DUBAI (Reuters) - Qatar is considering building one of the world's largest solar power complexes to help meet demand, which could increase four-fold over the next 30 years, the Middle East Economic Digest (MEED) reported.

Gulf Arab states have about 30 percent of the world's oil reserves and 8 percent of its gas, but an economic boom spurred by record crude prices is driving demand for power and water so rapidly that many are considering turning to alternative energies including nuclear.

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana - Over the past 50 years, farming has altered the hydrology and chemistry of the Mississippi River, injecting more carbon dioxide into the river and raising river discharge, finds a study by researchers at Louisiana State and Yale universities.

LSU Professor R. Eugene Turner and graduate student Whitney Broussard, along with their colleagues at Yale, tracked changes in the discharge of water and the concentration of bicarbonate, which forms when carbon dioxide in soil water dissolves rock minerals.

"We have experimentally shown beyond reasonable doubt that long-distance, intercontinental avian migrants can correct for east-west displacements during their return migration in spring," said Nikita Chernetsov of the Biological Station Rybachy at the Zoological Institute in Russia. "This means that they can determine geographic longitude, even though we do not currently know how they do it."

Chemists unveil new process for capturing and storing gas; potential spin-offs include improvements to greenhouse gas management and fuel cell development.
A new process for catching gas from the environment and holding it indefinitely in molecular-sized containers has been developed by a team of University of Calgary researchers, who say it represents a novel method of gas storage that could yield benefits for capturing, storing and transporting gases more safely and efficiently.

MADISON, WI, January 28, 2008 -- As organic farming becomes more common, methods to identify fraud in the industry are increasingly important. In a recent study in Journal of Environmental Quality, scientists successfully use nitrogen isotopic discrimination to determine if non-organic, synthetic fertilizers were used on sweet pepper plants.

The latest outbreaks were reported in southwestern
Gopalganj, northeastern Sylhet and northern Mymensingh
district, officials said.

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey detected bird flu virus in dead chickens found late last month in the northern part of the country after it had started culling poultry due to bird flu suspicions, the Agriculture Ministry said on Sunday.

The culling was sparked after residents reported chicken deaths in a district in the Samsun province in the northern Black Sea region.

Ask the people of Yorkshire. As a result of global warming, many homeowners this week are up to their waists in muddy water. And flooding could be just the beginning of our worries. This week a paper in the British Medical Journal gave warning that climate change could be particularly damaging to the health of people in the developing world, but research also suggests that it could be bad news for Britain.