Apple's iPhone 5 is seen on display at the Apple store in Manhasset, New York September 21, 2012.

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Paramedics dressed in protective attire walk in front of the ship, the Bellriva, in Wiesbaden December 8, 2012. The Bellriva has been quarantined after at least 30 passengers were found to be suffering from diarrhoea and vomiting. Authorities believed it is caused by the Norovirus, a virus that is spread from person-to-person and causes flu-like symptoms.

LONDON | Mon Dec 31, 2012 8:53am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - Poor Larry isn't looking too good. He's pale and clammy and he's been projectile vomiting over and over again while his carers just stand by and watch.

Yet their lack of concern for Larry is made up for by their intense interest in how far splashes of his vomit can fly, and how effectively they evade attempts to clean them up.

Larry is a "humanoid simulated vomiting system" designed to help scientists analyze contagion. And like millions around the world right now, he's struggling with norovirus - a disease one British expert describes as "the Ferrari of the virus world".

"Norovirus is one of the most infectious viruses of man," said Ian Goodfellow, a professor of virology at the department of pathology at Britain's University of Cambridge, who has been studying noroviruses for 10 years.

"It takes fewer than 20 virus particles to infect someone. So each droplet of vomit or gram of feces from an infected person can contain enough virus to infect more than 100,000 people."

Norovirus is hitting hard this year - and earlier too.

In Britain so far this season, more than a million people are thought to have suffered the violent vomiting and diarrhea it can bring. The Health Protection Agency (HPA) said this high rate of infection relatively early in the winter mirrors trends seen in Japan and Europe.

"In Australia the norovirus season also peaks during the winter, but this season it has gone on longer than usual and they are seeing cases into their summer," it said in a statement.

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say norovirus causes 21 million illnesses annually. Of those who get the virus, some 70,000 require hospitalization and around 800 die each year.

PROFUSE AND PROJECTILE

Norovirus dates back more than 40 years and takes its name from the U.S. city of Norwalk, Ohio, where there was an outbreak of acute gastroenteritis in school children in November 1968.

Symptoms include a sudden onset of vomiting, which can be projectile, and diarrhea, which may be profuse and watery. Some victims also suffer fevers, headaches and stomach cramps.

John Harris, an expert on the virus at Britain's HPA, puts it simply: "Norovirus is very contagious and very unpleasant."

What makes this such a formidable enemy is its ability to evade death from cleaning and to survive long periods outside a human host. Scientists have found norovirus can remain alive and well for 12 hours on hard surfaces and up to 12 days on contaminated fabrics such as carpets and upholstery. In still water, it can survive for months, maybe even years.

At the Health and Safety Laboratory in Derbyshire, northern England, where researcher Catherine Makison developed the humanoid simulated vomiting system and nicknamed him "Vomiting Larry", scientists analyzing his reach found that small droplets of sick can spread over three meters.

"The dramatic nature of the vomiting episodes produces a lot of aerosolized vomit, much of which is invisible to the naked eye," Goodfellow told Reuters.

Larry's projections were easy to spot because he had been primed with a "vomitus substitute", scientists explain, which included a fluorescent marker to help distinguish even small splashes - but they would not be at all easily visible under standard white hospital lighting.

Add the fact that norovirus is particularly resistant to normal household disinfectants and even alcohol hand gels, and it's little wonder the sickness wreaks such havoc in hospitals, schools, nursing homes, cruise ships and hotels.

During the two weeks up to December 23, there were 70 hospital outbreaks of norovirus reported in Britain, and last week a cruise ship that sails between New York and Britain's Southampton docked in the Caribbean with about 200 people on board suffering suspected norovirus.

MOVING TARGET

The good news, for some, is that not everyone appears to be equally susceptible to norovirus infection. According to Goodfellow, around 20 percent of Europeans have a mutation in a gene called FUT2 that makes them resistant.

For the rest the only likely good news will have to wait for the results of trials of a potential norovirus vaccine developed by U.S. drugmaker LigoCyte Pharmaceuticals Inc, or from one of several research teams around the world working on possible new antiviral drugs to treat the infection.

Early tests in 2011 indicated that around half of people vaccinated with the experimental shot, now owned by Japan's Takeda Pharmaceutical Co, were protected from symptomatic norovirus infection.

The bad news, virologists say, is that the virus changes constantly, making it a moving target for drug developers. There is also evidence that humans' immune response to infection is short-lived, so people can become re-infected by the same virus within just a year or two.

"There are many strains, and the virus changes very rapidly - it undergoes something virologists call genetic drift," Harris said in a telephone interview. "When it makes copies of itself, it makes mistakes in those copies - so each time you encounter the virus you may be encountering a slightly different one."

This means that even if a vaccine were to be fully developed - still a big 'if' - it would probably need to be tweaked and repeated in a slightly different formula each year to prevent people getting sick.

Until any effective drugs or vaccines are developed, experts reckon that like the common cold, norovirus will be an unwelcome guest for many winters to come. Their advice is to stay away from anyone with the virus, and use soap and water liberally.

"One of the reasons norovirus spreads so fast is that the majority of people don't wash their hands for long enough," said Goodfellow. "We'd suggest people count to 15 while washing their hands and ensure their hands are dried completely."

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Will Waterman)

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Emergency response crew hired by Exxon Mobil clean up oil spill along the Yellowstone River in Laurel, Montana, July 6, 2011.

WASHINGTON | Wed Jan 2, 2013 7:15pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An Exxon Mobil pipeline spill into the Yellowstone River in 2011 would have been far less severe if the company had not delayed closing valves, a report issued on Wednesday by federal pipeline regulators said.

Exxon's Silvertip pipeline, which carries 40,000 barrels per day of crude in Montana, leaked about 1,500 barrels of oil into the Yellowstone River in July 2011 after the region suffered heavy flooding.

Had Exxon Mobil Pipeline Company's shutdown procedures required remote controlled valves to be closed immediately after a leak, "the crude oil release volume would have been much less," said a U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration report obtained by Reuters on Wednesday.

Controllers closed some valves and pumps 10 minutes after the spill. But workers then waited about 46 minutes before shutting other valves, the report said. If the company had responded faster the spill would have been about two-thirds smaller.

The report said erosion from the flooding exposed the pipeline to debris that severed it and caused the leak. It did not specify fault or express that Exxon violated any safety regulations. A spokesman said the agency was reviewing the report to determine if enforcement actions will be taken.

The Silvertip routinely transports oil sands crude from Canada which environmentalists have said can corrode pipelines. The oil industry has said the petroleum is no more corrosive than other crude transported in pipelines. Exxon has said no Canadian oil was in the line near the area that was affected by the spill.

After the spill, Exxon had installed a new quarter-mile section of the line at least 40 feet under the river.

An Exxon spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the report until it had more time to review and analyze its findings.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)

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JERUSALEM | Thu Jan 3, 2013 7:04am EST

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's IDE Technologies will help construct and run a nearly $1 billion desalination plant along the coast of southern California to help alleviate the region's water shortage.

The facility, expected to begin operations in 2016, will produce 54 million gallons (204,412 cubic meters) of potable water each day, making it the largest sea water desalination plant in the United States, IDE said in a statement on Thursday.

IDE said it signed a contract with Kiewit Shea Desalination to design and supply equipment for the plant to be built near a power station in the city of Carlsbad.

The company also reached a 30-year operation and maintenance agreement with Poseidon Resources, which last week said it had secured $922 million funding for the project.

Poseidon Resources, a subsidiary of Poseidon Water, said the treated water will be delivered into San Diego County's water system.

The plant will use IDE's reverse osmosis technology, which requires less energy and is friendlier to the environment than thermal-based systems. It is part of a plan to have 7 percent of the region's water supply come from desalinated sea water by 2020, the statement said.

IDE is also helping to construct the largest reverse osmosis plant in the world in Israel. The company is jointly owned by Israeli conglomerate Delek Group and Israel Chemicals.

(Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch)

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LOS ANGELES | Wed Jan 2, 2013 8:28pm EST

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The U.S. wind industry is powering up once again after Congress extended a critical tax credit that wind companies say will save tens of thousands of domestic jobs and allow more clean energy projects to ramp up this year.

About half of the sector's 75,000 jobs in the United States had been expected to disappear if the wind production tax credit had been allowed to expire at the end of last year, according to trade group the American Wind Energy Association.

"There will be a lot of activity that wouldn't have otherwise occurred," said David Burton, an attorney with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld who works on the tax aspects of financing renewable energy projects.

The extension and several other clean energy tax breaks came out of a Senate Finance Committee "tax extenders" bill in August and was included, along with a host of other business tax incentives that industries had been pushing for all year, in the deal to avert the "fiscal cliff."

The tax break provides an income tax credit of 2.2 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity produced by utility-scale wind turbines, helping it compete with power generated from cheap fossil fuels like coal and natural gas.

Importantly, the credit was changed to allow project developers to claim it when they begin construction, rather than only once turbines are up and running. It addresses the stop-start nature of the tax credit and takes into consideration the two years it can take to develop a wind farm.

"That's a huge difference," said Lance Markowitz, a senior vice president in the leasing and asset finance division of Union Bank, a unit of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.

Markowitz added that he knows of several wind projects that will go forward that likely would not have without an extension of the tax credit. However, he cautioned that the industry still faces challenges such as weak power prices and an environment in which many utilities are close to fulfilling their state mandates for renewable energy generation and therefore are no longer required to buy more clean power.

The last-minute extension has already taken a toll on the industry, according to AWEA's interim chief executive, Rob Gramlich, who said some of the industry's jobs would not be saved.

"Some of the damage was certainly done," he said.

Manufacturers like Denmark's Vestas Wind Systems A/S, for instance, decreased their U.S. workforce in 2012 in anticipation of the tax credit expiring.

"Our order intake, like everyone else in the industry, saw a decrease in 2012," said Andrew Longeteig, a spokesman for Vestas' North American operations.

BIG HELP FOR SMALL GREEN INDUSTRIES

Allowing projects to claim the tax credit when they begin construction will be a big boon to less developed technologies like geothermal and biomass.

"They are less developed so tend to be looked at by investors as being riskier," said Michael Bernier, a senior manager at Ernst & Young who specializes in renewable energy tax credits. "Providing that certainty of 'OK, we're going to get this tax credit,' that helps you mitigate your risk."

The change could spur about $4 billion of new investment in geothermal projects, said Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association.

It remains to be seen how the federal government will define projects "under construction" and able to qualify for the tax credit. A popular solar power incentive, before it expired, allowed developers to qualify if they incurred five percent of the total project costs even if actual construction had not started.

"The Obama administration was very supportive of those guidelines and will push hard for those same guidelines," said Burton.

The bill to avert the fiscal cliff also included extensions of tax credits for electric vehicle chargers for individuals and businesses and electric motorcycles.

(Additional reporting by Valerie Volcovici in Washington; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

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Waves crash over the conical drilling unit Kulluk where it sits aground on the southeast side of Sitkalidak Island, Alaska in this U.S. Coast Guard handout photo taken January 1, 2013.

LONDON/ANCHORAGE, Alaska | Thu Jan 3, 2013 7:04am EST

LONDON/ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - An oil rig that ran aground in Alaska on New Year's Eve in "near hurricane" conditions dragged two vessels trying to control it more than 10 miles toward a wave-battered rocky shore before the crews cut it loose to save themselves.

The stricken Kulluk oil rig is owned by Royal Dutch/Shell and is a vital part of its controversial Arctic oil drilling program, which has encountered several problems.

The 28,000-tonne, saucer-shaped rig was pushed toward the shore by waves up to 35 feet and winds up to 62 mph, dragging its main towing vessel the Aiviq and a tug, the Alert, behind it.

"We are talking about near hurricane-strength conditions," said Darci Sinclair of the Kulluk Tow Incident Unified Command, set up by the U.S. Coast Guard and the companies involved.

The unified command said the Kulluk was now "upright and stable" on Sitkalidak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. Salvage experts spent three hours aboard it Wednesday for a structural assessment to be used by Netherlands-based Smit Salvage.

They saw no sign that the fuel tanks had been breached. It was still too early to give a recovery timeline, said a Coast Guard official, ahead of a more detailed update on Thursday.

Smit had worked on the Selendang Ayu, a ship that broke in half and spilled fuel and soybeans after grounding in bad weather off Unalaska Island in December 2004. Smit also worked on the Costa Concordia, which grounded off Italy last year.

More than 600 people are involved in the Kulluk response.

"It is important that the American public and our elected officials understand the dangerous and difficult challenges being faced by the response crews," Rear Admiral Thomas Ostebo, commander of the Coast Guard in Alaska, said in the statement.

The 30-year-old Kulluk is operated by Noble Corp and was refitted by Shell for its summer 2012 drilling expedition in the Beaufort Sea off northern Alaska.

Shell spent $4.5 billion preparing for extraction activities there and in the Chukchi Sea further east, but has yet to complete a single well.

Headlines that raise questions about the wisdom of drilling so far north in such an environmentally delicate and technically challenging place were not expected so early in 2013, given that activity stopped for the season two months ago.

Any Kulluk damage may threaten Shell's 2013 drilling program because its oil-spill plans require a second rig to be available at all times in case a relief well needs to be drilled to kill a well. The Noble-owned Discoverer is Shell's other Alaska rig.

The Kulluk was on its way south for the winter. It had been towed east from the Beaufort, and then south through the Bering Strait that separates the northernmost U.S. state from Siberia.

The Kulluk's 18-strong crew had already been lifted off when the four-day battle to keep it off the rocks began.

On December 28, about halfway to its winter destination in Seattle, and 50 miles south of Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska, engine failure struck the Aiviq -- an icebreaker that is less than a year old and whose name means "Walrus".

A few hours after nightfall on December 31, with the shore less than 19 miles away, Aiviq, one of two vessels attached at the time, lost its line.

Despite the Aiviq reattaching its line, the storm continued to drag the oil rig and the two towing boats closer to shore.

On January 1 the order came to cut the Kulluk lines to save the Aiviq, the Alert and the crews, and the oil rig ran aground about 1,600 feet from the shore on Sitkalidak Island.

Noble had no comment, while Shell in London referred calls to the unified command.

"ONE DISASTER TO THE NEXT"

The spill risk from the drillship is limited to the 143,000 gallons of ultra-low-sulfur diesel and 12,000 gallons of other oil products on board. Opponents of Arctic drilling said the accident showed Shell was unable to keep the Arctic safe.

"Shell has lurched from one Arctic disaster to the next, displaying staggering ineptitude every step of the way," Greenpeace campaigner Ben Ayliffe said on Wednesday. "Were the pristine environment of the frozen north not at risk of an oil spill it would be almost comical. Instead it's tragic."

Last month, the Coast Guard briefly detained the Discoverer in Seward, Alaska, on safety concerns. A mandatory oil-containment barge, the Arctic Challenger, failed for months to meet requirements for seaworthiness, and a ship mishap resulted in damage to a piece of equipment intended to cap a blown well.

Asked why the Kulluk was still at sea two months after drilling ended, a contract drilling source said "demobilization" can take days or weeks depending on the rig and its anchoring.

Replacing the Kulluk, if it ends up being badly damaged, would add to the cost of the accident for Shell, which must reimburse the federal and state governments for response costs.

The Noble Discoverer costs Shell $240,000 per day. Shell had to spend $292 million upgrading the Kulluk, which had been slated to be scrapped before Shell bought it in 2005.

(Additional reporting by Braden Reddall in San Francisco; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz, David Gregorio, Andre Grenon and Michael Perry)

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