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A new research has suggested that the risk of extinction for plants is higher in countries close to the equator than previously thought.

The research was carried out by Jana Vamosi and Steven Vamosi at the University of Calgary (U of C) in Canada.

“The tropics contain many ancient species of plants, leading many to consider tropical species as less susceptible to extinction. But, our study indicates that quite the opposite is, in fact, the case,” said Vamosi, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the U of C.

“The extinction risk for plants is high in countries close to the equator and even higher on islands, even after we take into account factors related to human activities and their use of the natural resources,” he added.

Previous studies on biodiversity in the tropics have focused on beetles, birds, mammals and molluscs.

The Vamosi study mined worldwide databases for the number of plant species at risk in each country of the world, from Falkland Islands in the south to Greenland in the north, and looked at human factors such as GDP, population density and deforestation.

Vamosi concentrated on data from vascular plants (ferns, conifers, and flowering plants), which includes such threatened species as the Canada Hemlock, Western Prairie Fringed Orchid, and Desert Lily, among many others.

Vamosi said that he was surprised that human activity was not the primary cause of the increasing risk of extinction in the equatorial regions.

“Our findings differ from previous ones in that factors tightly linked to human activity were not particularly important in determining how many plant species were threatened with extinction. Instead, the most important factor seemed to be simply latitude. So, extinction dynamics may be very different between plant and animal species,” said Vamosi.

“Plant species near the equator may persist at naturally low population sizes or have small ranges, making them intrinsically more susceptible to a given amount of disturbance,” he added.

“This is not to say that human activities are not underlying contemporary risk of extinction; instead, it implies that plant species in a tropical country will, on average, be more sensitive to a given amount of human disturbance than those in a temperate country,” he further added.

Japanese scientists said Tuesday they had created a cloned embryo from the dead body of an endangered species of rabbit and are hoping for a birth.

The Amami rabbit, or Pentalagus furnessi, lives on only two small islands in southwestern Japan. It is designated as endangered species by Japan’s environment ministry, with an estimated population of less than 5,000.

Professor Yoshihiko Hosoi of Kinki University in the western city of Osaka said his team had extracted a cell from a dead Amami rabbit’s ear and put it into the egg of an ordinary rabbit.

“After we confirmed that the egg developed into a cloned embryo, we put it back into the fallopian tube of the host mother,” Hosoi said.

“In about 30 days the host mother may give birth to a baby rabbit which has the gene information of Amami rabbit,” he told AFP, but added the possibility of pregnancy was less than 10 percent which is normal for cloned animals.

The experiment, which would be the first cloning of an endangered species in Japan and just one of a few cases in the world, is expected to help protect endangered species from the risk of inbreeding, Hosoi said.

“If we can use the gene information of a dead body, it will help avoid inbreeding which could lead to a genetic abnormality or frail offspring,” he said.

An approaching cold front could thwart NASA’s plans to launch space shuttle Endeavour on Friday on a flight to the international space station.

But the seven astronauts arrived Tuesday ahead of the countdown start and hopeful for an on-time liftoff.

“This mission is all about home improvement, home improvement both inside and outside,” shuttle commander Christopher Ferguson said after arriving from Houston with his crew.

During the 15-day mission, the astronauts will deliver a new bathroom, kitchenette, two bedrooms and exercise machine, as well as a water recycling system — and a new resident for the space station. A new astronaut will replace one of the three space station residents.

The plan is to expand the living quarters of the space station so the crew can be doubled to six by next June.

“On the inside of the space station, the walls are largely up,” Ferguson said. “… Well, it’s moving day. It’s time to fill them up.”

Ferguson also noted the never-before-attempted repairs that are planned for outside the space station. Three of the crew will take turns going outside to clean and lubricate a clogged joint that is preventing one set of solar wings from turning automatically toward the sun, and they’ll replace its bearings.

This will be NASA’s first shuttle launch since the end of May.

“We haven’t had a launch for a while, so we’re really excited to be back in the saddle again,” said test director Jeff Spaulding.

The threatening cold front was moving across the central part of the nation Tuesday and was expected to bring rain and thick clouds to the launch site by week’s end.

Shuttle weather officer Kathy Winters said there was a 60 percent chance of acceptable conditions at the 7:55 p.m. Friday liftoff time and only a 40 percent chance on Saturday.

“The timing of the front will be critical,” she said.

NASA has a shuttle launch window until Nov. 25.

A City Council committee has rejected a move to stop work on a $40 million elephant enclosure at the Los Angeles Zoo.

The panel’s decision came Thursday despite pleas from celebrities such as Lily Tomlin and Bob Barker to instead fund a 60-acre elephant sanctuary in the San Fernando Valley.

The council committee declined to take a vote that would have sent the proposal to the full council for consideration.

Celebrities who want to remove the elephants from the zoo say living there can harm their health and shorten their lives. Tomlin says she thinks “the word zoo is elephant-speak for Guantanamo.”

Zoo Director John Lewis says the new exhibit will be 6 acres, large enough to make the elephants safe and comfortable.

Rain stretched from the Great Lakes and Midwest to Florida early Friday, while the deep South and West were to be calm and clear.

The rainy storm system over the central Plains will continue to weaken as it moves eastward on Friday. The system will advance over the mid-Mississippi Valley for the majority of the day.

By late Friday evening, the storms were to reach the Great Lakes regions and will extend southward over areas of the eastern Gulf Coast.

Showers and thunderstorms are expected to flare up along the eastern Gulf Coast. Temperatures across the Great Lakes and the mid- to upper Mississippi Valleys will range from the 40s to 50s. The Southeast will see warm conditions with temperatures in the 60s to 70s.

The Northeast will remain dry as high pressure will move slowly across the East Coast. Temperatures across the New England states will remain cool, reaching into the 50s to 60s.

In the West, high pressure will keep conditions dry and warm. Warm temperatures coupled with low humidity will cause critical fire weather conditions to persist across areas of southern California. Temperatures across the Northwest will range in the 50s to 60s. The Southwest will see temperatures ranging from the 60s to 90s.

Temperatures in the Lower 48 states on Thursday ranged from a low of 1 degrees at Berthoud Pass, Colo., to a high of 99 degrees at Santee, Calif.

Western Kentucky University was locked down for several hours Wednesday after reports of gunmen on campus, but officials said they could find no evidence that shots had been fired or that anyone had a weapon.

Someone reported seeing people with weapons in a building on a satellite campus and police later received reports that shots had been fired on the main campus, a mile away.

University officials said they received three 911 calls from students. The last caller reported hearing shots.

But Howard Bailey, vice president for student affairs, said at a news conference that there was no gunfire and no witnesses reported seeing weapons.

Bailey said five male students were being questioned in connection with two fights, one on the satellite campus and the other near Pearce Ford Tower residence hall on the main campus, about an hour north of Nashville, Tenn.

He said the fights were related to an altercation Saturday at a school-sponsored dance organized by a group called Black Men at Western. Bailey said no one from the group, which mentors black students, was involved in the fights.

“That student organization has a good reputation,” he said.

Shortly before 2 p.m. EDT, the university sent a text message warning students to seek shelter after the reports of shots in or near Pearce Ford Tower. The campus emergency warning system was activated and students and employees were told to remain indoors. An “all clear” was issued about two hours later after police searched buildings and didn’t find any gunmen. Classes were canceled for the rest of Wednesday.

Bailey said one student suffered minor injuries trying to break up a fight on the satellite campus. The student, who wasn’t identified, was treated and released Wednesday.

Bailey said campus officials didn’t regret sending a message that shots had been fired.

“We would rather be telling you we didn’t have near the problem we thought we did,” he said.

Jake Oakley, an 18-year-old freshman from Princeton, Ky., said he believes he heard gunshots but later acknowledged it could have been the sound of people slamming doors as they ran away. He was leaving English class at the satellite campus, known as South Campus, when he saw 10 people beating up another person. As he was walking away, he thought he heard shots and ran into a building.

“I was scared as hell so I took off running,” Oakley said. “I was just thinking, I can’t get shot.”

He called his mother to say he was safe and stayed in the building until the all clear was given.

The university, which has about 16,500 undergraduates, is on a hill in Bowling Green. Its students and sports teams are known as Hilltoppers.

Light scattered rain showers will develop early Monday along a cold front over the Upper Great Lakes, while high pressure should keep skies clear over the Southeast and storms rattle the Northwest.

The Great Lakes front will bring cooler conditions to the region. Temperature highs will range from the 60s to 70s. The northern portions of the Great Lakes will be cooler, with temperature highs in the 40s.

Low pressure will sweep across the Pacific Northwest, triggering showers along the coastal regions of the Northwest. Cooler air will be pushed inland and may create snowfall over the mountains.

High pressure will begin to weaken over the Northeast. The New England states will continue to see mostly sunny skies with light winds. Temperatures will remain cool and will range from the 50s to 60s.

The South will see mostly sunny conditions as high pressure dominates the region. Southern Florida may see possible light, scattered showers throughout the day. Temperatures are expected to reach into the 60s to 70s.

Temperatures in the Lower 48 states on Sunday ranged from a low of 15 degrees at Saranac Lake, N.Y., to a high of 99 degrees at Goodyear, Ariz.

A scientist from Germany has claimed to have uncovered tracks from the world’s oldest dinosaur, though the footprints at the center of the find have sparked a major debate among scientists.

The find was made in a quarry near Bernburg, a small city in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

According to a report by Spiegel Online, weighing between 600 and 800 kilograms (1,760 pounds), the creature left impressive footprints in the limestone deposit. Shifting sand then covered the tracks.

The creature’s rear foot measured a large 35 centimeters (14 inches).

All this happened around 243 million years ago, and it took until now for the fossilized tracks of this massive reptile to come to light again.

If the discoverer, paleontologist Cajus Diedrich, is to be believed, these limestone impressions will make for a research coup of global dimensions.

Diedrich believes he’s found the world’s oldest dinosaur, the ancestor of T. rex, Brontosaurus, Triceratops and all the others.

But, a number of experts in the field believe Diedrich’s theory is fundamentally wrong and an all-out scientific brawl is brewing within the profession.

Diedrich speaks of the Prosauropods, dinosaur ancestors of the long-necked giants who later grazed the plains of the Jurassic period.

He sees his find as the evolutionary “missing link” between the slow reptiles of the Paleozoic era and the later, lithe dinosaurs.

But, the freelance paleontologist has attracted criticism with his theory.

It’s “ridiculous,” declares Hartmut Haubold, a paleontologist from Halle. “It’s as if someone found a 10-million-year-old stone and claimed it was a hand axe made by humans,” he said.

“Dinosaurs didn’t come into existance until a good 15 million years later than Diedrich claims,” he added.

Haubold believes the tracks in question, were most likely left by a Chirotherium, an ancestral reptile long known to scientists and possibly related to the dinosaurs’ predecessors.

According to Martin Sander, a paleontologist at Germany’s Bonn University, is also skeptical.

“The first dinosaurs were smaller creatures, about as big as monitor lizards. That a much larger dinosaur would have lived so much earlier is extremely improbable,” he said.

“With only tracks to go on, it’s very difficult to draw conclusions about a new dinosaur. There would have to be a skeleton,” he added.

A NASA spacecraft will whiz over Mercury’s crater-scarred surface next Monday, getting a look at the third of the planet closest to the sun that has never been seen close-up before.

It is a return engagement for the car-sized MESSENGER probe, which darted past Mercury on January 14 during its ongoing mission to explore the small and rocky sun-baked world.

MESSENGER is due to fly about 124 miles above Mercury’s surface at nearly 15,000 mph .

The only previous times Mercury was visited by a spacecraft was in 1974 and 1975 when NASA’s Mariner 10 flew past it three times and mapped about 45 percent of its surface. January’s fly-by by MESSENGER covered another 20 percent of the surface, the U.S. space agency said.

Next week’s fly-by will cover about 30 percent more, on the opposite side of the planet from the one seen in January.

“That represents an area bigger than the land area of South America that will be seen for the first time by our spacecraft,” Sean Solomon of Carnegie Institution of Washington, the mission’s lead investigator, told reporters.

The probe is due to take 1,200 images during the encounter with Mercury, which is two-thirds closer to the sun than Earth.

Data from the January fly-by showed that volcanic activity played a key role in forging Mercury’s surface and that the planet has been shrinking more than expected over time.

It also revealed unique volcanic structures, new details of an enormous impact crater and evidence that Mercury’s magnetic field is generated in its molten iron core, NASA said.

MESSENGER will fly past Mercury again in September 2009 before settling into orbit around the planet in 2011.

NASA said the primary purpose of next week’s fly-by is to allow the probe to use Mercury’s gravity to ease into a better position for its yearlong orbit in three years.

But MESSENGER’s seven scientific instruments will be busy amassing all the data they can, it said.

“We expect a whole lot more great information coming out next week,” NASA scientist Marilyn Lindstrom said.

In many ways, Mercury has remained a mystery to scientists and its proximity to the sun has made it difficult to observe from Earth. Its surface is a mix of plains, craters caused by bygone impacts with space rocks, and long, winding cliffs.

MESSENGER, which stands for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging, was launched in 2004.

With many scientists now considering Pluto a dwarf planet, Mercury holds the distinction as the solar system’s smallest planet, with a diameter of 3,032 miles, a third the size of Earth and only a bit larger than the Earth’s moon.

Climate change threatens to kill off up to a third of the planet’s species by the end of the century if urgent action isn’t taken to restore fragile ecosystems, protect endangered animals and manage growth, scientists warned Wednesday as a wildlife summit opened.

“Much of the predictions are gloom and doom. The ray of hope, however, is that we have not lost our opportunity. We still have time if we act now,” said Jean Brennan, a senior scientist with Defenders of Wildlife and co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The three-day summit, sponsored by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, assembled several world-renowned climate change researchers with dozens of wildlife experts to trade ideas on how to save species on a warming planet.

Florida has the lowest elevation of any state, the only living coral barrier reef in North America, and the Everglades, a unique wetland perilously close to collapse with at least 67 threatened or endangered species. The state’s population is expected to nearly double to 32 million people by 2050, adding more pressure on shrinking wildlife habitats.

The commission called the summit to learn how best to protect Florida’s wildlife and natural resources. Warming oceans and rising sea levels threaten to inundate Florida’s developed coastline and barrier islands, kill its reef and decimate an economy based on tourism.

Experts noted that many plants and animals have temperature-specific habitats. A change of only a few degrees can kill them or send them seeking a better home.

“Species are moving to track what is the most ideal climate for them,” Brennan said, adding that many are “desperately trying” to find their way through a maze of dams, development and other manmade obstacles along their natural corridors.

Brennan and others said creating wildlife pathways so animals can move freely northward as temperatures warm could mean the difference between survival and extinction.

“We have to have the ability for species to move and when they get there, wherever there is, it needs to be an intact and healthy ecosystem,” Brennan said.

As the Earth’s temperature rises, entire habitats will change, consumed by weather extremes, fires, pest outbreaks and invasions of nonnative species, said Virginia Burkett, a chief scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey.

Burkett, another co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, said extensive die-offs of pinion pine trees in the West are being attributed to climate change. She added some animal species are already disappearing.

Burkett cited the decline of the American pika, a small mountain-dwelling mammal also known as a rock-rabbit that is typically found in the western U.S. and Canada. The rodent maintains a body temperature topping 100 degrees, but with just a few degrees of climate change, “this animal will die,” Burkett said.

She said officials need to begin reducing the non-climate change related stressors, “stop draining the wetlands, damming rivers.”

Nature, she said, is highly adaptable and can be its own best protector against the effects of climate change if it can function, well, naturally.

Coastal growth also must be controlled and limited to allow for “wetlands to migrate inland naturally as sea level rise accelerates, and they can’t do that if there’s a road or a condominium there,” Burkett added.

Before Friday’s close, summit participants also will hold workshops on coastal ecosystems, land use planning, invasive species and wildlife adaptation.