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It is amazing the sorts of things that you can recycle these days. It seems like lots of different packaging s now recyclable, even though it is not always easy to find a local facility for recycling them. However, it is great that more and more things are able to be recycled, I even heard recently about X-Ray Film Recycling which is not only another great new recycling facility but can raise money for radiology reading rooms because there are companies which will buy film from places such as orthopedic pacs. It is great that these things are happening and that we should be able to get hold of lots more recycled products soon, which is fantastic.

It means that we will not be producing so much waste and we will not have so many problems with thinking about how to get rid of our rubbish. Trying to find room for landfill will get harder and harder if we keep consuming more and throwing away a lot more rubbish and so by recycling it we can avoid this problem. It means that as our children grow up, they will not have the problem of being swamped with rubbish and hopefully they will be able to find even better ways of reusing and recycling than we have.

Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of water vapor as a critical component of climate change.

Andrew Dessler and colleagues from Texas A and M University in College Station confirmed that the heat-amplifying effect of water vapor is potent enough to double the climate warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

With new observations, the scientists confirmed experimentally what existing climate models had anticipated theoretically.

The research team used novel data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on NASA’’s Aqua satellite to measure precisely the humidity throughout the lowest 10 miles of the atmosphere.

That information was combined with global observations of shifts in temperature, allowing researchers to build a comprehensive picture of the interplay between water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other atmosphere-warming gases.

“Everyone agrees that if you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, then warming will result,” Dessler said. “So the real question is, how much warming?” he added.

The answer can be found by estimating the magnitude of water vapor feedback.

Increasing water vapor leads to warmer temperatures, which causes more water vapor to be absorbed into the air. Warming and water absorption increase in a spiraling cycle.

Water vapor feedback can also amplify the warming effect of other greenhouse gases, such that the warming brought about by increased carbon dioxide allows more water vapor to enter the atmosphere.

“The difference in an atmosphere with a strong water vapor feedback and one with a weak feedback is enormous,” Dessler said.

Using data from AIRS, the research team observed how atmospheric water vapor reacted to shifts in surface temperatures between 2003 and 2008.

By determining how humidity changed with surface temperature, the team could compute the average global strength of the water vapor feedback.

“This new data set shows that as surface temperature increases, so does atmospheric humidity,” Dessler said.

“Dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere makes the atmosphere more humid. And since water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, the increase in humidity amplifies the warming from carbon dioxide,” he added.

Specifically, the team found that if Earth warms 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, the associated increase in water vapor would trap an extra 2 Watts of energy per square meter.

“That number may not sound like much, but add up all of that energy over the entire Earth surface and you find that water vapor is trapping a lot of energy,” Dessler said. “We now think the water vapor feedback is extraordinarily strong, capable of doubling the warming due to carbon dioxide alone,” he added.

Australia became an integral link in a network of tsunami warning hubs across the Indian and Pacific oceans with the official opening of a national monitoring centre.

The Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre that opened in the southern city of Melbourne joins India as a “tsunami watch provider” for 29 countries on the Indian Ocean rim that are prone to the killer waves, said Ray Canterford, head of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s disaster mitigation office.

Work on the USD 46 million centre developed by the government was launched six months after the catastrophic 2004 tsunami that killed more than 200,000 in 14 countries.

It will provide essential sea level and seismic data to the Pacific warning network to Southwest Pacific island nations. This data is critical to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii and the Japanese Meteorological Agency in Tokyo, Canterford said.

Eventually, there will be a network of several countries on the Indian Ocean rim with their own tsunami warning centres sharing scientific data, he said.

“We’re actually enhancing the capabilities of other countries in the Pacific and in the Indian Ocean,” he said.

The centre relies on high-tech deep sea buoys, five of which are located northwest of Australia below Indonesia, one in northeast of Australia in the Coral Sea and two in the Tasman Sea off the southeast coast.

Indonesia, which bore the brunt of the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people, is expected to have its own national warning centre fully operational by the end of the year, Canterford said.

A British explorer said today he would go ahead next year with a pioneering expedition to measure the thickness and density of the rapidly shrinking Arctic Ocean ice cap.

Pen Hadow and two other British explorers will set off in February for a six-month, 1,200-kilometre trek to the North Pole to take samples of ice, snow and air.

The trip had been due to start in February this year but was postponed to allow the expedition’s scientific remit to be expanded.

Hadow and his team will manually drill into the ice to extract samples, helping to update the mass of data, hitherto mostly estimated, on the state of the ice cap.

“The only way to get a proper measurement of the snow and ice is to take measurements from the ice surface, or by drilling into it,” he said to a news agency.

“Explorers are the only people who can undertake a survey of this kind.”

Hadow — the first explorer to trek solo and unsupported from Canada to the North Pole — and his team will send the data via satellite from a specially designed portable computer.

The project will fill the gap in existing measurement studies by satellites and submarines which cannot differentiate between layers of ice and snow.

The expedition’s findings will be presented to the crucial United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen next year aimed at charting a post-Kyoto course to tackle the impact of climate change.

Scientists have unearthed the remains of a large meat-eating dinosaur with a breathing apparatus much like a modern bird, fortifying the link between birds and dinosaurs and helping to explain the evolution of birds’ unique system of breathing.

Pulled from 85-million-year-old rock along the banks of Rio Colorado in Argentina’s Mendoza Province, this 33-foot-long (10 meter), two-legged predator weighed as much as an elephant and likely had feathers, the scientists said.

But its method of breathing makes this dinosaur stand out, said Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago, who wrote about the find on Monday in the journal PLoS ONE.

Instead of lungs that expand and contract, Sereno thinks this beast had air sacs that worked like a bellows, blowing air into the beast’s stiff lungs, much like modern birds.

“This dinosaur, unlike any other, provides more direct evidence of the bellows involved in bird breathing,” Ricardo Martinez of the Universidad Nacional de San Juan, Argentina, who worked with Sereno on the research, said in a statement.

The team named the dinosaur Aerosteon riocoloradensis, meaning “air bones from the Rio Colorado,” because its bones have pockets and a sponge-like texture called “pneumatization” in which air sacs from the lung invade the bone.

Most paleontologists believe birds evolved from small, feathered meat-eating dinosaurs, and the earliest known birds were strikingly similar to these dinosaurs.

The researchers think Aerosteon, a type of dinosaur called a theropod, may have evolved this breathing style in part to keep it from toppling over while chasing prey on its two massive legs. And it may have helped control body temperature.

“If dinosaurs and in particular theropods were ‘warm-blooded’ as many of us suspect and feathered for insulation, they would have had a major problem getting rid of heat at times. Perhaps this is why air sacs initially evolved, and then were co-opted for breathing,” Sereno said.

Aerosteon was smaller than the very biggest meat-eaters, which included North America’s Tyrannosaurus rex, Africa’s Spinosaurus and Giganotosaurus, also found in Argentina.

Sereno thinks Aerosteon represents a separate line of predators that lived alongside and then outlasted Giganotosaurus. “This is one of the nice surprises of the find,” he said in an e-mail.

During this time, the Earth was alternately subjected to the most severe ice age conditions it ever witnessed (with ice present even around the Equator), and then to widespread tropical greenhouse conditions, according to researchers.

“During these ice age events, any parts of the world that weren’t at that time submerged under the ocean would most probably have been barren, icy wastelands — including tourist destinations that are today considered tropical getaways.

“The extreme climates of the Snowball Earth period, together with the sudden and widespread appearance of very primitive multi-cellular lifeforms in a window of tropical climate between the period’s two major ice age events, make this one of the most enigmatic episodes in Earth’s history.

“A key question for scientists today is how these primitive lifeforms not only survived the extremely hostile temperatures of Snowball Earth’s ice age periods, but actually seemed to thrive during the wild fluctuations from ice age to tropical conditions and back to ice age.

“Indeed, it is thought that the extreme climates of this period may actually have provided the real kick-start that nature needed to get the process of evolution underway,” said lead researcher Stephen Gallagher of Geological Society of Australia.

However, according to the researchers, it’s certainly not as extreme as periods of climate change that Earth has experienced in its first five billion years, and it may not be as extreme that Earth will experience “in the five billion years remaining before it”.

New estimates have suggested that India is poised to become the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions this year.

These are the findings of an analysis completed by the Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the US.

Despite widespread concern about climate change, annual carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels and manufacturing cement have grown 38 percent since 1992, from 6.1 billion tons of carbon to 8.5 billion tons in 2007.

At the same time, the source of emissions has shifted dramatically as energy use has been growing slowly in many developed countries but more quickly in some developing countries, most notably in rapidly developing Asian countries such as China and India.

“The United States was the largest emitter of CO2 in 1992, followed in order by China, Russia, Japan and India,” said Gregg Marland of ORNL’s Environmental Sciences Division.

“The most recent estimates suggest that India passed Japan in 2002, China became the largest emitter in 2006, and India is poised to pass Russia to become the third largest emitter, probably this year,” he added.

The new estimates of CO2 emissions are based on energy data through 2005 from the United Nations, cement data through 2005 from the US Geological Survey, energy data for 2006 and 2007 from BP, and extrapolations by Marland, Gregg and co-authors Tom Boden and Bob Andres of ORNL.

Burning fossil fuels and manufacturing cement, along with deforestation, are the most important human-related sources of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, according to the researchers.

The cement data take into account the breakdown of limestone to produce lime.

Researchers also note that the new CO2 data include minor downward revisions of estimates for recent years, but the trends have not changed.

A total of 134 species of birds have wiped out worldwide between 1701 and 2000, the UK-based conservation group BirdLife International said on Monday.

Twenty-seven species were driven to extinction in the 18th century, 51 in the 19th century and 56 in the 20th century; the group said in a report, adding that it is highly possible three species have already been lost this century.

Currently, 1,226 species or 12.4 per cent of the total including species native to Japan such as Blakiston’s fish owl and the Amami woodcock face extinction, it said.

Three human factors — agriculture, logging and human-induced invasive species — are the most threat facing bird species, respectively affecting 1,065, 668 and 625 species, the report said.

These stresses are threatening many of the familiar bird species in parts of the world such as the little tern in Japan, the cuckoo and eastern turtle dove in Europe and the vulture in India, while water birds such as the red knot are showing widespread declines particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, it said.

The report also highlights that a disproportionately high number of threatened birds live on islands, particularly oceanic islands far from land, because these species are often susceptible to the impact of introduced predators due to isolation for thousands of years.

The four extinct species in Japan including the Bonin grosbeak and Ryukyu wood pigeon lived on the Ogasawara Islands and the Nansei Islands, it said.

Over the past 20 years, 225 bird species have been moved to a higher category of threat because of genuine changes in status whereas just 32 species have been moved down to a lower danger category.

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.

His waist size is down from 82 to 34 inches, he has lost 145 kg, he has recorded with Michael and Janet Jackson and he’s now turning actor. Adnan Sami reveals it’s all because wife Sabah left him, after telling him he loved food more than her.

“My wife married me when I was already overweight. She tried to keep me in check but I was out of control.

Finally, she said, ‘Adnan, I love you very much but you love food more than me. I cannot sit back and let you destroy yourself.

It’s a crime and I don’t want to be accused by God of being an accomplice’.” That’s when Adnan Sami finally cut back on food.

He lost 100 kg and then plucked up the nerve to call Sabah. “She didn’t believe me,” he recalls.

“So I mailed her a picture and then, caught a flight to Dubai. She had tears in her eyes when she saw me.

I’ll never let her go again.” Now Sabah’s set up a production house and is making a film with Adnan as hero.

“We’ve got four scripts but have to decide which one to start with,” he says. But isn’t Sabah insecure about him turning actor - there’s been talk that he’s seeing Ameesha Patel.

He refutes the rumours. “I’m a friendly guy, both verbally and physically.

My gestures are misinterpreted.” Adnan, who made a public appearance at the music release of Tahaan after a long time, says he did so to end speculation.

“My absence from the 1920 music launch sparked speculations that I’d had a heart attack. This time if I didn’t turn up, people would say that I was giving birth to a baby.

” So there’s no heart ailment? “That would have been believable when I was obese,” he retorts. “It was a bad bout of food poisoning from eating prawns.