Robot "fish" developed by European scientists to improve pollution monitoring moved from the lab to the sea in a test at the northern Spanish port of Gijon on Tuesday.

The developers hope the new technology, which reduces the time it takes to detect a pollutant from weeks to seconds, will sell to port authorities, water companies, aquariums and anyone with an interest in monitoring water quality.

It could also have spin-offs for cleaning up oil spills, underwater security, diver monitoring or search and rescue at sea, they said.

Scientists have identified thousands of sites in the Arctic where methane that has been stored for many millennia is bubbling into the atmosphere.
The methane has been trapped by ice, but is able to escape as the ice melts.
Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers say this ancient gas could have a significant impact on climate change.
Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas after CO2 and levels are rising after a few years of stability.

In the first study of its kind in Australasia, scientists have used 27 natural climate records to create the first large-scale temperature reconstruction for the region over the last 1000 years.

The study was led by researchers at the University of Melbourne and used a range of natural indicators including tree rings, corals and ice cores to study Australasian temperatures over the past millennium and compared them to climate model simulations.

Massive extraction of groundwater can resolve a puzzle over a rise in sea levels in past decades, scientists in Japan said on Sunday.

Global sea levels rose by an average of 1.8 millimetres per year from 1961-2003, according to data from tide gauges.

But the big question is how much of this can be pinned to global warming.

Biotech industry’s propaganda is false

The only transgenic crop grown in India is Bt cotton developed by injecting a toxin from a soil bacterium called Bacillus Thuringiensis [Bt] into a cotton seed through a highly sophisticated process. When planted the seed produces a highly toxic cotton plant. Its roots, stem, leaves and boll continuously secrete Bt toxin.

British scientists have abandoned an experiment to test the possibility of spraying particles into the upper atmosphere to stem global warming, largely due to concerns over a patent for some of the technology, the project's leader said.

Scientists and engineers from the universities of Bristol, Cambridge and Oxford are behind a three-year, 1.6 million pound ($2.5 million) geo-engineering project called Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE).

Coastal towns of Machilipatnam, Surya Lanka, Kavali and Gudur in Andhra Pradesh are sensitive regions with high return levels of sea surge in case of cyclones or tidal waves in the Bay of Bengal. Sea scientists from the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa, conducted studies to estimate the return periods of extreme sea level events along the East coast of India for as many as 26 coastal cities and towns. The research concentrated on five-year and 50-year return levels, which will help design marine structures for the protection of coastal areas.

Scientists poring over data collected by NASA's Kepler space telescope have discovered a world outside its field of view, demonstrating a new technique for finding planets beyond the Solar System, scientists reported on Thursday.

From its vantage point in space, Kepler stares at about 150,000 sun-like stars located a few hundred light years to a few thousand light years from Earth. One light year is about 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).