Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) gestures at the podium of the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, August 27, 2008.

WASHINGTON | Fri Jan 11, 2013 10:24am EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia will announce later on Friday that he will not seek a sixth term in the Senate in 2014, according to a Senate Democratic source.

Rockefeller, 75, is chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. He is scheduled to make an announcement at 11 a.m. EST (1600 GMT) in Charleston, West Virginia, about his future plans, according to his office.

The liberal Democrat, whose full name is John D. Rockefeller IV, is the great-grandson of the famous oil tycoon who became a billionaire in the late 1800s.

Senator Rockefeller has been a strong supporter of organized labor and was an active participant in healthcare reform initiatives, including President Barack Obama's successful effort in 2010.

Rockefeller also has been a protector of West Virginia's coal industry, an important economic force in his impoverished state. In 2009 and 2010, Rockefeller urged the Senate to take a careful approach to climate change legislation that would have aimed to reduce the use of carbon-emitting fossil fuels, such as coal, over the long-term.

That legislative effort ultimately sputtered in the Senate.

Instead, Rockefeller promoted a system that would have permanently stored carbon dioxide industrial emissions underground - a commercially unproven technology.

Republican Representative Shelley Moore Capito has been weighing a run for Rockefeller's Senate seat for a while.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Vicki Allen)

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The main body section of the first Airbus A350 is seen on the final assembly line in Toulouse, southwestern France, October 23, 2012.

TOULOUSE, France | Thu Jan 31, 2013 10:16pm EST

TOULOUSE, France (Reuters) - Airbus has studied alternatives to lithium-ion batteries for its next jet, the A350, and has time to adapt to any rule changes prompted by the problems that have grounded Boeing Co's 787 Dreamliner, its top executive said.

Airbus plans to use lithium-ion batteries on the A350, similar to the technology incorporated in Boeing's 787 airliners, and so far has stood by the modern power packs.

"We studied the integration of these batteries on the A350 very carefully," Airbus Chief Executive Fabrice Bregier told a group of French aerospace journalists on Thursday. "I am very relaxed about this."

The first U.S. grounding of a new model of passenger jet in over 30 years has focused attention on the risks that lithium-ion batteries can overheat and ignite a fire that is harder to put out than most flames, because of the solvents involved.

Airbus warned about the risks of lithium-ion batteries at a closed meeting of airlines in March 2011, according to a presentation first reported by Reuters this week.

"We identified this fragility at the start of development and we think we resolved it about a year ago," Bregier said. "Nothing prevents us from going back to a classical plan that we have been studying in parallel."

He did not provide details, but some aerospace industry sources caution that a redesign of the batteries could require months of engineering work and tests to obtain certification.

"We have a robust design. If this design has to evolve, we have the time to do that," Bregier said. "If it has to change in a more drastic way because the authorities reach the conclusion that the technology is not mature, then we have all the time we need to do this on the A350 before first delivery in the second half of 2014."

The head of the company that makes A350 batteries, France's Saft, told Reuters earlier on Thursday he did not believe there would be a radical rethink by aviation regulators on the use of lithium-ion as a result of the 787's problems.

It is the first time Boeing or Airbus has used the technology in designing commercial passenger jets.

POWER BOOST

Lithium-ion batteries are a third lighter than their older nickel-cadmium counterparts and are also capable of supporting other electrical systems that make the plane lighter. They take up less space than the nickel cadmium batteries used on most jets.

Experts say the 787 relies more heavily than the A350 on electrical systems instead of traditional hydraulics to control brakes and other systems, and therefore needs more power back-up.

The head of the National Transportation Safety Board said after a press conference last week that the lack of a fire-fighting system in the 787's battery compartment, which also contains flight electronics, was one area being examined.

Airbus has declined to say whether the A350 would include battery fire extinguishers, but industry sources say burning materials would instead be expelled outside the plane and that the fire hazard is reduced by electronics also provided by Saft.

Saft declined to comment on the A350 battery design.

Boeing's 787 batteries are supplied by French defence electronics company Thales, which sub-contracts the lithium-ion cells to Japanese company GS Yuasa Corp.

A year after intense global publicity surrounding wing cracks on its A380 superjumbos, Airbus is keen to avoid a public split with its commercial rival on safety issues. But after sending a public message of support to Boeing on the 787 this month, Bregier exhibited frustration at growing speculation over the saga's impact on the A350.

"I'm not going to give any lessons to Boeing. At the same time, I don't have to take any either, when I think we have done well and have a plan which allows me to have aircraft flying with batteries that don't catch fire," he said.

"Let's allow the U.S. authorities to come up with their own recommendations and decisions."

Boeing Chief Executive Jim McNerney said on Wednesday the U.S. planemaker was "narrowing down" the potential causes of the two battery incidents that led to the 787 grounding.

(Writing by Tim Hepher; Editing by Ian Geoghegan)

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A page from the Skype website is seen in Singapore May 10, 2011.

LONDON | Fri Jan 11, 2013 6:59am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - Niklas Zennstrom, co-founder of internet phone service Skype, believes the next hot tech business will just as likely spring from Istanbul or Sao Paolo as from Silicon Valley or the coolest districts of London.

And he is prepared to fly around the world to find it.

"Talent can pop up anywhere in the world, it's not just one city block," the Swedish entrepreneur and venture capitalist said at the headquarters of his Atomico fund, based on upmarket New Bond Street in central London.

Zennstrom, who retains faint traces of a Swedish accent despite his years of globetrotting, is looking for start-ups ready to shift up a gear into new markets and has the experience, gained from growing Skype into a service used by millions around the world, to help them.

Skype was sold to eBay Inc in 2005 for roughly $3 billion, before being bought back by a consortium including Zennstrom in 2009 and then two years later sold on to Microsoft Corp for $8.5 billion, leaving him a multi-millionaire.

"If you have a product that works it's important to scale (up) the business as quickly as possible," said Zennstrom, named by Time Magazine in 2006 as one of its 100 most influential people. "As entrepreneurs, usually you may not have that experience; how does Asia work? Europe? Latin America?"

Atomico, founded by Zennstrom in 2006, has invested in companies in northern Europe including Finland-based Rovio, developer of Angry Birds, and Hailo, a London-based startup that has developed an app that connects passengers with taxi drivers and has raised $20 million so far.

It also led a $105 million funding round for U.S. online retailer Fab in July.

FUTURE PORTFOLIO

The investment fund, whose London office reception is decked out with simple designer furniture and modern art pieces, has opened offices in Turkey and Brazil, emerging markets with growing middle classes eager to shop online and buy internet services.

Zennstrom wants to make these markets a large part of Atomico's portfolio in future.

The firm in 2011 backed Brazilian online retailers such as car parts supplier Connect Parts and announced a $16 million investment in a Russian online travel agency in October.

Atomico is not necessarily looking for the latest gizmo or internet trend, but savvy businesses with talented leaders who can take advantage of growth in nascent sectors such as e-commerce.

And Zennstrom, softly spoken and wearing an open-necked shirt and dark jacket, believes emerging market growth is fuelling a new breed of optimism and ambition.

"It's a much more of an entrepreneurial spirit (in Turkey and Brazil) compared to southern European where it's a depressed mindset," he said.

Zennstrom earned his stripes in the tech world after helping launch file-sharing service Kazaa more than a decade ago, which failed as a business but paved the way for Skype.

He said getting investment today was far easier than when he was starting Skype. It took him a year to secure funding, whereas today the most talented entrepreneurs with the best ideas could take their pick of investors.

There is also increasing recognition that entrepreneurs might want to realize some of the value of their creations, something he said was lacking when Skype became successful.

"There was really no IPO market and it was not really accepted for founders to sell some of their shares to get some money off the table," he said, adding that before Skype was sold to eBay, he could not even secure a mortgage on an apartment.

"I think we made the right decision for the time in terms of selling (Skype)," he said. "Today as an entrepreneur you have more options."

(Editing by David Holmes)

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Wed Jan 30, 2013 9:59pm EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket blasted off on Wednesday to put the first of a new generation of NASA communications satellites into orbit, where it will support the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope and other spacecraft.

The 191-foot (58-metre) rocket lifted off at 8:48 p.m. (0148 GMT Thursday), the first of 13 planned launches in 2013 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station just south of NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

Once in position 22,300 miles above the planet, the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, known as TDRS and built by Boeing Co, will join a seven-member network that tracks rocket launches and relays communications to and from the space station, the Hubble observatory and other spacecraft circling Earth.

Two other TDRS spacecraft were decommissioned in 2009 and 2011 respectively and shifted into higher "graveyard" orbits. A third satellite was lost in the 1986 space shuttle Challenger accident.

NASA used its space shuttle fleet for launching the satellites until 1995, then switched in 2000 to unmanned Atlas rockets, manufactured by United Space Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

With six operational satellites and a seventh spare, NASA can track and communicate with spacecraft in lower orbits, such as the space station, which flies about 250 miles above Earth.

Before 1983 when the first TDRS was launched, NASA relied on ground-based communications, occasionally supplemented with airplanes and ships, which was expensive to maintain and provided only a fraction of the coverage of an orbiting network.

Three second-generation TDRS spacecraft were launched from 2000 to 2002. Wednesday's launch was the first of three planned third-generation satellites needed to replace aging members of the constellation.

"It's been a long time since we launched the last one," NASA's TDRS project manager, Jeffrey Gramling, told reporters at a news conference before the launch.

Most of the spacecraft are well beyond their 10-year design life, he added.

Initially developed to support the space shuttle and space station programs, the TDRS network now serves a variety of NASA spacecraft and commercial users such as Space Exploration Technologies and foreign space agencies flying cargo ships to and from the station, a $100 billion research laboratory staffed by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts.

The new spacecraft, which cost between $350 million and $400 million, will take about 10 days to reach its intended orbit. It will then go through a three-month checkout before it is put into service, Gramling said.

The 12th and 13th TDRS satellites are targeted for launch in 2014 and December 2015.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Peter Cooney)

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A Sirius Satellite Radio unit is shown installed in a private vehicle in Washington February 20, 2007.

NEW YORK | Thu Jan 10, 2013 5:41pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sirius XM Radio Inc's grip on drivers is under an increasing threat as the availability of Internet connections in more cars is helping Pandora Media Inc counter some of its rival's big selling points.

In a sign of how important drivers are to the two companies, each of their top executives made the trek to Las Vegas this week to court automakers at the annual Consumer Electronics Show.

Sirius XM, which has its satellite radios in 70 percent of new vehicles, generates the vast majority of its revenue through subscriptions and derives only a fraction from advertising dollars. Streaming service Pandora is just the opposite, collecting most of its revenue from advertising and operating only a nascent subscription business.

Right now, Sirius XM is the much bigger company, with almost 24 million subscribers and more than $3 billion in annual revenue. In the third quarter, it generated average revenue of $12.14 per subscriber.

Pandora, by contrast has 60 million users, about 1 million of whom are paid subscribers, and is on track to generate $424 million in revenue this year.

But the migration of music audiences to mobile devices threatens to upend a market that Sirius current dominates. The key to both companies' futures rests on winning the battle for the listener on the go, particularly people traveling by car.

With its presence in new vehicles, Sirius XM has a first-mover advantage over Pandora. But Pandora is making a huge push to get into the car, a move that dovetails with ubiquitous wireless access that makes it easier to listen to its service.

"Internet-enabled radio in the car has already begun," Pandora Chief Executive Officer Joe Kennedy said in an interview. "It will grow as a snowball, initially small but growing exponentially."

Sirius XM declined to make its executives available for interviews.

Of Pandora's 60 million total listeners, 77 percent have tuned in with a mobile device. The problem is, the revenue per 1,000 listener hours on mobile was only $26.96 in the third quarter, up from $23.60 a year earlier, but still less than half of the $56.40 the company generated from other listeners.

"They do have to continue their mobile monetization," said Cowen and Co analyst John Blackledge, who has a "neutral" rating on the stock.

Kennedy called the third quarter a "key milestone" since the mobile revenue increase outpaced mobile usage growth.

At Sirius XM, executives have said its customers are increasingly listening to its service on mobile devices, but it has never broken out figures on that usage. It costs Sirius XM car subscribers an extra $3.50 a month to stream the service over the Internet on devices.

"They don't really promote it, and it's not really a cornerstone of the product," Gabelli & Co analyst Brett Harriss said.

Sirius XM Chief Financial Officer David Frear said at an investor conference on Wednesday that the strategy was "to capture you in the car and then allow you to extend to other platforms."

DASH FOR THE DASHBOARD

While Sirius XM touts the ability of its satellites to deliver a strong signal and high audio quality, the importance of those attributes is likely to fade because of the widespread availability of faster and better Internet connections in cars.

"From the consumer standpoint, the reception advantages of satellite radio will be marginalized or go away over time," said a former Sirius XM executive familiar with the business models of the company and its competitors.

Indeed, Liberty Media Corp, which ranks as Sirius XM's largest shareholder and is close to gaining operating control of the company, has criticized its former longtime CEO, Mel Karmazin, for not adapting to changing technologies fast enough.

Critics say Sirius XM has relied too heavily on its position in the auto market and perceived programming advantage. About 50 million cars in the United States come equipped with the satellite radios, with just under half of their owners actually subscribing to the service.

For its part, Pandora is available in just 75 vehicle models, although it also has deals with automakers like General Motors Co, Ford Motor Co, BMW and most recently Chrysler Group LLC that allow drivers to plug in their Pandora-enabled mobile devices and use the car's dashboard to control the service.

More than 1 million people have used Pandora's dashboard integration, Pandora said.

Sirius XM also believes it has an edge with its programming from the likes of shock jock Howard Stern, talk show host Oprah Winfrey and major sports leagues. Access to this type of content, Sirius contends, justifies the subscription cost of at least $14.49 per month.

In the first three quarters of the year, Sirius XM's programming and content costs were $205.2 million, while it paid $409.4 million in revenue sharing and royalties, the company has reported. This represents roughly 25 percent of its revenue in the period.

On the other hand, Pandora spends roughly 55 percent its revenue on acquiring music.

"Having music is an important thing, but having the diversity of the content, the music, the news, the talk and the entertainment content is really what sets us apart," Sirius XM CFO Frear said at a December 3 investor conference.

But as Internet access becomes more readily available in cars, people will be able to listen to podcasts and other content.

"The value of commercial-free music on Sirius could decrease," said Gabelli analyst Harriss. "There is no doubt competition from Pandora will increase in the next two or three years."

RIHANNA VS. PANDORA

Still, Sirius XM has an unlikely ally in its battle with streaming music services: the U.S. government.

As it stands, Pandora and other streaming music services pay a much bigger percentage of revenue to license songs than Sirius XM does. Plus, the more popular these services become, the more they have to shell out for music royalties.

Based on rules that U.S. lawmakers set under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Pandora pays more than 50 percent of its revenue to an agency called SoundExchange to license songs on a per-performance basis.

Sirius XM pays 8 percent of its revenue for song licensing, and that will increase to just 11 percent by 2017 under a new deal struck with regulators. Traditional radio pays nothing at all to SoundExchange, although it pays composers to air their music.

Pandora and its brethren are pushing for changes in how royalties for online radio are collected and are backing the Internet Radio Fairness Act, a bill that would change regulation of royalties.

But they are up against big stars like Billy Joel, Rihanna and Missy Elliott, who are opposed to the bill because they believe their royalties would be cut drastically.

"Music is a poisonous area of investment because the royalty structures are so out of whack, it's impossible to be profitable," said David Packman, a veteran of the music industry and partner in venture capital firm Venrock.

"We think innovation is seriously depressed in this sector because of the licensing challenges."

(Editing by Peter Lauria and Lisa Von Ahn)

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LONDON | Tue Jan 29, 2013 11:13am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - British and Chinese scientists have found a genetic variant which explains why Chinese populations may be more vulnerable to the H1N1 virus, commonly known as swine flu.

The discovery of the variant could help doctors find those people at high risk of severe flu and prioritize them for treatment, researchers said.

It may also help explain why new strains of flu virus often emerge first in Asia, where the variant known as rs12252-C is more common in the population than elsewhere, they said.

"Understanding why some people may be worse affected than others is crucial in improving our ability to manage flu epidemics and to prevent people dying from the virus," said Tao Dong at Britain's Oxford University, who led the study.

The research, published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday, found that having the rs12252-C variant could increase the chances of severe infection by six times.

H1N1 swine flu swept around the world in 2009 and 2010. A study published last week estimated at least one in five people worldwide were infected and around 200,000 killed in the first year of the outbreak, which was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation in June 2009.

Previous research has found that rs12252-C is linked to more severe flu infections.

For this study, researchers focused on the variant because it is 100 times more common in Han Chinese, the predominant ethnic group in China, than in Caucasian populations indigenous to West Asia and Europe. The variant is present in the genetic make-up of about 1 in 3,000 people in Caucasian populations.

The results showed it was present in 69 percent of Chinese patients with severe pandemic H1N1 in 2009 compared with 25 percent who only had a mild version of the infection.

Andrew McMichael of Oxford's human immunology unit said further studies are now needed to look in more detail at the gene variant's effect on flu severity in different populations.

"It remains to be seen how this gene affects the whole picture of influenza in China and South East Asia but it might help explain why new influenza viruses often first appear in this region of the world," he said in a statement.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Tom Pfeiffer)

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Guests are silhouetted at the launch event of Windows 8 operating system in New York, October 25, 2012.

LAS VEGAS | Thu Jan 10, 2013 9:28pm EST

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Holiday-season sales of personal computers fell for the first time in more than five years, according to tech industry tracker IDC, as Microsoft Corp's new Windows 8 operating system failed to excite buyers and many instead opted for tablet devices and smartphones.

The slump caps a miserable year for PC makers such as Hewlett-Packard Co, Lenovo Group and Dell Inc, which saw the first annual decline for more than a decade with no immediate signs of relief.

It underscores an unspectacular launch for the latest version of the Windows franchise, which Microsoft is banking on to fight off incursions into the PC arena by touch-friendly devices such as Apple Inc's iPad.

"The sense is that until Windows 8 is fully installed and prices start to come down, we will be in this state of negative dynamics in the PC market," said Aaron Rakers, an analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co.

Still, analysts warn against counting out Windows 8 -- the most radical change in the operating system in 20 years -- as consumers grow more comfortable with its tile-based interface and touch features.

In the past, a new operating system from Microsoft tended to stimulate a spurt of PC sales, but PC makers simply did not get enough attractive machines into the market, said IDC.

"Lost in the shuffle to promote a touch-centric PC, vendors have not forcefully stressed other features that promote a more secure, reliable and efficient user experience," said Jay Chou, senior research analyst at IDC.

This year could be better, he suggested, even in the face of talk about the death of the PC as tablets are on track to outsell full-featured machines for the first time in the United States.

"As Windows 8 matures, and other corresponding variables such as Ultrabook pricing continue to drop, hopefully the PC market can see a reset in both messaging and demand in 2013," said Chou.

PC makers sold 89.8 million units worldwide in the fourth quarter of last year, down 6.4 percent from the same quarter of 2011. That was slightly worse than expected by most, and the worst performance for more than five years, when the global economy shuddered to a halt and ushered in the worst recession since World War II.

For all of 2012, 352 million PCs were sold, down 3.2 percent from 2011. That was the first annual decline since 2001, according to IDC, in the wake of the tech stock crash and the September 11 attacks.

IDC is forecasting a meager 2.8 percent growth in PC sales for 2013.

"There's a lack of compelling reasons to upgrade," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst At Maxim Group, who said people are now waiting up to 10 years to replace computers rather than five in the past.

"Increases in performance have been smaller and there are fewer new applications that require more computing horsepower," he said. "In developing markets, the first purchase is not a PC, it's a smartphone, especially in markets where literacy levels are low."

NO MIRACLES AT CES

The numbers are bad news for Microsoft, which still provides the underlying software for nine out of 10 PCs but is suffering as Apple's iPad and other tablets eat away at the cheap end of the PC market.

Touch-friendly Windows 8 and Microsoft's own Surface tablet were designed to counter that shift, but the radical new-look software has not gripped consumers' imaginations.

"Windows 8 wasn't going to be as big a catalyst," said Shaw Wu, analyst at Sterne Agee. "It's so different, it's almost uncomfortably different from past Windows, and there's a risk that Windows 8 ends up like Vista."

Windows Vista, released worldwide in 2007, was Microsoft's least popular operating system with users in recent years.

Microsoft pulled out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, vacating its usual sprawling display area, but PC makers such as Asustek, LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics filled the gap with a dizzying array of big screen computers, lightweight laptops, tablets and combinations of those, all running Windows 8.

Many of the new models attracted jostling crowds on the show floor, like Panasonic Corp's 20-inch ultra-high-definition tablet and Razer's dedicated Edge tablet for PC gamers.

But none was hailed a show-stopper that might single-handedly turn around the fortunes of Windows.

"No single device will spur sales, it will take time for consumers to learn that Windows 8 even exists. CES will do little to change that," said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst for tech research firm Forrester. "Windows 8 is going to be a slow ramp, regardless of hardware quality."

Microsoft says it feels good about the progress of Windows 8, as sales hit 60 million this week after 10 weeks on the market. That is in line with Windows 7 three years ago, and well ahead of Vista, which took 100 days to reach 40 million sales.

Tami Reller, chief financial officer of Microsoft's Windows unit, said sales of Windows 8 PCs may have been held back by shortages of the most popular touch-screen machines.

"The level of demand I think surprised a lot of people. And frankly, the supply was too short," said Reller at an analyst presentation at CES this week.

Microsoft is looking to juice that demand further this month with its new Surface with Windows 8 Pro, a tablet running an Intel processor that is fully compatible with Office and traditional PC programs, unlike the first Surface it launched last year based on an ARM Holdings-designed chip.

Despite that bullishness, analysts have been edging down their earnings expectations for Microsoft lately.

"Win 8 is disappointing, the PC market will remain weak for awhile and margins are likely capped," said Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Holt on Thursday, as he downgraded the stock to 'equal-weight' from 'overweight'.

Investors are also nonplussed, driving Microsoft's shares down neraly 20 percent since last March, even as the Standard & Poor's 500 has marched upward to a five-year high this week. The shares are down 6 percent since the launch of Windows 8 on October 26.

(Additional reporting by Poornima Gupta, Miyoung Kim, Timothy Kelly, Sinead Carew and Noel Randewich in Las Vegas, and Alistair Barr and Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco.; Editing by Gary Hill and Steve Orlofsky)

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LIMA | Thu Jan 24, 2013 11:17am EST

LIMA (Reuters) - Climate change has shrunk Andean glaciers between 30 and 50 percent since the 1970s and could melt many of them away altogether in coming years, according to a study published on Tuesday in the journal The Cryosphere.

Andean glaciers, a vital source of fresh water for tens of millions of South Americans, are retreating at their fastest rates in more than 300 years, according to the most comprehensive review of Andean ice loss so far.

The study included data on about half of all Andean glaciers in South America, and blamed the ice loss on an average temperature spike of 0.7 degree Celsius (1.26 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 70 years.

"Glacier retreat in the tropical Andes over the last three decades is unprecedented," said Antoine Rabatel, the lead author of the study and a scientist with the Laboratory for Glaciology and Environmental Geophysics in Grenoble, France.

The researchers also warned that future warming could totally wipe out the smaller glaciers found at lower altitudes that store and release fresh water for downstream communities.

"This is a serious concern because a large proportion of the population lives in arid regions to the west of the Andes," said Rabatel.

The Chacaltaya glacier in the Bolivian Andes, once a ski resort, has already disappeared completely, according to some scientists.

(This story was refiled to insert "The" at the end of the first paragraph)

(Reporting By Mitra Taj; Editing by Sandra Maler)

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LONDON | Fri Jan 11, 2013 8:47am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain is deploying a back-up ship navigation system in the English Channel, one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, to tackle the growing risks of disruptions of vessel satellite devices and jamming by criminal gangs.

Mariners increasingly rely on global navigation systems that use satellite signals to find a location or keep exact time. One of the most well known is the Global Positioning System or GPS.

The General Lighthouse Authorities of the United Kingdom and Ireland (GLA) this week launched a radio-based back-up system called eLoran to counter the threats of jamming or signal loss of GPS devices. Ships will need to install receiver equipment.

"When a sat nav goes out, it matters a lot to have something secure to fall back on," David Last, special adviser to the GLA, said. "It (eLoran) is an almost perfect back-up."

If its GPS system ceases to function, a ship risks running aground or colliding with other vessels.

Last said all GPS systems run the risk of signal loss due to solar weather effects. Also cheap jamming devices are widely available in Britain and have been used by criminal gangs to disable tracking systems on high-value stolen cars.

"There have been major incidents in which North Korea has jammed GPS in South Korea. The outcome is that they lost not just ship navigation, but it affected all of their mobile phone networks and their military systems. We do know terrorists have been arrested in the U.S. with GPS jamming equipment," Last said. "So GPS is very vulnerable."

The eLoran system works on earth-based radio systems to provide alternative position and timing signals for navigation, Last said.

It has been deployed in the Dover area, which includes the Dover Strait waterway in the English Channel, through which an average of 500 ships pass daily.

"We are picking up significant modes of jamming in the UK including in the Dover area," Last said.

The Dover installation is the first of up to seven to be rolled-out along Britain's east coast, including the ports of Middlesbrough in England and Grangemouth and Aberdeen in Scotland, the GLA said.

Passenger line P&O Ferries has already installed the equipment on one of its vessels.

"Satellite navigation systems are vulnerable to degradation of signal strength, and our ships have also experienced occasional loss of signal," Simon Richardson, head of safety management at P&O Ferries, said.

"We see eLoran as the most effective solution to countering the problem."

(editing by Jane Baird)

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Harvard geneticist George Church speaks to Reuters reporters about cloning during an interview in Boston, Massachusetts January 23, 2013.

BOSTON | Thu Jan 24, 2013 12:13am EST

BOSTON (Reuters) - After spending the weekend reading blog posts claiming that he was seeking an "extremely adventurous female human" to bear a cloned Neanderthal baby - which was news to him - Harvard geneticist George Church said it may be time for society to give some thought to scientific literacy.

Church became the subject of dozens of posts and tabloid newspaper articles calling him a "mad scientist" after giving an interview to the German magazine Der Spiegel.

In the interview, Church discussed the technical challenges scientists would face if they tried to clone a Neanderthal, though neither he nor the Der Spiegel article, which was presented as a question and answer exchange, said he intended to do so.

"Harvard professor seeks mother for cloned cave baby," read one headline, on the website of London's Daily Mail.

But Church explained on Wednesday that he was simply theorizing.

Still, the readiness of bloggers, journalists and readers to believe he was preparing an attempt to clone a Neanderthal, a species closely related to modern humans that went extinct some 30,000 years ago, led Church to ponder scientific literacy.

"The public should be able to detect cases where things seem implausible," Church said in an interview at his office at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "Everybody's fib detector should have been going off. They should have said, ‘What? Who would believe this?' ... This really indicates that we should have scientific literacy."

Despite the spate of articles comparing him to the character in the book and movie "Jurassic Park" who attempts to open a theme park filled with living dinosaurs, Church said he plans to continue speaking publicly about his research, which focuses on using genes to treat and prevent disease.

Given the number of policy debates driven by science - from how to address climate change, to space exploration, to public health concerns - scientists should not back away from talking to the media, Church said.

"We really should get the public of the entire world to be able to detect the difference between a fact and a complete fantasy that has been created by the Internet," he said.

In the Der Spiegel article, which Church said reported his words accurately, and his recent book "Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves," Church theorized that studying cloned Neanderthals could help scientists better understand how the human mind works. Scientists have already extracted DNA from Neanderthal bones.

But such experiments would pose a host of ethical concerns - including how many Neanderthals would be created and whether they would be treated as mere study subjects or as beings with their own rights, Church said.

"I do want to connect the public to science because there are so many decisions to be made if the way they learn it, if they learn it faster by talking about Neanderthals than they did by getting rote learning in high school, that's great," he said.

(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

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A Vodafone logo is seen on a Blackberry phone in London November 9, 2010. Vodafone.

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