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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A plug is seen coming from the Chevrolet Volt electric car during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan January 13, 2009.

WASHINGTON/DETROIT | Thu Jan 31, 2013 4:28pm EST

WASHINGTON/DETROIT (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Energy on Thursday eased off President Barack Obama's stated goal of putting 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015, and laid out what experts called a more realistic strategy of promoting advanced-drive vehicles and lowering their cost over the next nine years.

Since Obama announced the goal in his 2011 State of the Union speech, auto analysts and executives have doubted American consumers would buy a million electric vehicles by 2015.

"Whether we meet that goal in 2015 or 2016, that's less important than that we're on the right path to get many millions of these vehicles on the road," an Energy Department official said, in advance of remarks by Energy Secretary Steven Chu in a speech at the Washington D.C. auto show.

The proposal to lower electric vehicle costs represents the first look at how U.S. auto policy may take shape during Obama's next four years. His first term saw a flurry of initiatives related to the auto industry, beginning with government rescues of General Motors Co and Chrysler Group LLC.

Chu told reporters after his speech that he was excited by the advances in vehicle technology.

Asked about the 1 million electric vehicles goal, Chu said: "It's ambitious, but we'll see what happens."

Promoting plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles has been another long-running focus for the White House, which has also pushed for more stringent standards on fuel economy. Overall, U.S. federal policies to promote electric vehicles will cost $7.5 billion through 2019, the Congressional Budget Office said in September.

That includes $2.4 billion in grants to lithium-ion battery makers and projects to promote electric vehicles as well as $3.1 billion in loans to auto companies, intended to spur production of fuel-efficient vehicles.

But demand for hybrids and electric vehicles has been weaker than expected. Last year, nearly 488,000 hybrids, plug-in hybrids and electric cars were sold in the United States, accounting for 3.3 percent of the overall auto market, according to green-car website Hybridcars.com.

For the administration to meet its 2015 goal, electrified vehicles would have double their market share to roughly 6 percent of the U.S. auto market, which automotive consulting firm Polk estimates will reach 16.2 million vehicles that year.

Poor demand has hurt lithium-ion battery makers, pushing two DOE grant recipients, A123 Systems Inc and EnerDel, to file for bankruptcy protection.

Dow Chemical Co took a $1.1 billion charge last year, related in part to a writedown of its lithium-ion battery business, Dow-Kokam LLC.

Under the new strategy outlined on Thursday, the DOE is supporting research into new battery technologies and manufacturing methods that would lower the cost of lightweight materials and improve vehicles' fuel-efficiency.

Chu stressed that it was important to set high goals for electric car technology, because advanced vehicles will eventually be competing with internal combustion vehicles that get 45 miles per gallon fuel economy.

The DOE also confirmed its goal to lower the cost of lithium-ion batteries to $300 per kilowatt hour by 2015 from the present $650. The department eventually hopes to get the cost down $125 per kilowatt hour.

Ultimately, the department's goal is to have about 500 companies offer workplace charging over the next five years. Several companies are already on board, including Google Inc, Verizon and General Electric Co.

(Editing by Matthew Lewis and David Gregorio)

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Wed Jan 9, 2013 2:52pm EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A hardy bacteria common on Earth was surprisingly adaptive to Mars-like low pressure, cold and carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, a finding that has implications in the search for extraterrestrial life.

The bacteria, known as Serratia liquefaciens, is found in human skin, hair and lungs, as well as in fish, aquatic systems, plant leaves and roots.

"It's present in a wide range of medium-temperature ecological niches," microbiologist Andrew Schuerger, with the University of Florida, told Reuters.

Serratia liquefaciens most likely evolved at sea level, so it was surprising to find it could grow in an experiment chamber that reduced pressure down to a Mars-like 7 millibars, Schuerger said.

Sea-level atmospheric pressure on Earth is about 1,000 millibars or 1 bar.

"It was a really big surprise," Schuerger said. "We had no reason to believe it was going to be able to grow at 7 millibars. It was just included in the study because we had cultures easily on hand and these species have been recovered from spacecraft."

In addition to concerns that hitchhiking microbes could inadvertently contaminate Mars, the study opens the door to a wider variety of life forms with the potential to evolve indigenously.

To survive, however, the microbes would need to be shielded from the harsh ultraviolet radiation that continually blasts the surface of Mars, as well as have access to a source of water, organic carbon and nitrogen.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is five months into a planned two-year mission to look for chemistry and environmental conditions that could have supported and preserved microbial life.

Scientists do not expect to find life at the rover's landing site - a very dry, ancient impact basin called Gale Crater located near the Martian equator. They are however hoping to learn if the planet most like Earth in the solar system has or ever had the ingredients for life by chemically analyzing rocks and soil in layers of sediment rising from the crater's floor.

So far, efforts to find Earth microbes that could live in the harsh conditions of Mars have primarily focused on so-called extremophiles which are found only in extreme cold, dry or acidic environments on Earth.

Two extremophiles tested along with the Serratia liquefaciens and 23 other common microbes did not survive the experiment, which not only replicated Mars' low pressure, but also its cold temperature and carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.

A follow-up experiment on about 10,000 other microbes retrieved from boring 40 to 70 feet into the Siberian permafrost found six species - all members of the genus Carnobacterium - that could survive and grow in the simulated Mars chamber, located at the Space Life Sciences Laboratory adjacent to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The next step is to see how the microbes fare under even more hostile conditions, such as higher salt levels, more radiation and less water.

Related studies to analyze the genetics and metabolism of the common bacteria Serratia liquefaciens also are under way.

"In the search for life on another planet, we have to start with something that we at least have access to. We don't have a Martian bacterium we can experiment with, not yet, so we keep trying to see if some of our own hardy micro-organisms have the ability to grow at another location," Schuerger said.

"If we can never find a microbe that can grow under conditions on another planet, then it starts implying that life may not exist on that other location," he said.

The studies appear in the December 19 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and this week in the journal Astrobiology.

(Edited David Adams; Editing by M.D. Golan)

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