The poll, conducted in the wake of the allegations, found that Cain’s popularity among registered Republicans declined by 9 points since the days before the allegations of the scandal were published. Among Republicans polled last week, on October 27 and 28, 66 percent said they had a favorable opinion of Cain. But just 57 percent of those polled on November 4 and 5 said they had a favorable opinion of the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza.

The drop off comes primarily from Cain’s less enthusiastic supporters. The percentage of Republicans who say they hold a ‘very favorable’ opinion of him has dropped by only 3 percentage points. The percentage of voters who say they hold a ‘somewhat favorable’ view of him has dropped by 6 points.

The sexual harassment allegations seem unlikely to go away: they have been widely reported, and 88 percent of Republicans say they have heard of them, as have 81 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents.

That said, Republicans remain somewhat uncertain on the whether or not there is any truth to the allegations. Thirty-two percent say they think it is likely that the allegations are true, while 27 percent they are likely untrue. Very few — 7 percent — say they strongly believe the allegations are true, and just 10 percent say they strongly believe the allegations are untrue. Twenty-four percent say they don’t know. Among independents who have an opinion, most believe the allegations to be likely true. However, over half of independents express no opinion.

Almost half of Republicans say the reported allegations have no bearing on how they feel about Cain. But 35 percent say it makes them feel less favorably about him, while just 14 percent say it improves their opinion of him.

The results suggest that while many Republicans are still giving Cain the benefit of the doubt, the longer the story stays in the news, the worse things will get for him.

An ABC/Washington Post poll conducted in the first three days after the story broke on Monday October 31 saw little change in Cain’s popularity. Most Republicans surveyed said the allegations were not serious, and Cain ran within 2 points of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on the ballot.

Moreover, the Cain campaign reported a large outpouring of donations to the campaign in the days following the allegations, as many conservatives stood by him, calling the allegations a “high tech lynching.”

But the continuing decline suggests that the allegations are sinking into voters’ consciousness. The longer the story stays in the news and the more details that emerge, the more Cain is likely to see his support erode.

The Ipsos poll was conducted from November 4 to November 5, and surveyed 836 registered voters, including 343 Republicans.

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That means international markets could shape regional trading and Japanese stocks are up due to a positive overnight lead from Wall Street and steady oil prices.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has the opportunity to soothe market jitters about a possible scaling back of the bank's $85 billion monthly bond-purchase programme.

The quantitative easing policy has helped fuel a global rally in stock markets and recent talk of a pullback in stimulus has knocked major indexes off their highs.

Regional markets, especially those in United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia have rallied in recent months as strengthening local fundamentals boosted sentiment. But while U.S. equities have recovered sharp losses triggered by the 2008 financial crisis, regional markets continue to lag from a long-term perspective.

Change to U.S. monetary policy could affect global sentiment and subsequently Gulf market confidence.

In the UAE, Dubai's index has traded within a range of about 130 points following an early-year surge, with investors now looking for new positive catalysts to justify further gains or a correction to buy at lower prices.

It slipped 0.1 percent to 2,379 points on Tuesday, trimming 2013 gains to 46.7 percent.

"A medium-to-high probability entry signal to go 'long' will be given with the upward break of 2,430 after the market found support at 2,320," MENA Corp says in a note. "Only the downward break of 2,320 would cancel the bullish scenario."

In Kuwait, mobile operator Zain will be in focus after its chief executive told Reuters the firm will make acquisitions and partnerships in computer-based industries this year to exploit rising demand for data and help offset falling conventional call and text income. (Reporting by Nadia Saleem; Editing by Matt Smith)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Global drugmakers said on Wednesday they would cooperate with an independent review to address concerns of a potential link between widely used diabetes medicines and pancreatic cancer and other safety problems.

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) this week called for a new evaluation of clinical data on drugs used to control blood sugar for patients with type 2 diabetes. They include Merck & Co's $4 billion a year Januvia franchise, Novo Nordisk's Victoza, and Byetta and Onglyza from Bristol-Myers Squibb Co and AstraZeneca Plc, among others.

"People who are taking these medications, or who may consider taking them, should have the benefit of all that is currently known about their risks and advantages in order to make the best possible decisions about their treatment," Dr. Robert Ratner, ADA's chief scientific and medical officer, said in a statement.

The medicines are called incretin mimetics because they mimic hormones the body produces to stimulate release of insulin, and are from classes of drugs known as GLP-1 receptor agonists and DPP-4 inhibitors. GLP-1 drugs boost insulin production by the pancreas and slow absorption of food. DPP-4 inhibitors block an enzyme the breaks down the GLP-1 peptide in the gut, thereby increasing insulin production.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in March said it was studying unconfirmed reports that the drugs cause inflammation of the pancreas and pre-cancerous changes to cells in the pancreas. European health regulators are also studying the issue.

Around the same time, new concerns arose from a small study conducted by a leading diabetes expert, Dr. Peter Butler, from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Butler examined human pancreases from patients who had died of causes unrelated to pancreatic disease and found more pancreas lesions and one cancerous tumor in those who had taken Januvia or Byetta compared with nondiabetics or diabetics who had not taken those medicines.

More than 370 million people are living with diabetes worldwide, with type 2 accounting for 90 percent to 95 percent of the cases, according to the International Diabetes Federation. Without significant lifestyle changes to curb obesity and other causes of diabetes, that number could balloon to as many as 552 million by 2030, the organization projected.

NO FIRM EVIDENCE OF RISK

Bristol-Myers and AstraZeneca issued a joint statement expressing support for the ADA initiative. Merck said it is committed to participating in the ADA effort, and is separately conducting a 14,000-patient heart safety study of Januvia.

Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk, in an emailed comment, said its studies to assess safety signals of its $1.8 billion a year Victoza do not reveal any evidence of increased risk of pancreatitis or pancreatic cancer.

"As far as the ADA proposal is concerned, this is something that I do support from a conceptual basis," said Alan Moses, Novo's global chief medical officer, in a telephone interview.

"In principle, Novo Nordisk absolutely supports working with the other companies, but the final details depend on what specifically is being proposed," Moses said, adding "it all depends on the credibility of the data that's being evaluated."

The safety concerns are being discussed on Wednesday and Thursday at a workshop conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK).

A document outlining the FDA's presentation at the workshop was handed out at the meeting. Attendees quoted it as saying the agency review of trial data on the drugs did not provide enough evidence to say whether there is a link to pancreatitis, and that long-term study would be required to determine any cancer risk. A FDA spokeswoman could not immediately confirm the contents of the document.

"The FDA basically appears to just be saying 'look, there just isn't enough information here to make an informed decision'," said Mark Schoenebaum, a drug industry analyst with ISI Group who was attending to two-day NIH/NIDDK workshop.

"There are no conclusions at this point in time from the meeting and I doubt very much there will be because the science quite frankly is immature about the whole area of pancreatic cancer," said Novo's Moses, who will address the workshop on Thursday. "Everybody agrees that this is an incredibly complex area."

In an interview with Reuters earlier this week Peter Stein, Merck vice president of clinical research for diabetes, expressed full confidence in the safety of Januvia.

During the workshop, Merck said it will present data on the safety profile of Januvia, known chemically as sitagliptin, including an updated analysis of data from more than 14,000 patients from 25 randomized clinical trials.

Merck last month reported a surprising decline in first quarter sales of Januvia, which has been the drugmaker's fastest growing medicine since its 2006 approval. It was not clear if increased competition, safety concerns or other factors led to the 4 percent slip in quarterly sales to $884 million.

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot and Ransdell Pierson)

The conversation is no longer solely about how to save the planet by cutting carbon emissions. It's becoming more about how to save ourselves from the warming planet's wild weather.

It was Mayor Michael Bloomberg's announcement last week of an ambitious plan to stave off New York City's rising seas with flood gates, levees and more that brought this transition into full focus.

After years of losing the fight against rising global emissions of heat-trapping gases, governments around the world are emphasizing what a U.N. Foundation scientific report calls "managing the unavoidable."

It's called adaptation and it's about as sexy but as necessary as insurance, experts say.

It's also a message that once was taboo among climate activists such as former Vice President Al Gore.

In his 1992 book "Earth in the Balance," Gore compared talk of adapting to climate change to laziness that would distract from necessary efforts.

But in his 2013 book "The Future," Gore writes bluntly: "I was wrong." He talks about how coping with rising seas and temperatures is just as important as trying to prevent global warming by cutting emissions.

Like Gore, governmental officials across the globe aren't saying everyone should just give up on efforts to reduce pollution. They're saying that as they work on curbing carbon, they also have to deal with a reality that's already here.

In March, President Barack Obama's science advisers sent him a list of recommendations on climate change. No. 1 on the list: "Focus on national preparedness for climate change."

"Whether you believe climate change is real or not is beside the point," New York's Bloomberg said in announcing his $20 billion adaptation plans. "The bottom line is: We can't run the risk."

On Monday, more than three dozen other municipal officials from across the country will go public with a nationwide effort to make their cities more resilient to natural disasters and the effects of man-made global warming.

"It's an insurance policy, which is investing in the future," Mayor Kevin Johnson of Sacramento, Calif., who is chairing the mayors' efforts, said in an interview Friday. "This is public safety. It's the long-term hazards that could impact a community."

Discussions about global warming are happening more often in mayors' offices than in Congress. The Obama administration and local governments are coming up with thousands of eye-glazing pages of climate change adaptation plans and talking about zoning, elevation, water system infrastructure, and most of all, risk.

"They can sit up there and not make any policies or changes, but we know we have to," Broward County, Fla., Mayor Kristin Jacobs said. "We know that we're going to be that first line of defense."

University of Michigan professor Rosina Bierbaum is a presidential science adviser who headed the adaptation section of the administration's new National Climate Assessment. "It's quite striking how much is going on at the municipal level," Bierbaum said. "Communities have to operate in real time. Everybody is struggling with a climate that is no longer the climate of the past."

Still, Bierbaum said, "Many of the other developed countries have gone way ahead of us in preparing for climate change. In many ways, the U.S. may be playing catch-up."

Hurricanes, smaller storms and floods have been a harsh teacher for South Florida, said Jacobs.

"Each time you get walloped, you stop and scratch your head ... and learn from it and make change," she said. "It helps if you've been walloped once or twice. I think it's easier to take action when everybody sees" the effect of climate change and are willing to talk about being prepared.

What Bloomberg announced for New York is reasonable for a wealthy city with lots of people and lots of expensive property and infrastructure to protect, said S. Jeffress Williams, a University of Hawaii geophysicist who used to be the expert on sea level rise for the U.S. Geological Survey. But for other coasts in the United States and especially elsewhere in the poorer world, he said, "it's not so easy to adapt."

Rich nations have pledged, but not yet provided, $100 billion a year to help poor nations adapt to global warming and cut their emissions. But the $20 billion cost for New York City's efforts shows the money won't go far in helping poorer cities adapt, said Brandon Wu of the nonprofit ActionAid.

At U.N. climate talks in Germany this past week, Ronald Jumeau, a delegate from the Seychelles, said developing countries have noted the more than $50 billion in relief that U.S. states in the Northeast got for Superstorm Sandy.

That's a large amount "for one storm in three states. At the same time, the Philippines was hit by its 15th storm in the same year," Jumeau said. "It puts things in context."

For poorer cities in the U.S., what makes sense is to buy out property owners, relocate homes and businesses and convert vulnerable sea shores to parks so that when storms hit "it's not a big deal," Williams said. "I think we'll see more and more communities make that decision largely because of the cost involved in trying to adapt to what's coming."

Jacobs, the mayor from South Florida, says that either people will move "or they will rehab their homes so that they can have a higher elevation. Already, in the Keys, you see houses that are up on stilts. So is that where we're going? At some point, we're going to have to start looking at real changes."

It's not just rising seas.

Sacramento has to deal with devastating droughts as well as the threat of flooding. It has a levee system so delicate that only New Orleans has it worse, said Johnson, the California capital's mayor.

The temperature in Sacramento was 110 this past week. After previous heat waves, cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., have come up with cooling centers and green roofs that reduce the urban heat island affect.

Jacobs said cities from Miami to Virginia Beach, Va., are coping with mundane efforts: changes in zoning and building codes, raising the elevation of roads and runways, moving and hardening infrastructure. None of it grabs headlines, but "the sexiness is ... in the results," she said.

For decades, scientists referenced average temperatures when they talked about global warming. Only recently have they focused intensely on extreme and costly weather, encouraged by the insurance industry which has suffered high losses, Bierbaum said.

In 2012, weather disasters not necessarily all tied to climate change caused $110 billion in damage to the United States, which was the second highest total since 1980, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said last week.

Now officials are merging efforts by emergency managers to prepare for natural disasters with those of officials focused on climate change. That greatly lessens the political debate about human-caused global warming, said University of Colorado science and disaster policy professor Roger Pielke Jr.

It also makes the issue more local than national or international.

"If you keep the discussion focused on impacts ... I think it's pretty easy to get people from all political persuasions," said Pielke, who often has clashed with environmentalists over global warming. "It's insurance. The good news is that we know insurance is going to pay off again."

Describing these measures as resiliency and changing the way people talk about it make it more palatable than calling it climate change, said Hadi Dowlatabadi, a University of British Columbia climate scientist.

"It's called a no-regrets strategy," Dowlatabadi said. "It's all branding."

All that, experts say, is essentially taking some of the heat out of the global warming debate.

___

Associated Press writers Karl A. Ritter in Bonn, Germany, Jennifer Peltz in New York and Tony Winton in Miami contributed to this report.

___

Online:

Federal government's National Climate Assessment chapter on adaptation: http://1.usa.gov/154qUGs

The national mayors' efforts to promote adaptation: http://www.resilientamerica.org

Georgetown University's Climate Center primer on adaptation: http://www.georgetownclimate.org/adaptation

___

Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

First of a two-part package on adapting to climate change. Tomorrow: Snapshots of what cities are doing around the world.

Global energy-generating capacity from renewable sources rose by 115 gigawatts in 2012, compared with 105 gigawatts the previous year, the report by the Paris-based think tank REN21 showed.

Installed renewable energy capacity rose to over 1,470 gigawatts, equivalent to about 1,500 nuclear reactors. Two thirds of all renewable capacity still comes from hydropower, but wind and solar have been gaining. The worldwide capacity of photovoltaic cells, which convert sunshine into electricity, reached 100 gigawatts last year, the report said.

The drop in solar prices fuelled by Chinese manufacturers helped bring the overall cost of investment in renewables down 12 percent to $244 billion from $279 billion in 2011, effectively boosting the amount of generating capacity investors can get for their money.

"This is not only normal in a rapidly growing, high tech industry but is likely to lead to even more competition, with even bigger gains for consumers, the climate and wider sustainability opportunities," said Achim Steiner, the head of the U.N. Environment Program.

Whether this glut of cheap solar products can last is unclear. Last week the EU announced new import duties on Chinese-made solar panels, cells and wafers, alleging they were being sold abroad at a lower price than at home, or below the manufacturing cost. Last year, the United States imposed tariffs on Chinese solar panels following similar complaints.

UNEP said investment in renewables was strong in developing countries and Japan last year, but stagnated or fell in the United States and many European countries grappling with high government debt and uncertainty over future feed-in subsidies.

China alone invested $67 billion in renewable energy last year, compared with $36 billion in the United States and almost $80 billion for all European countries combined.

Perchlorates are reactive chemicals first detected in arctic Martian soil by NASA's Phoenix lander that plopped down on Mars over five years ago in May 2008.

It is likely both of NASA's Viking Mars landers in 1976 measured signatures of perchlorates, in the form of chlorinated hydrocarbons. Other the Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity detected elemental chlorine. Moreover, orbital measurements taken by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft show that chlorine is globally distributed.

And more recently, NASA'swithin Gale Crater, where it landed in August 2012. []

Unexpected results

Finding calcium perchlorate "was one of our most unexpected results," said Peter Smith, the Phoenix principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"Perchlorate is not a common word in the English language; all of us had to go and look it up," Smith said during Spacefest V, a conference held May 24-27 in Tucson, Ariz. "Perchlorate has become an important component of the soil and half a percent is a fair amount," he said.

Smith said microbes on Earth use perchlorate for an energy source. They actually live off highly oxidized chlorine, and in reducing the chlorine down to chloride, they use the energy in that transaction to power themselves. In fact, when there's too much perchlorate in drinking water, microbes are used to clean it up, he said.

Furthermore, seasonal flow features seen on Mars may be caused by high concentrations of the brines of perchlorate, which has a strong attraction to water and can drastically lower its freezing point, Smith told SPACE.com.

Devilishly dangerous

The high levels of perchlorate found on Mars would be toxic to humans, Smith said.

"Anybody who is saying they want to go live on the surface of Mars better think about the interaction of perchlorate with the human body," he warned. "At one-half percent, that's a huge amount. Very small amounts are considered toxic. So you'd better have a plan to deal with the poisons on the surface."

Any humans exploring Mars, Smith said, will find it hard to avoid the finest of dust particles. "It'll get into everythingcertainly into your habitat."

Undeniably,laden with perchlorates are sure to be devilishly dangerous.

But Smith also noted that perchlorate is used within the pyrotechnics industry, and ammonium perchlorate is also a component of solid rocket fuel. "So maybe you can mine it as an on-the-spot resource," he said.

Good news, bad news

Perchlorate has made, and continues to make, the search for organics on Mars all but impossible, said astrobiologist Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

"Its presence is good news for the possibility of but very, very bad news for humans, McKay told SPACE.com. "Once again, Mars is full of surprises."

"It's bad for astronauts because it is toxic for humans, as it interferes with the thyroid," he said.

McKay is one of the co-authors of a new research paper delving into perchlorates on Mars; the work was led by Alfonso Davila of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. That review is slated to appear in the International Journal of Astrobiology and focuses on perchlorate as both a chemical hazard as well as a resource for humans.

Dual implications

The research emphasizes that perchlorate is widespread in Martian soils at concentrations of between 0.5 to 1 percent. There are dual implications of calcium perchlorate on Mars. On one hand, at such concentrations, perchlorate could be an important source of oxygen. But it could also become a critical chemical hazard to astronauts.

In the forthcoming paper, the researchers propose a biochemical approach for the removal of perchlorate from Martian soil that would not only be energetically cheap and environmentally friendly, but could also be used to obtain oxygen both for human consumption and to fuel surface operations. []

Managing exposure

In many ways, managing calcium perchlorate exposure onis viewed as no different than managing for example, uranium, lead or general heavy-metal-contaminated areas in modern mines, where dust suppression, dust extraction and regular blood monitoring are employed. Other ideas suggested by the study team include a wash-down spray that can clean suits and equipment of dust deposits.

More proposals are on the table, too. For instance, Mars suits could be kept on the outside of extravehicular activity rovers or habitation modules. The astronauts would climb into their suits through a bulkhead opening, and then the suits would be sealed from within. Thus, Mars crews avoid coming into contact with outside materials.

This approach was originally proposed as a way for astronauts to avoid back contamination when coming in contact with rock and regolith materials. But it might also help in dealing with perchlorates.

Knowledge gaps

There is growing interest in appraising perchlorate as a long-term exposure risk tobefore the first human sets foot on the Red Planet.

NASA has identified key strategic knowledge gaps that need to be addressed before humans can be sent to Mars. Two key areas are the potential hazards to humans, and the existence of resources that can support human and robotic operations.

"I'd put it in the category of, this is exactly why we do robotic exploration before sending humans," Doug Archer, a scientist with the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said of the perchlorate research.

Archer said perchlorate's existence on Mars would have posed an even larger problem had it not been discovered.

"But now that we know it's there, I am confident we will be able to design around it," he said. "I have a lot of co-workers here at Johnson Space Center who work in the human exploration side of things, and none of them seem to think perchlorate is a showstopper. So sending robotic explorers as precursors to human exploration is shown to be a very useful strategy."

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is former director of research for the National Commission on Space and is co-author of Buzz Aldrin's new book, "Mission to Mars My Vision for Space Exploration," published by National Geographic. Follow us,and. Original article on .

The sisal producer said it expected prices and sales to remain at "satisfactory levels" in the remainder of its financial year ending September.

It blamed rising costs at its Tanzanian estates for driving its cost of sales for the six months ended March to 667 million shillings from 637 million the year before.

Earnings per share dropped to 3.18 shillings from 3.47 shillings, it added.

"The continued unreliable grid power supply situation continues to contribute to higher energy costs as we are forced to use diesel generators for extended periods," the company said in a statement.

With at least 10in one night this week leveling neighborhoods, killing six and injuring dozens it might be tempting to call the twisters yet another instance of climate-fueled weather. But not so fast.

While most climate scientists agree that global warming is driving record heat waves, widespread drought, heavy rain and floods, intense hurricanes, and even monster snowstorms, tornadoes at least for now are a different story.

"With tornadoes, what we don't know is as much as what we do know,'' said Michael Wehner, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Global warming is making wet places wetter and dry places drier, and creating moisture-laden air that fuels hurricanes and snowstorms, making them much worse than they otherwise would be in a climate unchanged by human behaviors. []

But we can't necessarily say the same the same about tornadoes, at least not yet. The tornado connection to global warming is tenuous, and for several reasons. Chief among them is the fact that climate change apparently affects the two major factors influencing tornadoes energy and wind shear in completely opposite ways.

Tornadoes, violently rotating columns of air spawned by thunderstorms, occur when available energy warm, moist air at low levels and cold, drier air above meets vertical wind shear, which provides the source of the rotation. Climate change enhances the former, also known as "convective available potential energy,'' or CAPE, and diminishes the latter.

As the planet warms, "the energy goes up, and the shear goes down,'' said Harold Brooks, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Severe Storms Laboratory. "Thus, we have one ingredient expected to become more favorable and another expected to become less favorable.''

Furthermore, the enormous natural variability in tornadoes makes it difficult to sort out any viable climate trends. Also, what seems like an increase in excessive violent tornado activity in recent years may in fact be the result of other factors. []

"Tornadoes are small, and the observational record shows increases that are simply due to more people in more places seeing them,'' said Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist in the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

There also is a dearth of information about what happens to tornadoes over time. Tornado reporting and record-keeping practices have been fraught with problems. "Our database for evaluating long-term changes in tornadoes is pretty awful, so we really don't know how tornadoes might be changing,'' said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground.

Brooks agreed. "Tornado data collection has never been intended as a climate data set,'' he said. "Large changes have taken place in reporting procedures that make interpretation of the past very difficult.''

Tornadoes can be terrifying and destructive, causing about 70 deaths and 1,500 injuries in the United States annually, according to NOAA. The strongest ones feature rotating winds of more than 250 miles per hour; they can be as wide as 1 mile and stay on the ground for distances as far as 50 miles. The year 2011 brought an onslaught of vicious tornadoes, including a catastrophic twister that struck Joplin, Mo., in May, killing 161 people and destroying a third of the city.

They can happen anywhere there is enough moist air at low levels, cold dry air aloft and strong vertical wind shear. "Tornadoes are spawned in particular environments that occur more in the United States than anywhere else,'' Trenberth said. "It relates to the Rockies running north-south and the Gulf of Mexico being where it is. "Tornadoes are small in scale and not modeled in global models,'' he added, explaining why it is so difficult to link them to climate change. "Meteorologists can find two storms that look almost identical and in similar environments, and one spawns a tornado and one doesn't, so there is a large element of chance, evidently.''

Tornadoes are further complicated by the fact that certain small-scale processes friction at the ground, and where and how much rain evaporates within the parent thunderstorm also are critical. "Those are beyond our large-scale observational capabilities or predictions,'' Brooks said. []

No one knows whether tornadoes have increased in number or intensity, since the aforementioned changes in reporting practices "make the intensity question harder to answer,'' Brooks said, adding, "If you take the dataset of reports at face value, it appears intensity has decreased over the years, but there are a number of things that have led to lower ratings for the strongest tornadoes.''

There always have been strong tornadoes, but the intensity picture has become further muddled because "warnings are so much better now and houses are constructed better," Trenberth said.

Most climate scientists believe that clearer answers will be forthcoming with better climate modeling tools and patience.

"Better understanding of the relationships between the large-scale environments and tornadoes would help, but the big thing is waiting long enough to get better trend estimates,'' Brooks said.

Wehner agreed. "We need bigger computers, and better models,'' he said. "But what we really need is time. We don't yet have an answer. But, that doesn't mean we aren't thinking about it.''

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Now scientists think they've found a possible culprit: another microbe called foraminifera. A billion years ago, these two single-celled species battled for supremacy in the world's oceans, andlost, according to a study published May 27 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We'll never be able to prove what happened back in the Proterozoic, but we've at least shown there's a potential explanation," said Joan Bernhard, lead study author and a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass.

Early ocean throw-down

Stromatolite mounds grow tall when waves cover the top layer of algae with mud or sand and a new algae layer covers the sunlight-choking sediment. The trapped sediments turn into . But the wavy layers disappear beginning about a billion years ago, replaced by thrombolites clumpy, jumbled microbial mats.

Researchers suspect the decline is due to a change in ocean chemistry or the sudden appearance of a creature that found the stromatolites especially tasty though there's no fossil evidence for this.

Bernhard said DNA evidence triggered her suspicion that forams (short for foraminifera) were guilty of turning stromatolites into thrombolites. Foraminifera are tiny organisms, usually the size of a sand grain, that grow hard shells. Their shells don't show up in the fossil record until just before the , about 550 million years ago. However, DNA evidence called a molecular clock suggests the first forams were shell-free, and evolved 400 million years earlier. (Without their shells, evidence of these early forams was less likely to survive in the fossil record.)

The rise of the forams thus neatly coincides with the demise of stromatolites, but a real-world test was needed to back up this idea. Bernhard and her colleagues collected modern stromatolites from the Bahamas, one of the few remaining spots where the microbial mounds survive today, and threw them in the ring with forams to see who came out the victor.

In this corner we have

In a lab, the researchers seeded the stromatolites with forams from the same Bahamas bay. Ever so slowly, thefanned out their hairlike pseudopods into the algae layers. Pseudopods help forams eat, move and explore their environment. After six months, the effect was devastating for the stromatolites. Their layers were scrambled. But during a control experiment, in which forams were treated with a chemical that kept them from using their pseudopods, the stromatolites were still pristinely layered at the end of the test. The team also found forams living in thrombolites from the Bahamas, supporting their hypothesis that forams turn stromatolites into thrombolites. []

Bernhard hopes to repeat the experiment with other single-cell species with billion-year-old ancestors, such as ciliates and flagellates.

"It's possible the foraminifera did this, but we certainly haven't resolved the question. It's an interesting one to keep studying," Bernhard said. "Foraminifera are often overlooked, but they are really diverse and they've been around for a long time. They may be a key player in a lot of Earth history," she said.

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It would seem to be something you'd see only in a cartoon or at a Phish concert, but according to park rangers in New South Wales, Australia, dozens of giant, fluorescent pink slugs have been popping up on a mountaintop there.

"As bright pink as you can imagine, that's how pink they are," Michael Murphy, a ranger with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, . "On a good morning, you can walk around and see hundreds of them."

The eight-inch creatures have been spotted only on Mount Kaputar, a 5,000-foot peak in the Nandewar Range in northern New South Wales.

Scientists believe the eye-catching organisms are survivors from an era when Australia was home to rainforests. A series of volcanoes, millions of years of erosion and other geological changes "have carved a dramatic landscape at Mount Kaputar," the , and unique arid conditions spared the slugs from extinction.

They "probably would have long since vanished, if a volcano had not erupted at Mount Kaputar about 17 million years ago," Ben Cubby . "The result of that eruption is a high-altitude haven for invertebrates and plant species that have been isolated for millions of years, after Australia dried out and the rainforests receded."

And they're not the only unusual inhabitants on the mountain.

"We've actually got three species of cannibal snail on Mount Kaputar, and they're voracious little fellas," Murphy said. "They hunt around on the forest floor to pick up the slime trail of another snail, then hunt it down and gobble it up."

If you're not into pink slugs - check out other pink creatures: