Space shuttle Discovery ready for voyage to museum

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Space shuttle Discovery has one last mission to complete.

At daybreak Tuesday, the oldest of NASA's retired shuttle fleet will leave its home at Kennedy Space Center for the final time, riding on top a modified jumbo jet.

Its destination: the Smithsonian Institution's hangar outside Washington, D.C.

The plane and jet will make a farewell flight over Cape Canaveral before heading north. The pair also will swoop over the nation's capital, including the National Mall, before landing in Virginia.

Space center workers arrived by the busloads Monday at the old shuttle landing strip, where the jet was parked with Discovery bolted on top. Security officers, firefighters, former shuttle workers and even astronauts all posed for pictures in front of Discovery.

The six astronauts who flew Discovery's final space trip a year ago were on hand to bid Discovery goodbye.

Discovery first launched in 1984 and flew 39 times in space, more than any other shuttle. It is the oldest of NASA's three surviving space shuttles and the first to head to a museum.

It will go on display at the Smithsonian's hangar at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, replacing Enterprise, the shuttle prototype that never made it to space but was used in landing tests in the late 1970s. Enterprise is bound for New York City's Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.

"It's good to see her one more time, and it's great that Discovery is going to a good home. Hopefully, millions of people for many, many years to come will go see Discovery," said Steven Lindsey, the last astronaut to command Discovery. "It's also sad ... it's sad to see that the program is over."

NASA ended the shuttle program last summer after 30 years to focus on destinations beyond low-Earth orbit. Lindsey, no longer with NASA, now works in the commercial space industry, helping to develop a successor for launching American astronauts to the International Space Station.

Stephanie Stilson, a NASA manager who is heading up the transition and retirement of the three remaining shuttles, said Discovery looked as though it had just arrived from a ferry trip from the backup landing site in California, as it did so many times in years past.

"To see her like this is quite an amazing sight," Stilson said. "We're finally here" almost an exact year since Discovery launched and landed for good, she noted.

Discovery's list of achievements include delivering the Hubble Space Telescope to orbit, carrying the first Russian cosmonaut to launch on a U.S. spaceship, performing the first rendezvous with the Russian space station Mir with the first female shuttle pilot in the cockpit, returning Mercury astronaut John Glenn to orbit, and bringing shuttle flights back to life after the Challenger and Columbia accidents.

A white tail cone covers the three replica main engines at the back end of Discovery, to keep them safe during the ferry flight and provide for better aerodynamics. (Only the nozzles are there, no massive power assemblies.)

The original air lock is on board that spacewalking astronauts used to step out into the vacuum; Discovery is the only shuttle keeping one because it's considered the spacecraft of historic record. The robot arm is already in Virginia and will be placed on side-by-side display.

NASA spent the past year draining all toxic fuels from Discovery and removing unnecessary plumbing.

Stilson said she's managed to keep her emotions in check by staying busy. She's one of the luckier ones; thousands of shuttle workers have lost their jobs.

Astronaut Nicole Stott had "mixed feelings" as she gazed up at Discovery. "There's no denying the sadness associated with it," said Stott, who was on Discovery's last crew.

The newer shuttle Endeavour is promised to the California Science Center in Los Angeles; it ships out in September. Shuttle Atlantis will remain at Kennedy; a huge display area is in works at the visitor complex.

With the shuttles retired, U.S. astronauts are hitching big-bucks rides on Russian Soyuz rockets to get to the space station. A variety of private American companies are vying for astronaut transportation rights. Officials expect it to be another five years or so before the new spacecraft will be ready to carry passengers.

One of the main competitors, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. or SpaceX, is due to launch its Falcon rocket and Dragon capsule from Cape Canaveral on April 30, on an unprecedented trip to the space station. It will be the first time a private company makes such a cargo run.

After reviewing the status of the flight, NASA officials said Monday there is a good chance that SpaceX can make the April 30 launch date. More software testing is needed, however, over the next two weeks.

___

Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

Dow gains on retail sales but Apple bites Nasdaq

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Dow rose on Monday as robust U.S. retail sales data helped large-cap consumer stocks, but a 4 percent slide in Apple hurt the Nasdaq.

U.S. retail sales for March shot up 0.8 percent, sharply higher than the forecast, pushing Procter & Gamble up 1.5 percent, while givingWal-Mart Stores , the world's largest retailer, a 1.4 percent boost.

But Apple shares dropped 4.2 percent to $580.13. After a meteoric rise of 43 percent this year, Apple was ripe for profit taking.

Apple wasn't the market's only worry. Spain's rising borrowing costs and a weak New York state manufacturing report stirred concerns about Europe's debt crisis and the U.S. economic recovery.

"The market behavior is fairly manic today and investors are confused after a mixed set of data, Spanish yields, and momentum stocks like Apple losing ground," said James Dailey, portfolio manager at TEAM Asset Strategy Fund in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

"The confusion is leading to anxiety, and that's why we are seeing the blue chips, the large caps, outperform."

Other major drags on the Nasdaq included a slide of 9 percent in the shares of Mattel Inc , the world's largest toy maker, on declining quarterly sales, and a 3 percent drop in Google Inc shares ahead of a high-stakes legal battle with Oracle Corp.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.DJI> rose 71.82 points, or 0.56 percent, to 12,921.41 at the close. But the Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.SPX> inched down 0.69 of a point, or 0.05 percent, to 1,369.57. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.IXIC> dropped 22.93 points, or 0.76 percent, to close at 2,988.40.

Procter & Gamble, the world's largest household products company, closed at $66.78, up 1.5 percent, and helped bolster the Dow. Wal-Mart, another Dow component, ended at $60.58, up 1.4 percent.

Spain's 10-year government bond yields climbed above the 6 percent mark on Monday for the first time since the beginning of December. Spain has acknowledged that it has probably slipped into its second recession since 2009.

"Barring an accelerated flight of assets out of the euro zone and into U.S. equities, we see little reason for equities to rally appreciably above the most recent high," said Peter Cecchini, managing director at Cantor Fitzgerald in New York.

"Having said this, we are expecting a short-term bounce, which may lead to a retest of 1,400," he said.

Monday's mixed session followed last week's pullback, when both the Dow and the S&P 500 suffered their worst two-week percentage drops since late November on increasing concerns about the euro zone's debt crisis and weaker-than-expected U.S. economic data.

Earnings season will pick up steam this week, with 86 S&P 500 companies scheduled to report results. According to Thomson Reuters data through Monday, of the 34 S&P 500 companies to have reported earnings so far, 76 percent have reported earnings above analysts' expectations.

Mattel's quarterly profit fell short of analysts' expectations as price increases hurt sales of its iconic Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels cars, driving its stock down 9.1 percent to $31.01.

Google's stock slid 3 percent to $606.07 on Monday, when jury selection got under way in a high-stakes dispute over smartphone technology with Oracle Corp. Shares of Oracle gained 0.5 percent to $28.64.

Volume was light, with about 6.25 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, below last year's daily average of 7.84 billion.

Advancers outnumbered decliners on the NYSE by a ratio of 17 to 13, while on the Nasdaq, about 13 stocks rose for every 12 that fell.

(Reporting by Angela Moon; Editing by Jan Paschal)

As ice cap melts, militaries vie for Arctic edge

YOKOSUKA, Japan (AP) — To the world's military leaders, the debate over climate change is long over. They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts.

By Arctic standards, the region is already buzzing with military activity, and experts believe that will increase significantly in the years ahead.

Last month, Norway wrapped up one of the largest Arctic maneuvers ever — Exercise Cold Response — with 16,300 troops from 14 countries training on the ice for everything from high intensity warfare to terror threats. Attesting to the harsh conditions, five Norwegian troops were killed when their C-130 Hercules aircraft crashed near the summit of Kebnekaise, Sweden's highest mountain.

The U.S., Canada and Denmark held major exercises two months ago, and in an unprecedented move, the military chiefs of the eight main Arctic powers — Canada, the U.S., Russia, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland — gathered at a Canadian military base last week to specifically discuss regional security issues.

None of this means a shooting war is likely at the North Pole any time soon. But as the number of workers and ships increases in the High North to exploit oil and gas reserves, so will the need for policing, border patrols and — if push comes to shove — military muscle to enforce rival claims.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and 30 percent of its untapped natural gas is in the Arctic. Shipping lanes could be regularly open across the Arctic by 2030 as rising temperatures continue to melt the sea ice, according to a National Research Council analysis commissioned by the U.S. Navy last year.

What countries should do about climate change remains a heated political debate. But that has not stopped north-looking militaries from moving ahead with strategies that assume current trends will continue.

Russia, Canada and the United States have the biggest stakes in the Arctic. With its military budget stretched thin by Iraq, Afghanistan and more pressing issues elsewhere, the United States has been something of a reluctant northern power, though its nuclear-powered submarine fleet, which can navigate for months underwater and below the ice cap, remains second to none.

Russia — one-third of which lies within the Arctic Circle — has been the most aggressive in establishing itself as the emerging region's superpower.

Rob Huebert, an associate political science professor at the University of Calgary in Canada, said Russia has recovered enough from its economic troubles of the 1990s to significantly rebuild its Arctic military capabilities, which were a key to the overall Cold War strategy of the Soviet Union, and has increased its bomber patrols and submarine activity.

He said that has in turn led other Arctic countries — Norway, Denmark and Canada — to resume regional military exercises that they had abandoned or cut back on after the Soviet collapse. Even non-Arctic nations such as France have expressed interest in deploying their militaries to the Arctic.

"We have an entire ocean region that had previously been closed to the world now opening up," Huebert said. "There are numerous factors now coming together that are mutually reinforcing themselves, causing a buildup of military capabilities in the region. This is only going to increase as time goes on."

Noting that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe, the U.S. Navy in 2009 announced a beefed-up Arctic Roadmap by its own task force on climate change that called for a three-stage strategy to increase readiness, build cooperative relations with Arctic nations and identify areas of potential conflict.

"We want to maintain our edge up there," said Cmdr. Ian Johnson, the captain of the USS Connecticut, which is one of the U.S. Navy's most Arctic-capable nuclear submarines and was deployed to the North Pole last year. "Our interest in the Arctic has never really waned. It remains very important."

But the U.S. remains ill-equipped for large-scale Arctic missions, according to a simulation conducted by the U.S. Naval War College. A summary released last month found the Navy is "inadequately prepared to conduct sustained maritime operations in the Arctic" because it lacks ships able to operate in or near Arctic ice, support facilities and adequate communications.

"The findings indicate the Navy is entering a new realm in the Arctic," said Walter Berbrick, a War College professor who participated in the simulation. "Instead of other nations relying on the U.S. Navy for capabilities and resources, sustained operations in the Arctic region will require the Navy to rely on other nations for capabilities and resources."

He added that although the U.S. nuclear submarine fleet is a major asset, the Navy has severe gaps elsewhere — it doesn't have any icebreakers, for example. The only one in operation belongs to the Coast Guard. The U.S. is currently mulling whether to add more icebreakers.

Acknowledging the need to keep apace in the Arctic, the United States is pouring funds into figuring out what climate change will bring, and has been working closely with the scientific community to calibrate its response.

"The Navy seems to be very on board regarding the reality of climate change and the especially large changes we are seeing in the Arctic," said Mark C. Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences University of Colorado. "There is already considerable collaboration between the Navy and civilian scientists and I see this collaboration growing in the future."

The most immediate challenge may not be war — both military and commercial assets are sparse enough to give all countries elbow room for a while — but whether militaries can respond to a disaster.

Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the London-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said militaries probably will have to rescue their own citizens in the Arctic before any confrontations arise there.

"Catastrophic events, like a cruise ship suddenly sinking or an environmental accident related to the region's oil and gas exploration, would have a profound impact in the Arctic," she said. "The risk is not militarization; it is the lack of capabilities while economic development and human activity dramatically increases that is the real risk."

Forecasters say Saturday storms 'life threatening'

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — In an unusually early and strong warning, national weather forecasters cautioned Friday that conditions are ripe for violent tornadoes to rip through the nation from Texas to Minnesota this weekend.

As states across the middle of the country prepared for the worst, storms were already kicking off in Norman, Okla., where a twister whizzed by the nation's tornado forecasting headquarters but caused little damage.

It was only the second time in U.S. history that the Storm Prediction Center issued a high-risk warning more than 24 hours in advance, said Russ Schneider, director of the center, which is part of the National Weather Service. The first time was in April 2006, when nearly 100 tornadoes tore across the southeastern U.S., killing a dozen people and damaging more than 1,000 homes in Tennessee.

This weekend's outbreak could be a "high-end, life threatening event," the center said.

The strongly worded message came after the National Weather Service announced last month that it would start using terms like "mass devastation," ''unsurvivable" and "catastrophic" in warnings in an effort to get more people to take heed. It said it would test the new warnings in Kansas and Missouri before deciding whether to expand them to other parts of the country.

Friday's warning, despite the dire language, was not part of that effort but just the most accurate way to describe what was expected, a weather service spokeswoman said.

It's possible to issue earlier warnings because improvements in storm modeling and technology are letting forecasters predict storms earlier and with greater confidence, said Chris Vaccaro, a spokesman for the National Weather Service. In the past, people often have had only minutes of warning when a siren went off.

"We're quite sure tomorrow will be a very busy and dangerous day in terms of large swathes of central and southern plains," Vaccaro said. "The ingredients are coming together."

The worst weather is expected to develop late Saturday afternoon between Oklahoma City and Salina, Kan., but other areas also could see severe storms with baseball-sized hail and winds of up to 70 mph, forecasters said. The warning issued Friday covers parts of Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

The weather service confirmed a tornado touched down about 4 p.m. Friday near the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman, where it is based. Non-essential personnel at the storm center and students were ordered to take shelter, officials said.

Video from television helicopters showed several buildings damaged in the city of about 100,000 about 20 miles south of Oklahoma City, but Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management spokeswoman Keli Cain said there were no reports of serious injuries.

"This is just a fraction of what's to come tomorrow," Vaccaro warned.

Storms were developing as cold air from the west hit low-level moisture coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. The difference in wind direction and speed was creating instability in the atmosphere that can spawn tornadoes, said Scott Curl, another weather service meteorologist.

Emergency management officials in Kansas and Oklahoma warned residents to stay updated on weather developments and create a plan for where they and their families would go if a tornado developed.

"We know it's a Saturday and that people are going to be out and about, so stay weather aware," Cain said. "Have your cell phone on you, keep it charged and make sure you're checking the weather throughout the day so you don't get caught off guard."

People also should put together an emergency preparedness kit that includes a pair of boots, rain gear, flashlight, battery-operated radio, first-aid kit and a few days' supply of food and water.

"It seems like it's kind of a big deal this time," said Monte Evans, a 42-year-old middle school teacher in Wichita, Kan., who said he planned to keep a close eye on the weather and take shelter in his basement with his wife and four children, ages six to 11, if tornadoes hit. "But they always say it's coming and then ends up somewhere else. You just do the best you can and get ready if it happens."

Medical officials in Oklahoma warned residents not to seek shelter at hospitals or other public buildings, but rather to stay inside their homes in a basement or interior closet.

During a tornado outbreak last spring, hundreds of residents packed Oklahoma City hospitals seeking shelter from a violent series of twisters that killed seven people in Oklahoma and Kansas.

"We had people actually lining the halls," said Michael Murphy of the Emergency Medical Services Authority. "Had we experienced a mass casualty incident, it really could have placed a strain on our resources."

Budget woes force NASA to redraw plans to Mars

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Know how to go to Mars cheaply? NASA can use your help.

The space agency on Friday put out a call for ideas for the next Mars mission in 2018. The fine print: The cost can't be astronomical and the idea has to move the country closer to landing humans on the red planet in the 2030s.

"This is the kickoff," said NASA sciences chief John Grunsfeld.

The race to redraw a new, cheaper road map comes two months after NASA pulled out of a partnership with the European Space Agency on two missions targeted for 2016 and 2018, a move that angered scientists. The 2018 mission represented the first step toward hauling Martian soil and rocks back to Earth for detailed study — something many researchers say is essential in determining whether microbial life once existed there.

Agency officials said returning samples is still a priority, but a reboot was necessary given the financial reality.

In the past decade, NASA has spent $6.1 billion exploring Earth's closest planetary neighbor.President Barack Obama's latest proposed budget slashed spending for solar system exploration by 21 percent, making the collaboration with the Europeans unaffordable.

A newly formed team will cull through the ideas and come up with options by summer around the time when NASA's latest mission, a $2.5 billion car-sized rover Curiosity, will land near the equator on Mars. NASA headquarters is the ultimate decider of which future projects to fund.

Whatever mission flies in 2018, it will be vastly cheaper than Curiosity and will be capped at $700 million.

NASA is mainly seeking suggestions from scientists and engineers around the world, but you don't have to have a Ph.D. Anyone can submit a proposal online and go through a lengthy process.

"Check all the boxes and you may be considered," said NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown.

Scientists welcomed the chance to offer input but worried about the budget uncertainty.

"It will be extremely difficult to plan and implement the next specific steps that will lead to Mars sample return," Arizona State University scientist Jim Bell said in an email. He is part of the rover Curiosity team.

See Dan read: Baboons can learn to spot real words

WASHINGTON (AP) — Dan the baboon sits in front of a computer screen. The letters BRRU pop up. With a quick and almost dismissive tap, the monkey signals it's not a word. Correct. Next comes, ITCS. Again, not a word. Finally KITE comes up.

He pauses and hits a green oval to show it's a word. In the space of just a few seconds, Dan has demonstrated a mastery of what some experts say is a form of pre-reading and walks away rewarded with a treat of dried wheat.

Dan is part of new research that shows baboons are able to pick up the first step in reading — identifying recurring patterns and determining which four-letter combinations are words and which are just gobbledygook.

The study shows that reading's early steps are far more instinctive than scientists first thought and it also indicates that non-human primates may be smarter than we give them credit for.

"They've got the hang of this thing," said Jonathan Grainger, a French scientist and lead author of the research.

Baboons and other monkeys are good pattern finders and what they are doing may be what we first do in recognizing words.

It's still a far cry from real reading. They don't understand what these words mean, and are just breaking them down into parts, said Grainger, a cognitive psychologist at the Aix-Marseille University in France.

In 300,000 tests, the six baboons distinguished between real and fake words about three-out-of-four times, according to the study published in Thursday's journal Science.

The 4-year-old Dan, the star of the bunch and about the equivalent age of a human teenager, got 80 percent of the words right and learned 308 four-letter words.

The baboons are rewarded with food when they press the right spot on the screen: A blue plus sign for bogus combos or a green oval for real words.

Even though the experiments were done in France, the researchers used English words because it is the language of science, Grainger said.

The key is that these animals not only learned by trial and error which letter combinations were correct, but they also noticed which letters tend to go together to form real words, such as SH but not FX, said Grainger. So even when new words were sprung on them, they did a better job at figuring out which were real.

Grainger said a pre-existing capacity in the brain may allow them to recognize patterns and objects, and perhaps that's how we humans also first learn to read.

The study's results were called "extraordinarily exciting" by another language researcher, psychology professor Stanislas Dehaene at the College of France, who wasn't part of this study. He said Grainger's finding makes sense. Dehaene's earlier work says a distinct part of the brain visually recognizes the forms of words. The new work indicates this is also likely in a non-human primate.

This new study also tells us a lot about our distant primate relatives.

"They have shown repeatedly amazing cognitive abilities," said study co-author Joel Fagot, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

Bill Hopkins, a professor of psychology at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, isn't surprised.

"We tend to underestimate what their capacities are," said Hopkins, who wasn't part of the French research team. "Non-human primates are really specialized in the visual domain and this is an example of that."

This raises interesting questions about how the complex primate mind works without language or what we think of as language, Hopkins said. While we use language to solve problems in our heads, such as deciphering words, it seems that baboons use a "remarkably sophisticated" method to attack problems without language, he said.

Key to the success of the experiment was a change in the testing technique, the researchers said. The baboons weren't put in the computer stations and forced to take the test. Instead, they could choose when they wanted to work, going to one of the 10 computer booths at any time, even in the middle of the night.

The most ambitious baboons test 3,000 times a day; the laziest only 400.

The advantage of this type of experiment setup, which can be considered more humane, is that researchers get far more trials in a shorter time period, he said.

"They come because they want to," Fagot said. "What do they want? They want some food. They want to solve some task."

___

Online:

Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

Experts sleuth out what killed Puget Sound orca

SEATTLE (AP) — Two months after a 3-year-old endangered orca washed ashore bloodied and bruised in Washington state the cause of her death remains a mystery.

Marine experts believe the female killer whale, known as L-112, died of massive blunt force trauma, but they're still examining evidence and waiting for tests of tissue samples to determine what caused that trauma. Some orca experts, however, suspect the injuries are linked to an underwater explosion or military trainingactivity at sea.

Law enforcement officers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last week began looking into the orca's death and are seeking information from the U.S. Navy and other sources about their activities as part of its investigation, said NOAAspokesman Brian Gorman. "So far, there haven't been any red flags," he said.

The Navy says it wasn't conducting activity off the coast in the weeks before Feb. 11, when the orca's 12-foot long carcass was discovered on Long Beach on Washington's southern coast.

The young female orca was a member of the "L'' pod, one of three groups of federally-protected killer whales that frequent Puget Sound, whose population now stands at 86.

Conservations groups say her death represents a major reproductive loss for the marine mammals and, combined with recent naval sonar use in the region by the U.S. and Canada, underscores the need for stricter protections for the marine mammals. Last month, they urged the Navy to disclose all of its activities off the Oregon and Washington coast in the weeks before the whale washed ashore.

"There were no activities at all," said Navy spokesman Sheila Murray. "The Navy was doing nothing. ... If the Navy was doing an activity at the time, I think they would let the public know. There's so much speculation, and it's wrong."

Joe Gaydos, a wildlife veterinarian with SeaDoc Society who has been working with a team of experts to understand what killed the whale, said they're considering all possible scenarios, including a strike from another animal, sonar activity, an explosion and other possibilities.

"Right now everything is on the table," he said, adding that "as scientists, we have to weigh all the evidence before we come to a conclusion."

Gaydos and a team of biologists dissected the orca's head and examined the skull and brain during a necropsy last month. They found no fractures of the skull or jaw, indicating that the trauma or the force was dispersed over a larger area and not likely caused by a boat strike. They also found hemorrhaging and bleeding in the back of the orca's head.

"When something is shaken up, you'll have trauma at multiple locations," Gaydos said.

Orca expert Ken Balcomb, however, is convinced the whale died from an explosion, which he believes is most likely from military training exercises at sea.

"I don't know who else has that powerful of an explosive device that they're setting off in whale habitat," said Balcomb, a senior scientist at the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island who has studied the mammals for years. He suspects the extensive trauma found on the whale's head, chest and side are consistent with blast trauma. Balcomb observed the necropsy but is not directly involved in the examination being conducted by Gaydos, Washington state wildlife officials, Cascadia Research, the Makah tribe, Portland State University and others.

The whale's death comes at a tense time between conservationists and the Navy. Conservationists are suing in federal court over the Navy's use of sonar in the Northwest, saying the noise can harass and kill whales and other marine life and NOAA was wrong to approve the Navy's plan for increased training activities. The Navy for decades has been training in the Northwest Training Range Complex, an area about 126,000 nautical square miles off the coast of Northern California, Oregon and Washington.

Several days before the whale turned up dead on the Washington coast, the Canadian Naval frigate HMSC Ottawa used sonar in Canadian and U.S. waters near Victoria, B.C., raising concerns about possible harm to marine mammals.

But federal officials studying wind, currents and tides during the two weeks before the orca washed ashore recently concluded the animal could not have been near British Columbia during that time.

"We are very confident that this animal died near the Columbia River or south of Long Beach and drifted north," Gorman said Tuesday. "It's highly unlikely that it died off the coast of B.C. and drifted south."

If the whale was on the coast, it's unlikely that she would have been near the Ottawa's sonar activity so far away, said Jason Wood, research associate at The Whale Museum at Friday Harbor, who has studied the effect of human sound on mammals. "But I don't know if there were other naval ships doing other things on the outer coast," he added.

Tissue samples collected from the whale are currently being analyzed under a microscope. Once that is done, the team of experts will have to figure out how to piece together all the evidence to determine what killed the orca, Gaydos said.

"We may never know," said Kristin Wilkinson, who works with NOAA and is coordinating the examination. "All we can do is to try to do all of our homework to see what potentially could have happened."

Titanic's sinking: Was it more than human folly?

WASHINGTON (AP) — After an entire century that included two high-profile government investigations and countless books and movies, we're still debating what really caused the Titanic to hit an iceberg and sink on that crystal-clear chilly night.

Maybe there's more to blame than human folly and hubris. Maybe we can fault freak atmospheric conditions that caused a mirage or an even rarer astronomical event that sent icebergs into shipping lanes. Those are two of the newer theories being proposed by a Titanic author and a team of astronomers.

But the effort to find natural causes that could have contributed to the sinking may also be a quest for an excuse — anything to avoid gazing critically into a mirror, say disaster experts and Titanic historians.

New theories and research are important "but at its most basic what happened is they failed to heed warnings and they hit the iceberg because they were going too fast," said James Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

With this week's 100th anniversary of Titanic's sinking, the interest in all things Titanic is steaming faster than the doomed cruise ship on its maiden voyage.

One of the novel new theories says Titanic could have been the victim of a mirage that is similar to what people see in the desert. It's the brainchild of Tim Maltin, a historian who has written three books about Titanic. The latest, an e-book titled "A Very Deceiving Night" emphasizes how the atmosphere may have tricked the Titanic crew on a cloudless night.

"This was not avoidable human error," Maltin said in a telephone interview from London. "It's just about air density difference."

It was a beautiful clear night and for a couple of days, there had been something strange going on in the air over the North Atlantic, reported by all sorts of ships, including the crew on Titanic, Maltin said.

The unusually cold sea air caused light to bend abnormally downward, Maltin said. The Titanic's first officer, William McMaster Murdoch, saw what he described as a "haze on the horizon, and that iceberg came right out of the haze," Maltin said, quoting from the surviving second officer's testimony.

Other ships, including those rescuing survivors, reported similar strange visuals and had trouble navigating around the icebergs, he said.

British meteorologists later monitored the site for those freaky thermal inversions and said 60 percent of the time they checked, the inversions were present, Maltin said.

The same inversions could have made the Titanic's rescue rockets appear lower in the sky, giving a rescue ship the impression that the Titanic was smaller and farther away, Maltin said.

Physicists Donald Olson and Russell Doescher at Texas State University have another theory in Sky &Telescope magazine that fits nicely with Maltin's. Olson — who often comes up with astronomical quirks linked to historical events — said that a few months earlier, the moon, sun and Earth lined up in a way that added extra pull on Earth's tides. The Earth was closer to the moon than it had been in 1,400 years.

They based their work on historical and astronomical records and research in 1978 by a federal expert in tides.

The unusual tides caused glaciers to calve icebergs off Greenland. Those southbound icebergs got stuck near Labrador and Newfoundland but then slowly moved south again, floating into the shipping currents just in time to greet the Titanic, the astronomers theorized. Maltin said the icebergs also added a snaking river of super-cold water that magnified the mirage effect.

Tides and mirages may have happened, but blaming them for Titanic's sinking "misses the boat," said Lee Clarke, a Rutgers University disaster expert and author of the book "Worst Cases."

"The basic facts of Titanic are not in dispute: The boat was going too fast in dangerous waters," Clarke said. If Titanic had stopped for the night because of ice like the British steamship Californian did, "tides and mirages wouldn't have mattered."

On April 14, the day it hit the iceberg, the Titanic received seven heavy ice warnings, including one from the Californian less than an hour before the fateful collision. The message said: "We are stopped and surrounded by ice." Titanic sent back a message that said "Shut up. We are busy."

Clarke said people keep looking for additional causes "because if it's nature or God, then we're off the hook, morally and practically."

Yale disaster expert Charles Perrow said he found the mirage theory plausible, especially because cold air played visual tricks that were a factor in a 1979 airplane crash in Antarctica that was originally blamed on pilot error.

Steven Biel, who wrote "Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster," said he understands the search for other reasons.

"There's something appealing about retrospectively gaining control over an event that's centrally about uncertainty and contingency and lack of control," he said.

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

Study: Fungus behind bat die-off came from Europe

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The mysterious deaths of millions of bats in the United States and Canada over the past several years were caused by a fungus that hitchhiked from Europe, scientists reported Monday.

Experts had suspected that an invasive species was to blame for the die-off from "white nose syndrome." Now there's direct evidence the culprit was not native to North America.

The fungal illness has not caused widespread deaths amongEuropean bats unlike in the U.S. and Canada. In North America more than 5.7 million bats have died since 2006 when white nose syndrome was first detected in a cave in upstate New York. The disease does not pose a threat to humans, but people can carry fungal spores.

It's unclear exactly how the fungus crossed the Atlantic, but one possibility is that it was accidentally introduced by tourists. Spores are known to stick to people's clothes, boots and caving gear.

White nose syndrome has killed bats in four Canadian provinces and 19 U.S. states, mostly in the Northeast and South. Last week, the illness marched west of the Mississippi River, infecting bats in Missouri.

Now that scientists have pinpointed the apparent origin of the epidemic, what can be done to protect bats? They play a crucial role in the ecological food chain by devouring insects.

"There is still not much we can do beyond making absolutely sure we don't make things worse by accidentally spreading the fungus," said biologist Craig Willis of the University of Winnipeg in Canada.

Willis and a team of U.S.-Canadian scientists set out to determine whether the fungus behind white nose syndrome was native to this continent or invaded from abroad. To do this, they collected 54 little brown bats from an uninfected cave in Manitoba.

The bats were divided into three groups: One group was infected with spores collected from Europe; another group was sickened with spores from North America. A third group was not infected. Researchers used infrared cameras to monitor the bats' behavior and disease progression over several months.

Both infected groups developed symptoms, including the telltale trace of white powder on the nose that gives the disease its name and scarring on the wings. Compared with uninfected bats, infected bats were roused more often from hibernation. This depletes their fat reserves and ultimately leads to death.

The findings were reported online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Since the infected groups showed similarly severe symptoms, scientists concluded the fungus originated in Europe. Had the pathogen been native to North America but with a mutation that made it more deadly, scientists would have expected to see milder symptoms in the group infected with the European fungus.

The team planned to repeat the experiment next year with European bats and compare results.

Why European bats have not died off en masse is unknown. It's possible they developed immunity to the fungus or learned to avoid places that favor the spread of the disease. North American bats have shown little protection against white nose syndrome and there's active research into whether populations can rebound.

"We are still working to understand if it is possible for bats to develop resilience or resistance to the fungus," said Jeremy Coleman of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who had no role in the latest work.

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Online:

Journal: http://www.pnas.org