• Aura Earth Observing Satellite Launched into Orbit
  
• National Water Research Bill Would Combat Drought
  
• Environmentalists Want Probe of Texas Power Plants
  
• Biscuit Fire Logging Plan Sparks Lawsuits
  
• Poll Finds Hunters, Anglers Upset With Bush
  
• Two Missing Nuclear Fuel Rods Found at Vermont Yankee
  
• Rethinking Conservation Planning and Spending
  
• The Red Snapper on Your Plate Likely Not Red Snapper
  
• Chipmunk Finding Gnaws at Glacier Migration Theory
  

Aura Earth Observing Satellite Launched into Orbit

The Delta II launch vehicle carrying the Aura spacecraft successfully lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, and NASA says all systems are functioning normally.

The Malindi Tracking Station, in Kenya, confirmed the successful separation of the spacecraft from its launch rocket at 4:06 am Pacific Time, NASA said.

Aura will help scientists understand how atmospheric composition affects and responds to Earth's changing climate.

The satellite will help reveal the processes that connect local and global air quality. It will also track the extent to which Earth's protective ozone layer is recovering from decades of ozone depleting chemicals.

Aura will carry four instruments each designed to survey different aspects of Earth's atmosphere. The instruments will provide an unprecedented picture of the composition of the atmosphere.

Aura will survey the atmosphere from the troposphere, where humankind lives, through the stratosphere, the location of the ozone layer that protects life on Earth from the harmful ultraviolet rays of the Sun.

"Aura, the first comprehensive laboratory in space to help us better understand the chemistry and composition of the Earth's atmosphere, is fundamentally a mission to understand and protect the very air we breathe," said NASA Associate Administrator for Earth Science Dr. Ghassem Asrar.

"It is also a perfect complement to our other Earth Observing System satellites that, together, will aid our nation and our neighbors by determining the extent, causes, and regional consequences of global change," he said.

Aura's space-based view of the atmosphere and its chemistry will complete the first series of NASA's Earth Observing System satellites. The other satellites are, Terra, which monitors land, and Aqua, which observes Earth's water cycle.

The Aura mission climaxes NASA's 15 year long international effort to establish the world's most comprehensive Earth Observing System. The goal is to determine the extent, causes, and regional consequences of global climate change, air quality and changes to the ozone layer.

National Water Research Bill Would Combat Drought

The bill authorizes $200 million annually for basic and applied research and development in water supply technologies.

"The Department of Energy National Laboratory Water Technology Research and Development Act of 2004," would involve the Department of Energy national lab system in partnership with universities around the country to design and deploy technologies aimed at providing more clean water for residential, commercial, industrial and natural resource use around the country.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete Domenici of New Mexico, a Republican, leads the group of cosponsors. He said, “We have neglected federal water research for too long. Now, we are faced with regional droughts and a pending water shortages or one type or another in most regions of the country. Our investment is water research has been like a leaky faucet. A drip and occasional dribble. Let’s turn the faucet on full."

Other cosponsors are Ranking Member of the Committe Senator Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat, and Senators Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican; Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat; and Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat. Republican Congressmen Richard Pombo and Ken Calvert of California are also cosponsors.

Bingaman said, “Drought and population changes are just two of the most significant factors making the management and use of water an urgent issue facing our country Meeting this challenge requires an increased national commitment to water resources research."

Domenici calls his bill "ambitious" but conceives of it as a way to avert looming water crises. "I want to fund a state-of-the-art design and deployment program that ensures that Americans and the world’s people have adequate access to water," he said.

Among 14 other bills voted out of committee on Wednesday is a bill to provide assistance to the State of New Mexico for the development of comprehensive state water plans. Senators Domenici and Bingaman both represent New Mexico, which is currently in the grip of a prolonged drought.

Environmentalists Want Probe of Texas Power Plants

Texas environmentalists also filed notice on Tuesday with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of their intent to sue the agency if the alleged violations are not investigated.

The allegations documented by the engineer, Bill Wilson, center on activities at three large AEP power plants in east Texas - Welsh, Pirkey and Knox-Lee. AEP is the nation's largest electricity generator.

The alleged violations include:

• repeatedly and illegally burning chemical waste in utility boilers
• violating emission limits for smog forming chemicals, particulate matter and carbon monoxide
• misrepresenting emissions data to state environmental officials
• failing to satisfy the Clean Air Act's New Source Review program

Wilson was fired by AEP in May after reporting the problems to the company's ethics division.

"I was not the party that did something wrong here," he said. "AEP was the one I saw breaking the law over and over again."

AEP officials said Wilson was fired for causes not related to the environmental claims he reported to the company's ethics division.

"We do not retaliate against an employee who files a complaint," said Michael Morris, AEP chairman, president and chief executive officer. "We encourage employees to raise issues of concern so we can ensure we are meeting high ethical and legal standards while conducting our business. But filing a complaint does not make an employee immune to disciplinary actions for issues not related to the complaint."

Morris said company officials reviewed Wilson's allegations and determined most were unfounded. The few that had some merit, he said, were properly reported.

"We take our environmental compliance responsibilities very seriously, so claims like this are also taken seriously," said Morris. "We conducted an internal investigation, reviewed the facts related to issues raised by Mr. Wilson and determined that appropriate corrective action had been taken or that no violations had taken place."

But the Environmental Integrity Project says its interviews with Wilson and review of documents he has provided warrant further investigation by federal officials.

"There is more than enough evidence to trigger a criminal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice," said Eric Schaeffer, director of the Environmental Integrity Project and a former enforcement official at the EPA. "For some time now, we have been concerned about the cozy relationship between the nation's largest utility polluters and the Bush administration. We will be watching to see if they take the action that is needed here, and send a message that even the most powerful companies are not above the law."

Biscuit Fire Logging Plan Sparks Lawsuits

The legal challenge filed by the conservation groups comes on the heels of a suit filed last week by the American Forest Resource Council that aims to expedite salvage logging on lands burned by the Biscuit fire.

The fire ravaged some 500,000 acres in southwest Oregon 2002, much of it in the Siskiyou National Forest.

The salvage plan is one of the largest proposed timber sales in U.S. history - it would allow the logging of some 370 million board feet, including old growth trees and timber from roadless areas.

Critics say the Bush administration is using the fire as an excuse to sell large, old growth trees that would otherwise be off-limits to logging.

The suit filed by the conservation groups says the plan violates federal laws that protect water quality, endangered species and public participation in public land management decisions.

They have also asked the courts to block two logging projects set for auction this Friday - the 697-acre Fiddler Mountain timber sale and the 339-acre Berry timber sale.

These areas include old growth reserves, the conservation groups say, and the sales should be blocked until the court has judged the merits of the case.

"The federal government is putting the logging of these old growth reserves on a fast track," said attorney Todd True of the environmental law firm Earthjustice, which along with the Western Environmental Law Center is representing the conservation groups in the case. "There is not a lot of time left to save these special forest reserves and recreational areas."

To date, the court had not released a decision on the Fiddler Mountain and Berry timber sales.

In their complaint, the conservation groups are also seeking review of an emergency situation determination signed by Regional Forester Linda Goodman on June 3.

The determination, which Goodman said was needed because of the declining economic value of the burnt timber, exempted six sales within the salvage plan - including the Fiddler Mountain and Berry sales - from administrative appeal.

"Fiddler Mountain is a beautiful place that deserves to be protected," said Don Smith, executive director of the Siskiyou Project, one of the plaintiffs in the case. "Many local people enjoy this area for its scenic beauty and wonderful hiking trails. This is not a place for a massive timber sale."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has gone on record urging the U.S. Forest Service to cut back plans to log so much timber, recommending in February that only 96 million board feet should be taken from the Siskiyou National Forest.

The environmental regulators expressed concern that increased salvage could inflict long-term harm on water quality, fish and wildlife, and potential wilderness areas. The EPA is required under the National Environmental Policy Act to comment on major federal projects.

Poll Finds Hunters, Anglers Upset With Bush

Two Missing Nuclear Fuel Rods Found at Vermont Yankee

The two pieces were stored in a unique 40 inch aluminum cylinder, which is unlike a typical storage container but is similar to several other aluminum structures and tools in the pool, Entergy said.

On April 21, after an inspection by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Entergy determined that two short spent fuel rod segments were not in their documented location in the spent fuel pool.

Entergy Vermont Yankee Site Vice President Jay Thayer credited interviews with former employees and contractors, intense research of records and documents dating back more than 25 years, and video tapes of the pool that were recently taken.

The search team explored every possibility from three different angles. "They looked visually with the cameras, they searched the documents, and they talked to people who were on the scene 25 years ago," said Thayer. "The team deserves a tremendous amount of credit."

"We earlier had checked all the containers in the pool," Thayer explained, "but when we learned that General Electric had designed and sent a pipe-like cylinder for the fuel-rod pieces, we rechecked the videotapes. That's when we noticed that what was previously thought to be part of an existing in-pool structure could very well be the canister that GE sent here."

Workers used remotely operated tools to open the canister and insert a small high-resolution video camera that confirmed the presence of the fuel segments, which are nine inches and seventeen inches long and about the diameter of a pencil.

Thayer also credits the resident NRC inspectors at Vermont Yankee and William Sherman, the Vermont Public Service Department's nuclear engineer, for their contributions to the investigation. "'These folks had full and open access to the process every step of the way and they provided valuable insights and guidance.'"

The Vermont Yankee spent fuel pool is 40 feet in depth and contains 2,789 spent uranium fuel assemblies that were used in energy production since 1972. Vermont Yankee is presently shut down for its twenty fourth refueling and maintenance outage.

Thayer said the policies and procedures for record keeping and documentation of activities in Vermont Yankee's spent fuel pool have been revised to ensure accurate record keeping. "We want to make sure this doesn't happen again," he said.

Rethinking Conservation Planning and Spending

"Conservation agencies are spending tens of millions of dollars on systematic planning, but it does not translate to saving wildlife," said author Sandy Andelman, deputy director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis where the study was conducted. "We need to reallocate dollars spent on 'perfect world' planning scenarios to aggressively pursue opportunities to safeguard habitat for species that are most in need."

The authors of the new study are some of the very people who have been at the forefront of these modeling efforts they believe are ineffective.

Their analysis of how to improve the system indicates that an opportunistic approach - informed by basic scientific information about the abundance and distribution of plants and animals, but heavily focused on how landowners make decisions - will have a better shot at protecting biodiversity over time.

"If it is possible to conserve exactly the sites you want - and do it immediately - a conservation blueprint makes sense," Andelman said. "In marine environments, where there is public ownership, this may be possible, but this situation is rare on land. Conservation has to be staged over time, and it is difficult to predict when and where you will have willing sellers."

The authors note that creating networks of parks and protected areas is a cornerstone of global conservation strategies, but 40 percent of highly threatened vertebrates do not occur in a single protected area around the globe.

"For the last 20 years we thought we needed to be more systematic and we became really good at identifying priority areas for protection without taking into account opportunities in the real world - the rise and fall of property values and who might be influenced to sell," said coauthor Hugh Possingham of Queensland University, a leading conservation biologist and mathematician. "We have taken a passive theoretical approach instead of getting out there and actively seizing opportunities."

The findings do not diminish the need for accurate information on the distribution of plants and animals and the activities that threaten their survival, the authors said.

"Just like any business plan, we need the best background research we can get - in this case the basic ecological data about abundance and distribution of plants and animals that is still sparse - but it needs to be melded with a better understanding of changing market dynamics and landowner's choices," Possingham explained.

"For 20 years the theory of conservation planning proceeded on the assumption that the world is static," he added. "Assuming the world is static, economically and ecologically, is absurd."

The Red Snapper on Your Plate Likely Not Red Snapper

More than 75 percent of fish tested and sold as red snapper in stores within eight states were other species, according to a study by graduate students at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill.

The team conducted molecular analyses of 22 fish bought from nine vendors in Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina and Wisconsin.

They found 17, or 77 percent, of the samples sold as red snapper were other species.

The research team said their work has a margin of error of 17 percent - this means "that between 60 percent and 94 percent of fish sold as red snapper in the United States are mislabeled."

"Red snapper is the most sought-after snapper species and has the highest prices, and many people, including me, believe it tastes best," said Dr. Peter B. Marko, assistant professor of marine sciences at UNC's College of Arts and Sciences.

"Mislabeling to this extent not only defrauds consumers, but also risks adversely affecting estimates of stock size for this species if it influences the reporting of catch data used in fisheries management. The potential for this kind of bias in fisheries data depends on at what point in the commercial industry fish are mislabeled, which is something that we currently know little about."

Markso said how much of the mislabeling, which is a violation of federal law, was unintentional or fraud is unknown.

A report on his group's research appears in the July 15 issue of the journal "Nature."

Among those species sold as red snapper were lane snapper and vermilion snapper, two other species from the western Atlantic Ocean.

Marko said the team was surprised to find that more than half the DNA sequences came either from fish from other regions of the world such as the western Pacific or from rare species about which little is known.

"The remarkable extent of product mislabeling of red snapper threatens to distort the status of fish stocks in the eyes of consumers, contributing to a false impression that the supply of marine species is keeping up with demand," Marko said.

There are some 100 known snapper species - about a dozen, including red snapper, live in warm offshore U.S. waters around coral reefs and rocky outcroppings.

Red snapper is one of the most economically important fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico, even though commercial fishing of the species has been closely regulated since 1996, when the federal government determined it was being overfished.

The study notes that "such restrictions create an economic incentive for seafood substitution, where less valuable species are mislabeled and sold under the names of more expensive ones. Substitutions among closely related fish are difficult to detect, because most distinguishing features are lost during processing."

Chipmunk Finding Gnaws at Glacier Migration Theory

The finding casts doubts on previous assumptions that migrations were driven by advancing glaciers, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Illinois Natural History Survey.

Mitochondiral DNA analysis showed the Wisconsin and Illinois populations of Eastern chipmunks clearly descend from survivors in the west and north, closer to the Wisconsin glaciation.

Over time, these chipmunks migrated south from the colder region, merging with chipmunks that migrated into the region from the warmer east and south.

"This is counter-intuitive given that organisms would be expected to respond to glacial expansion by shifting their ranges to more suitable climates most often in a southern refuge followed by a northward recolonization as the glaciers receded," said Kevin C. Rowe, lead author and doctoral student in the evolutionary/molecular biology laboratory at the University of Illinois.

Rowe said the researchers were also surprised that although chipmunks in Illinois and Wisconsin are closely related, they are distantly related to chipmunks in Indiana and Michigan.

"There really is no clear geographical barrier at present that should lead to their isolation, so chipmunk history may be responsible," he said. "From our data, this history appears to include colonization of the Midwest from multiple sources such as separate ice-age refugia."

The findings were reported online this week ahead of regular publication by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Wisconsin glaciation occurred about 18,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene, with the Laurentide Ice Sheet gradually receding from its southern reaches.

Researchers had long thought that the driftless region near the ice sheets were all tundra, but emerging geological evidence now suggests that small areas of deciduous forests may have persisted, allowing for some animals to survive.

"Overall, in light of global climate change occurring today, our results indicate that predictions of movements and where organisms may or may not end up will not be as straightforward as the literature up to now has led one to believe," said co-author Ken Paige, head of the animal biology department at the University of Illinois.