene associated with hearing and visual perception is more frequent in the east Asian descendants they studied.

But the gene about which Sabeti is most excited, called large, has been implicated in the resistance of a subpopulation of Africans to the Lassa fever virus. Scientists have found that certain versions of the so-called large gene could protect the Nigerians who have it from an infection that would otherwise be as deadly as Ebola. With her new method to home in on variations within a gene, Sabeti is eager to try to pinpoint which mutations of large confer protection against Lassa fever.

Another finding revealed through the composite approach is that about half of all the predicted selected variants are not in regions of the gene that code for proteins. "Lately in genome-wide association studies, there's been this overhaul where many of the most important functional changes are regulatory, or in regions of the gene that are not protein coding," Sabeti says.

The potential to identify selected variants, along with the traits they encode or the genes they regulate, could soon explode, as geneticists gather sequence information from more individuals. Whereas Sabeti's study analyzed only three million nucleotides from 270 individuals, efforts are underway, through the 1000 Genomes Project, to sequence the entire genomes of 1,000 people.

James Evans, a geneticist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was not involved in the current study, says that, with next-generation sequencing technology, obtaining data is no longer the obstacle. "We soon will have an avalanche of sequence data from humans all across the globe, and analysis has become the bottleneck. That is why this kind of study is so important and so timely," he says.

news20100110reut

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
Victoria Bryan and Nao Nakanishi
LONDON
Fri Jan 8, 2010 12:49pm EST
UK licenses world's biggest offshore wind farms
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain has awarded energy companies the rights to develop the world's biggest offshore wind project in hopes the country will become a leader in the emerging industry, which is vital to slash carbon emissions.

The Crown Estate, in charge of Britain's coastal seabed, on Friday announced winners for the Round 3 tender, including Portugal's EDP Renewables, Britain's Centrica, Germany's E.ON and Sweden's Vattenfall.

In total, the government hopes the programme will deliver up to 32 gigawatts (GW) of generation capacity, or enough to meet a quarter of the UK's electricity need by 2020.

It is expected to bring a step change to the global offshore wind industry, which currently has installed capacity of only about 1.5 GW, accounting for mere 1 percent of the total installed wind capacity of around 150 GW, including onshore.

"This is a great day for energy policy, sustainable energy and the environment. This is a great day also for the United Kingdom," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters.

He said Round 3 would make Britain the number one market for offshore wind development and create about 70,000 jobs by 2020.

"We are determined to do everything we can...to bring these jobs to the country," Brown said.

However, obtaining funding for cash-intensive offshore wind farms is not easy, and larger utilities have often resorted to using cash from their own balance sheets.

The projects' location, in deep water and far offshore, presents many technical challenges, including how to provide maintenance and cope with potential gearbox failures in winter.

"Attention will now turn to delivery, where the private sector will now need to demonstrate it can develop the technical and financial solutions needed to deliver. The race for capital is on," said Arnaud Bouille, a Director in Ernst & Young's Energy and Environmental Infrastructure Advisory team.

Rob Hastings from the Crown Estate said there was a lot more interest in the tender than expected, with entries accounting for projects totaling about 40 GW -- 60 percent more than its initial target for 25 GW.

"We were very encouraged by the confidence that the developers had in setting up their targets," Hastings, director for the Marine Estate, told Reuters:

FALLING COSTS?

Gordon Edge, director of Economics and Markets from the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA), told Reuters construction costs for 32 GW would total 75 billion pounds-80 billion pounds ($119.6 billion-$127.6 billion).

Costs are expected to drop as new technology for offshore wind farms is developed, the number of turbine makers rises from just two at present and a supply chain is set up in Britain.

Currently, no turbines are made in Britain due to the country's slow development of onshore wind farms.

It has just begun developing a supply chain for the offshore wind industry, using its experience in offshore oil and gas.

"If you look at what happened with onshore costs...we would expect over the period of time that costs of 3-3.2 million pounds (per megawatt) to come down...to 2.5 million pounds," said Keith Anderson, ScottishPower Renewables Director.

BWEA said research was under way to develop a UK-built offshore wind turbine as large as 10 MW, up from around 3 MW common among offshore farms now. It also expected there would be around six offshore turbine manufacturers by 2015.

While the government has increased support for the industry under the Renewable Obligations Certificate (ROC) scheme, it is unclear if this will last beyond 2014.

British Gas owner Centrica called for a support mechanism to help ensure project viability.

"Offshore wind is expensive to build and we will need a long-term, stable support mechanism to make these investments commercially viable for the foreseeable future," said Sarwjit Sambhi, Managing Director of Power Generation at Centrica.

(Editing by Anthony Barker)


[Green Business]
COPENHAGEN
Sat Jan 9, 2010 9:10am EST
Novozymes gets $28.4 million tax credit for U.S. plant
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Danish industrial enzymes group Novozymes has been awarded a $28.4 million U.S. tax credit to support a new Nebraska plant to produce enzymes for the biofuel industry, the company said on Saturday.

The tax credit was granted as part of a $2.3 billion scheme by the Obama Administration to support clean energy manufacturing projects across the United States.

"We believe our selection for this tax credit is a reflection of the tremendous potential of advanced biofuels to create green jobs and contribute to meaningful reduction of greenhouse gases in the near-term," Adam Monroe, president of Novozymes North America, said in a statement.

Novozymes, the world's biggest producer of industrial enzymes, has pinned big hopes on supplying enzymes to the biofuel industry, particularly for "second-generation" biofuels made from plant waste rather than food crops.

The company is investing up to $200 million in the Blair, Nebraska plant which it expects to complete by mid-2012.

The plant's blending facility started up in November 2009 and is shipping enzymes to customers globally, Novozymes said.

The facility will provide more than 100 jobs, it said.

The plant will produce enzymes for first-generation and second-generation bioethanol, Novozymes has said earlier.

First-generation bioethanol is made from sugar or starchy raw materials such as wheat or corn.

Second-generation bioethanol is produced from materials such as the stalks, leaves and husks of corn plants, wood chips and sawdust or from energy crops such as switch grass.

Enzymes are used in biofuel production to break down the starch or cellulose in the raw materials.

Novozymes has said it aims to deliver the first commercially viable enzymes for second-generation ethanol in 2010.

The company's main competitor in the race to supply the bioethanol industry with enzymes is Danish food ingredients and enzymes producer Danisco.

The U.S. Department of Energy said in a statement on Friday that tax credits awarded under the scheme will support investment in 183 manufacturing facilities for clean energy products in 43 states.

The DOE said it expected the facilities to generate more than 17,000 jobs.