WASHINGTON | Thu Jan 31, 2013 11:32am EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Chesapeake Bay, North America's biggest estuary, is still ailing but making some progress as it struggles to recover from over-fishing and pollution, a partnership overseeing its revival said on Thursday.

The number of juvenile crabs is the highest in two decades, rockfish are stable and last year's "dead zone," the part of the bay without enough oxygen to support life, seems to be the smallest since 1985, the Chesapeake Bay Program said in its 2011-12 "Bay Barometer."

On the down side, water clarity was very poor and only a third of the bay met standards for dissolved oxygen, a measure of water's health. The oyster population also was at less than 1 percent of historic levels.

"While we clearly have a lot of work to do, the bay is resilient and we have reason for hope," Nick DiPasquale, director of the federal and state program, said in a statement.

The Chesapeake Bay, home to more than 3,600 species of plants and animals, has been fouled by decades of over-fishing and pollution. Pollutants include sediment, manure, trash and chemicals that flow into it from its 64,000-square-mile (166,000-square-km) watershed across six states.

The Chesapeake Bay Program was formed in 1983 to restore the estuary, where salt water from the ocean mixes with fresh water. It includes Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the District of Columbia, the Environmental Protection Agency and citizens groups.

The group said that most of the bay's feeder freshwater streams were in poor or very poor condition. Water murkiness and algae levels in 2011 were the worst since 2009.

But the big Susquehanna Flats grass bed survived Tropical Storm Lee in 2011. In another sign of health, grasses in the middle of the Chesapeake showed "dramatic increases," the program said.

The adult female crab population was still within the sustainable range in 2012 despite falling for two years.

Nitrogen and phosphorus, components in fertilizers that contribute to algae growth, each moved about 20 percent closer to their targets from July 2009 to June 2011 under a bay "pollution diet."

Sediment was about 30 percent nearer its target, helped by more forested buffers being planted to limit runoff into streams and rivers.

In a separate report, the U.S. Geological Survey said this month that nutrient and sediment trends at nine bay monitoring sites had shown an overall lack of improvement through 2010.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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Apollo 11 crew's portrait session shows astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin Aldrin in this July 1969 handout photo courtesy of NASA.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Thu Jan 3, 2013 11:08pm EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Astronaut Neil Armstrong may not have been speaking entirely off the cuff when he delivered the most iconic quote in the history of manned space flight.

Armstrong wrote out the sentence, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," before blasting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with Apollo astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins in July 1969, his brother now says, according to the transcripts of a documentary recently aired on BBC Two.

Because of a radio communications glitch, millions of people watching on television as Armstrong became the first human being to step onto the surface of the moon never heard him utter the word "a" before man.

Armstrong, who died in August at the age of 82, had always maintained he composed the words after touching down on the moon on July 20, 1969, while he waited to leave the Eagle lunar lander.

But Armstrong's younger brother Dean, speaking in an interview for the documentary, "Neil Armstrong - First Man on the Moon" aired on Sunday, said that was not entirely accurate.

"Dean told me that Neil shared the words with him shortly before he left for the Cape, so maybe a couple weeks before the mission," producer Chris Riley told Reuters.

An Armstrong family spokesman did not reply to a request from Reuters for comment.

"I find the timing of Dean Armstrong's revelation to be curious," said Robert Pearlman, owner and curator of CollectSpace.com, a space history website.

"Why wait until after his brother died? He was interviewed for Neil's authorized biography in 2002 and apparently never mentioned this story, despite Neil giving permission to his family and friends to speak openly," Pearlman said.

Andrew Chaikin, author of "A Man on the Moon," which served as a template for an HBO miniseries produced by Tom Hanks, said Armstrong was asked many times over the years when he came up with the quote and always replied that it was spoken spontaneously.

"He had said that many times publicly before I wrote my book, so I never asked him when he made up the quote," Chaikin said.

In the documentary, Dean Armstrong said he and his brother were up one night shortly before Neil left for Florida playing the board game, Risk, Riley said.

Dean said Neil slipped him a piece of paper with the sentence "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," written out and asked Dean what he thought of it, Riley said.

Dean replied, "Fabulous," a transcript of the documentary shows.

Riley, who was commissioned to produce the documentary after Armstrong's death, said he doesn't see it as raising any real questions about the astronaut's integrity.

"Anybody making that historic step onto another world as a human being would have appreciated the significance of it, as Neil did, and would have given it some thought beforehand. It wasn't something that just sort of came to him as he headed down the ladder. But I don't think he fully decided what to say until maybe after landing," Riley said.

The documentary, produced in partnership with PBS's NOVA is due to air in the United States later this year.

(Editing by Tom Brown)

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LONDON | Thu Jan 31, 2013 6:40am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - Environmental campaigners ClientEarth and BirdLife International are taking legal action against the European Commission over its failure to publish a review of greenhouse gas emissions from biomass.

The groups have filed an application to the General Court in Luxembourg for the Commission to give access to the study, which could confirm doubts that biomass used for heat and power is free of emissions, ClientEarth told Reuters on Thursday.

The Commission's review was initially expected to be finalized by September last year.

Marlene Holzner, spokeswoman for the EU energy commissioner, said the Commission's Joint Research Centre was still working on the document on the carbon accounting of biomass.

"The Commission is closely monitoring the scientific debate (..) around the accounting of carbon benefits of biomass. This topic is being analyzed in the context of the ongoing Commission analysis on biomass sustainability, to be finalized in the first half of this year," she added.

Environmentalists have been urging the European Union for some time to agree sustainability criteria to ensure only the right kind of biomass is used in energy generation.

ClientEarth said it has repeatedly asked for access to the review but each time has met with delays from the Commission.

"We believe there is no legitimate reason for the Commission to withhold the document, so we would expect that the Commission will not be able to justify refusal and thus decide to provide access to the document," said Giuseppe Nastasi, biomass legal expert at ClientEarth.

"We believe this document will be crucial for an informed public debate on the sustainability of bioenergy, in particular as policy makers discuss the reform of the much-contested biofuel and biomass policies," he added.

To meet a 2020 goal to cut carbon emissions by 20 percent compared with 1990 levels and increase the share of renewable energy in the mix to 20 percent, also by the end of the decade, EU nations are increasingly depending on biomass which is made from wood pellets, forest residues and other kinds of waste,

European demand for wood pellets to produce electricity is estimated to rise more than three-fold by 2020 as governments offer subsidies for greener energy sources.

So far, biomass has been assumed to be carbon-neutral on the grounds that any emissions generated when it is burnt for heat or power are offset instantly by the regrowth of more biomass.

However, many experts now doubt this.

A report by the Institute for European Environment Policy last year said EU carbon reduction efforts would fall short of target because they rely on the false assumption that biomass used for heat and power is emission-free.

The institute said there could be a time lag, potentially lasting for decades, between harvesting a tree and growing enough new forestry biomass to compensate.

Rulings made by the General Court can, within two months, be subject to an appeal limited to the points of law to the European Court of Justice.

(Reporting by Nina Chestney; Editing by Helen Massy-Beresford)

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Thu Jan 10, 2013 4:12pm EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Like many people, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield confesses that he's sometimes clumsy in the morning just after waking up.

The three-time astronaut, now living aboard the International Space Station, was surprised to learn that did not change in the weightless environment of space.

"When I come out of my sleeping berth to go into our galley and our bathroom, I bump into things even though I'm floating weightless," the 53-year-old pilot told reporters during an in-flight press conference on Thursday.

"You can still have the morning clumsies up here and that surprised me," said Hadfield, who is in line to become the first Canadian commander of the orbital outpost in March.

Hadfield has been sharing his experiences in orbit with a growing flock of Twitter followers. His "Cmdr_Hadfield" Twitter account has added more than 130,000 new subscribers since the astronaut blasted off on December 19 for a six-month stay on the station.

"What we're doing on the space station is fundamentally fascinating ... It encapsulates where we are in history, with people permanently living off Earth. With these new technologies and communications, we can directly give people the human side of that," said Hadfield, who now has more than 163,000 followers.

In between Twitter posts about false fire alarms and fixing the station's toilet, Hadfield has been sharing photographs taken from his unique vantage point 250 miles above Earth.

His favorite subject so far has been so-called noctilucent, or "night shining" clouds that form at the outermost edge of Earth's atmosphere.

These tenuous patches of ice crystals are barely visible from the planet's surface, but sparkle clearly in orbit, Hadfield said.

"The light bounces off of those clouds directly into our eyes," he said.

In addition to the beautiful colors, textures and ripples, Hadfield said the clouds also are a way to monitor changes in the atmosphere and learn more about how the atmosphere interacts with space.

That vantage point from orbit extends beyond visual perception, he added.

"The world just unrolls itself for you, and you see it absolutely discretely as one place. It's hard to reconcile the inherent patience and beauty of the world with the terrible things that we can do to each other as people and can do to the Earth itself," Hadfield said.

"With increased communication, with increased understanding comes a more global perspective and it's one that we feel incredibly honored to see directly and one that we do our best to try to pass on to everybody," he said.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Dan Grebler)

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CONWAY, Massachusetts | Thu Jan 31, 2013 1:44pm EST

CONWAY, Massachusetts (Reuters) - Rain and high winds lashed U.S. Northeast and mid-Atlantic states early on Thursday, knocking out power to more than 330,000 homes and businesses as they braced for a coming snowstorm.

Gusty winds of up to 77 miles per hour battered parts of New England and a high-wind advisory remains in effect until 6 p.m. for northern Connecticut, most of Massachusetts, and southern New Hampshire, the National Weather Service said.

Thunderstorms rolled across the Northeast early on Thursday morning, toppling trees and downing utility lines. Among the hardest hit areas were Connecticut, where about 71,000 customers had no electricity; Long Island, with about 34,000 customers out; and New Jersey, where about 27,000 customers were without power, according to utility reports.

Heavy rainfall caused several dams in Carroll County, Virginia, to overflow after "river flow increased a multiple of 10 times in just 12 hours," said a statement released by Appalachian Power.

The state of Vermont warned residents on Thursday to brace for flash flooding from the storm, with heavy rains causing ice jams in rivers. Residents of low-lying areas were advised to seek higher ground immediately if water began to rise on local rivers.

Raging winds tore the roof off of an elementary school in Fall River, Massachusetts, sending bricks and other debris crashing to the street below, local media reported. A large section of the roof of another elementary school, this one in Raynham, south of Boston, also was blown off, with some debris landing across the street. No one was reported injured.

Early morning bursts of wind and rain also caused traffic accidents. In Centerville, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, a teenage girl crossing the street to board a school bus was seriously injured after being hit by a car in what police called a weather-related crash, local media said. In Boston, a toppled tree fell on an ambulance on its way to pick up a patient. No injuries were reported.

From Friday through the weekend, a series of storms threatens to dump snow from the Midwest to New England and the mid-Atlantic, according to meteorologist Alex Sosnowski on Accuweather.com. Slick conditions could snarl the Friday morning commute to Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, he said.

(Additional reporting by Scott DiSavino; Writing by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Bob Burgdorfer)

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Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA helix and father of the Human Genome Project, became the first human to receive the data encompassing his personal genome sequence at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in this May 31, 2007 file photo.

NEW YORK | Wed Jan 9, 2013 6:34am EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A day after an exhaustive national report on cancer found the United States is making only slow progress against the disease, one of the country's most iconic - and iconoclastic - scientists weighed in on "the war against cancer." And he does not like what he sees.

James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, lit into targets large and small. On government officials who oversee cancer research, he wrote in a paper published on Tuesday in the journal Open Biology, "We now have no general of influence, much less power ... leading our country's War on Cancer."

On the $100 million U.S. project to determine the DNA changes that drive nine forms of cancer: It is "not likely to produce the truly breakthrough drugs that we now so desperately need," Watson argued. On the idea that antioxidants such as those in colorful berries fight cancer: "The time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer."

That Watson's impassioned plea came on the heels of the annual cancer report was coincidental. He worked on the paper for months, and it represents the culmination of decades of thinking about the subject. Watson, 84, taught a course on cancer at Harvard University in 1959, three years before he shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for his role in discovering the double helix, which opened the door to understanding the role of genetics in disease.

Other cancer luminaries gave Watson's paper mixed reviews.

"There are a lot of interesting ideas in it, some of them sustainable by existing evidence, others that simply conflict with well-documented findings," said one eminent cancer biologist who asked not to be identified so as not to offend Watson. "As is often the case, he's stirring the pot, most likely in a very productive way."

There is wide agreement, however, that current approaches are not yielding the progress they promised. Much of the decline in cancer mortality in the United States, for instance, reflects the fact that fewer people are smoking, not the benefits of clever new therapies.

GENETIC HOPES

"The great hope of the modern targeted approach was that with DNA sequencing we would be able to find what specific genes, when mutated, caused each cancer," said molecular biologist Mark Ptashne of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The next step was to design a drug to block the runaway proliferation the mutation caused.

But almost none of the resulting treatments cures cancer. "These new therapies work for just a few months," Watson told Reuters in a rare interview. "And we have nothing for major cancers such as the lung, colon and breast that have become metastatic."

The main reason drugs that target genetic glitches are not cures is that cancer cells have a work-around. If one biochemical pathway to growth and proliferation is blocked by a drug such as AstraZeneca's Iressa or Genentech's Tarceva for non-small-cell lung cancer, said cancer biologist Robert Weinberg of MIT, the cancer cells activate a different, equally effective pathway.

That is why Watson advocates a different approach: targeting features that all cancer cells, especially those in metastatic cancers, have in common.

One such commonality is oxygen radicals. Those forms of oxygen rip apart other components of cells, such as DNA. That is why antioxidants, which have become near-ubiquitous additives in grocery foods from snack bars to soda, are thought to be healthful: they mop up damaging oxygen radicals.

That simple picture becomes more complicated, however, once cancer is present. Radiation therapy and many chemotherapies kill cancer cells by generating oxygen radicals, which trigger cell suicide. If a cancer patient is binging on berries and other antioxidants, it can actually keep therapies from working, Watson proposed.

"Everyone thought antioxidants were great," he said. "But I'm saying they can prevent us from killing cancer cells."

'ANTI-ANTIOXIDANTS'

Research backs him up. A number of studies have shown that taking antioxidants such as vitamin E do not reduce the risk of cancer but can actually increase it, and can even shorten life. But drugs that block antioxidants - "anti-antioxidants" - might make even existing cancer drugs more effective.

Anything that keeps cancer cells full of oxygen radicals "is likely an important component of any effective treatment," said cancer biologist Robert Benezra of Sloan-Kettering.

Watson's anti-antioxidant stance includes one historical irony. The first high-profile proponent of eating lots of antioxidants (specifically, vitamin C) was biochemist Linus Pauling, who died in 1994 at age 93. Watson and his lab mate, Francis Crick, famously beat Pauling to the discovery of the double helix in 1953.

One elusive but promising target, Watson said, is a protein in cells called Myc. It controls more than 1,000 other molecules inside cells, including many involved in cancer. Studies suggest that turning off Myc causes cancer cells to self-destruct in a process called apoptosis.

"The notion that targeting Myc will cure cancer has been around for a long time," said cancer biologist Hans-Guido Wendel of Sloan-Kettering. "Blocking production of Myc is an interesting line of investigation. I think there's promise in that."

Targeting Myc, however, has been a backwater of drug development. "Personalized medicine" that targets a patient's specific cancer-causing mutation attracts the lion's share of research dollars.

"The biggest obstacle" to a true war against cancer, Watson wrote, may be "the inherently conservative nature of today's cancer research establishments." As long as that's so, "curing cancer will always be 10 or 20 years away."

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Jilian Mincer and Peter Cooney)

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Thu Jan 31, 2013 1:19pm EST

n">(Reuters) - The unrelenting drought gripping key farming states in the U.S. Plains shows no signs of abating, and it will take a deluge of snow or rain to restore critical moisture to farmland before spring planting of new crops, a climate expert said on Thursday.

"It's not a pretty picture," said climatologist Mark Svoboda of the University of Nebraska's Drought Mitigation Center.

Precipitation in the Plains region has been 3-6 inches shy of normal levels since October, and some areas are nearly 16 inches short of much-needed moisture over the last nine months, said Svoboda.

The drought that last year ranked as the worst in roughly 50 years is still entrenched in the nation's mid-section. This month was considered the worst January in terms of drought over the 13 years that a consortium of federal and state climatology experts have been monitoring drought levels and issuing regular "Drought Monitor" reports, said Svoboda.

"The January number is the highest amount of coverage for the U.S. since we've been doing this," Svoboda said.

Thursday's Drought Monitor report showed severe drought still gripping 87.25 percent of the High Plains, unchanged from the prior week. Fully 100 percent of the land area in Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska and Oklahoma remained engulfed in severe drought or worse, according to the Drought Monitor.

Nebraska remained the most drought-stricken state, with 96.28 percent in extreme drought - the second-worst level of drought - and 77.46 percent in exceptional drought, considered the most dire.

The Plains states are key crop production areas, particularly for hard red winter wheat, an important bread-making crop. And they are critical areas for cattle and other livestock production.

Overall, 57.68 percent of the contiguous United States was in at least "moderate" drought as of January 29, a slightly worse situation than the previous week's tally of 57.64 percent. Exceptional drought expanded slightly to 6.37 percent, up from 6.36 percent of the country.

Millions of acres from South Dakota to Oklahoma and west into Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico and east into Missouri and Arkansas, are short more than half of the normal moisture they receive, said Svoboda.

The dry conditions have been exacerbated by unseasonably warm conditions in many areas.

The U.S. winter wheat crop that was planted last fall is struggling for survival now as a result, and will need substantial moisture to emerge in the spring.

Corn and soybeans crops, generally planting in April or shortly after, will also need good soil moisture to get the plants off to a healthy start before summer sets in. But there are no signs of any significant weather pattern shifts to bring about heavy precipitation, said Svoboda.

"Instead of normal, we'd like to see 150 percent of normal," he said.

(Reporting by Carey Gillam in Kansas City; Editing by David Gregorio)

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A dead wild pine tree is seen behind a pile of eucalyptus logs in Arganil, central Portugal April 28, 2008.

OSLO | Mon Jan 7, 2013 4:35am EST

OSLO (Reuters) - Green schemes to fight climate change by producing more bio-fuels could actually worsen a little-known type of air pollution and cause almost 1,400 premature deaths a year in Europe by 2020, a study showed on Sunday.

The report said trees grown to produce wood fuel - seen as a cleaner alternative to oil and coal - released a chemical into the air that, when mixed with other pollutants, could also reduce farmers' crop yields.

"Growing biofuels is thought to be a good thing because it reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," said Nick Hewitt, who worked on the study with colleagues from England's Lancaster University.

"What we're saying is 'yes, that's great, but biofuels could also have a detrimental effect on air quality'," he added.

The report, in the journal Nature Climate Change, looked into the impact of a European Union scheme to slow climate change by producing more biofuels.

Hewitt told Reuters there would be a similar impact wherever biofuels were produced in large quantities in areas suffering air pollution, including the United States and China.

Poplar, willow or eucalyptus trees, all used as fast-growing sources of renewable wood fuel, emit high levels of the chemical isoprene as they grow, the study said. Isoprene forms toxic ozone when mixed with other air pollutants in sunlight.

"Large-scale production of biofuels in Europe would have small but significant effects on human mortality and crop yields," said Hewitt.

"As far as we know, no one has looked at the air quality of growing biofuel crops before," he added.

The report estimated that ozone from wood-based energy to meet the European Union's 2020 goal would cause nearly 1,400 premature deaths a year, costing society $7.1 billion.

The European plan would also would reduce the annual value of wheat and maize production by $1.5 billion since ozone impairs crop growth, the study added.

LUNG PROBLEMS

Siting new biofuel plantations far away from polluted population centres would help limit ozone formation, the study suggested. Genetic engineering might be used to reduce isoprene emissions, it said.

Ozone can cause lung problems and is blamed for killing about 22,000 people a year in Europe. Overall air pollution, mainly from fossil fuels, causes about 500,000 premature deaths in Europe a year, according to the European Environment Agency.

Sunday's study did not compare the potential damage caused by biofuels to the impact on human health from producing coal, oil or natural gas as part of policies to slow global warming. "We're not in a position to make that comparison," Hewitt said.

He noted that the main reason to shift to biofuels was to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, mainly from fossil fuels, that U.N. studies project will become ever more damaging this century.

The United Nations' World Health Organization estimates global warming has caused more than 140,000 deaths annually worldwide since the 1970s.

The biggest impact was recorded in developing nations where the floods, droughts and other disasters blamed on climate change left millions suffering from diarrhea, malnutrition, malaria and dengue fever.

Burning biofuels is viewed as neutral for climate change because plants soak up carbon when they grow and release it when they burn or rot. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, add carbon to the atmosphere from underground stores millions of years old.

Biofuels are often blamed for causing food price spikes by competing for cropland. Responding to such criticisms, the European Commission said last year it aimed to limit crop-based biofuels - such as from maize or sugar - to five percent of transport fuels.

(Editing by Andrew Heavens)

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A truckload of corn is dumped into a chute at the Lincolnway Energy plant in the town of Nevada, Iowa, December 6, 2007.

WASHINGTON | Thu Jan 31, 2013 8:09pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Corn ethanol would get a larger share of the U.S. gasoline market under a government proposal on Thursday while ranchers, environmentalists and the oil industry aim to kill the renewable fuels mandate altogether.

The Obama administration proposed a 9 percent increase in the so-called renewable fuels standard from 2012, in line with a 2007 law. Half of the 1.35 billion-gallon increase would go to corn ethanol and half to "advanced" biofuels that produce half the greenhouse gases of first-generation ethanol.

Overall, biofuels would be allotted 16.5 billion gallons of the fuel market for cars and light trucks. The mandate reaches 36 billion gallons in 2022, with half of the mandate going to new-generation biofuels.

Last fall, the administration denied a request from several governors from livestock and oil-producing states for a partial or total waiver of the requirement to use ethanol. Corn prices soared during the drought as ethanol makers, livestock producers, and grain exporters competed for a smaller supply.

"We're girding for a fight," said Bob Dinneen of the ethanol trade group Renewable Fuels Association. He said a campaign against the biofuel mandate already was under way.

There will be a 45-day comment period on the latest proposal after which the Environmental Protection Agency will issue a final ruling.

EPA SAYS CELLULOSIC TARGET IS REASONABLE

As part of its proposal, the EPA put the mandate for advanced biofuels at 2.75 billion gallons, including 14 million gallons of cellulosic biofuels, made from grass, shrub and trees.

The cellulosic target "is a reasonable representation of expected production," EPA said was in line with an appellate court decision last week that ruled against an unrealistically high production target.

EPA set its biodiesel target for this year at 1.28 billion gallons in an earlier, separate action.

Traders said Brazilian ethanol, made from sugar cane, and domestic biodiesel would compete to fill the advanced biofuels mandate. Biodiesel counts as an advanced biofuel.

In addition, EPA proposed a new voluntary program to assure the validity of Renewable Identification Numbers, known as RINs. Fuel companies can use RINs, each representing a gallon of biofuel, to meet the renewable fuel mandate.

Fraudulent RINs have been a problem in the biodiesel industry. EPA said it worked with the biofuels industry in developing its RINs proposal.

ETHANOL PRODUCTION FALLS DURING TOUGH YEAR

U.S. ethanol production fell during the second half of 2012 in the face of high corn prices, the drought-shortened crop and weaker demand for gasoline, the Energy Department said on Thursday. And ethanol prices in 2012 were down 8 percent from 2011's average.

The slump continued into this year. Ethanol production in the week ending on January 25 was the lowest in two years and the four-week average pointed to ethanol production of 12.2 billion gallons this year, far below the mandate of 13.6 billion gallons.

"There's not a market. We're trying to build demand," said Dinneen of the RFA.

Three dozen ethanol plants, with 15 percent of industry capacity, were closed as of Tuesday. Analysts said comparatively low demand for gasoline meant limited demand for ethanol too.

Ethanol is a farm-state favorite, where it is embraced as a home-grown antidote for oil imports and a job-creating industry for rural America. About 40 percent of the corn crop is used in distilling ethanol.

Foes ranging from environmentalists to livestock producers and the oil industry want to end the mandate. They say it encourages soil erosion and pesticide runoff from farms and, by driving up the cost of livestock feed, affects beef, pork and chicken meat prices in grocery stores.

(Reporting by Charles Abbott; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Mon Jan 7, 2013 5:06pm EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's Kepler space telescope has uncovered another 461 potential new planets, most of which are the size of Earth or a few times larger, scientists said on Monday.

The announcement brings Kepler's head count to 2,740 candidate new worlds, 105 of which have been confirmed.

"Two years ago we had around 1,200 candidate planet objects. A year later, we added a significant number of new objects and saw the trend of huge numbers of very small planets ... twice the size of Earth and smaller," Kepler astronomer Christopher Burke told a news conference webcast from the American Astronomical Society conference in Long Beach, California.

With the addition of 461 new candidate planets, collected over 22 months of Kepler telescope observations, the proliferation of smaller planets continues.

The new targets include what appears to be a planet about 1.5 times bigger than Earth circling its sun-like parent star in a 242-day orbit - a distance where liquid water, believed to be necessary for life, could exist on its surface.

In related research, astronomers have determined that about one in six sun-like stars have Earth-sized planets circling their parent stars closer than Mercury's 88-day day orbit around the sun.

The goal of the Kepler mission, which began in 2009, is to determine how many stars in the Milky Way galaxy have an Earth-sized planet orbiting in so-called habitable zones, where water can exist on its surface.

"You need very specific conditions to have liquid water. You can't have your planet too close to your star where it's too hot. You can't have it too far away for the planet conditions to be too cold. We're trying to find these planets in this very specific habitable zone," said Burke, who is with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

The Kepler telescope works by tracking slight decreases in the amount of light coming from 160,000 target stars caused by a planet or planets passing by, or transiting, relative to the telescope's point of view.

Earth-sized planets located about where Earth orbits the sun would take 365 days to circle their parent star. Those located closer, in Mercury-like 88-day orbits, transit more frequently.

Scientists need at least two and preferably three or more cycles to determine whether an apparent transit is real or some other phenomena.

"In order to catch several transits of an Earth analog, you have to wait for one more year to get another transit. It's simply too early to call," said astronomer Francois Fressin, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The Kepler roster also boosts the number of multi-planet systems. Of the 2,740 objects, 299 are in dual-planet systems, 112 are in triplets, 44 are part of four-planet systems, 11 systems have five planets and one system has six planets.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Christopher Wilson)

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1 of 20. Paramedics wheel an injured person to a helicopter at the parking lot of the state-run oil company Pemex after an explosion in Mexico City January 31, 2013.

MEXICO CITY | Fri Feb 1, 2013 5:50am EST

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Emergency services worked into the early hours of Friday to find people trapped in rubble under state oil company Pemex's headquarters in Mexico City after an explosion that killed at least 25 people and injured more than 100.

Scenes of confusion and chaos at the downtown tower dealt yet another blow to Pemex's image as Mexico's new president courts outside investment for the 75-year-old monopoly.

Search and rescue workers picked through debris, and investigators sifted through shattered glass and concrete at the bottom of the building to try to find what caused the blast. It was not clear how many might still be trapped inside.

Pemex, a symbol of Mexican self-sufficiency as well as a byword in Mexico for security glitches, oil theft and frequent accidents, has been hamstrung by inefficiency, union corruption and a series of safety failures costing hundreds of lives.

Thursday's blast at the more than 50-storey skyscraper that houses administrative offices followed a September fire at a Pemex gas facility near the northern city of Reynosa which killed 30 people. More than 300 were killed when a Pemex natural gas plant on the outskirts of Mexico City blew up in 1984.

Eight years later, about 200 people were killed and 1,500 injured after a series of underground gas explosions in Guadalajara, Mexico's second biggest city. An official investigation found Pemex was partly to blame.

Pemex initially flagged Thursday's incident as a problem with its electricity supply and then said there had been an explosion. But it did not give a cause for the blast.

A government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a preliminary line of inquiry suggested a gas boiler had blown up in a Pemex building just to the side of the main tower. However, he stressed nothing had been determined for sure.

Others at the scene said gas may have caused the blast.

Not long after the blast, President Enrique Pena Nieto was at the scene, vowing to discover how it happened.

"We will work exhaustively to investigate exactly what took place, and if there are people responsible, to apply the force of the law on them," he told reporters before going to visit survivors in hospital.

Shortly after midnight, at least 46 victims were still being treated in hospital, the company said.

Pemex said the blast would not affect operations, but concern in the government was evident as top military officials, the attorney general and the energy minister joined Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong for a late news conference.

"I have issued instructions to the relevant authorities to convene national and international experts to help in the investigations," Osorio Chong said. He later noted that the number of casualties could still climb.

Whatever caused it, the deaths and destruction will put the spotlight back on safety at Pemex, which only a couple of hours before the explosion had issued a statement on Twitter saying the company had managed to improve its record on accidents.

Nieto has said he is giving top priority to reforming the company this year, though he has yet to reveal details of the plan, which already faces opposition from the left.

Both Pena Nieto and his finance minister were this week at pains to stress the company will not be privatized.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

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1 of 2. A giant squid is seen in this still image taken from video captured from a submersible by a Japanese-led team of scientists near Ogasawara islands taken in July 2012, in this handout picture released by NHK/NEP/Discovery Channel in Tokyo January 7, 2013. The scientists have captured on film the world's first live images of a giant squid, journeying to the depths of the ocean in search of the mysterious creature thought to have inspired the myth of the ''kraken'', a tentacled monster. Picture released on January 7.

TOKYO | Tue Jan 8, 2013 5:07pm EST

TOKYO (Reuters) - A Japanese-led team of scientists has captured on film the world's first live images of a giant squid, journeying to the depths of the ocean in search of the mysterious creature thought to have inspired the myth of the "kraken", a tentacled monster.

The images of the silvery, three-meter (10 feet) long cephalopod, looming out of the darkness nearly 1 km below the surface, were taken last July near the Ogasawara islands, 1,000 km (620 miles) south of Tokyo.

Though the beast was small by giant squid standards - the largest ever caught stretched 18 meters long, tentacles and all - filming it secretly in its natural habitat was a key step towards understanding the animal, researchers said.

"Many people have tried to capture an image of a giant squid alive in its natural habitat, whether researchers or film crews. But they all failed," said Tsunemi Kubodera, a zoologist at Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science, who led the team.

"These are the first ever images of a real live giant squid," Kubodera said of the footage, shot by Japanese national broadcaster NHK and the Discovery Channel.

The key to their success, said Kubodera, was a small submersible rigged with lights invisible to both human and cephalopod eyes.

He, a cameraman and the submersible's pilot drifted silently down to 630 meters and released a one-meter-long squid as bait. In all, they descended around 100 times.

"If you try and approach making a load of noise, using a bright white light, then the squid won't come anywhere near you. That was our basic thinking," Kubodera said.

"So we sat there in the pitch black, using a near-infrared light invisible even to the human eye, waiting for the giant squid to approach."

As the squid neared they began to film, following it into the depths to around 900 meters.

"I've seen a lot of giant squid specimens in my time, but mainly those hauled out of the ocean. This was the first time for me to see with my own eyes a giant squid swimming," he said. "It was stunning, I couldn't have dreamt that it would be so beautiful. It was such a wonderful creature."

Until recently, little was known about the creature believed to be the real face of the mythical kraken, a sea-monster blamed by sailors for sinking ships off Norway in the 18th century.

But for Kubodera, the animal held no such terror.

"A giant squid essentially lives a solitary existence, swimming about all alone in the deep sea. It doesn't live in a group," he said. "So when I saw it, well, it looked to me like it was rather lonely."

(Reporting by Ruairidh Villar; Writing by Elaine Lies; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

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