Air New Zealand has announced plans to carry out the first test flight of a commercial airliner partially powered by biofuel in late 2008 or early 2009, the BBC has reported.

The move follows the New Zealand government’s recent announcement that the country aims to become carbon neutral, and climate change and energy minister David Parker said he was “delighted that Air New Zealand were taking the lead by signing up for the first commercial trial of a biofuelled… aircraft”.

Environmentalists are, however, growing increasingly sceptical about whether the use of biofuels could actually result in increased greenhouse emissions, and are also increasingly concerned about the amount of land needed to grow existing fuel crops.

Japanese scientists looking for solutions to the decreasing availability of valuable endangered species of fish are pioneering a new technique of producing fish stocks by injecting the germ cells of one species into sterilised embryos of another.

So far the method has been successfully used by marine biologist Goro Yoshizaki from the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology to breed salmon from trout embryos. The Telegraph reports though, that the real motive of the work is to produce more bluefin tuna because of its importance in traditional Japanese cuisine such as sushi and sashimi.

The New Scientist reported this week that a new oral contraceptive pill may allow women to opt out of period pains by putting their menstrual cycle on hold entirely. The pills, which went on sale in the USA in July, can be taken 365 days a year with no need to break every month. Researchers are also experimenting with creating similar drugs that block the body’s own progesterone.

Geneticists have made a breakthrough in their understanding of the gene sequences of Siberian mammoths using tiny samples of their hair found preserved in the Russian tundra, reports Nature.   

Researchers Tom Gilbert from the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Ancient Genetics and Stephan Schuster from Pennsylvania State University Managed to extract DNA from the hair of mammoths that had been frozen in the ground for around 50,000 years. This demonstrates new insights into the usefulness of hair for recovering ancient DNA, as well as hair’s amazing resistance to deterioration.  

The first photographic evidence that the yeti, otherwise know as the abominable snowman, might be more than a myth will be offered for auction at Christie’s in London later this month. In total there are four photographs of large paw prints in the snow that were taken by British mountaineer Eric Shipton on a trip to Everest in 1951.

Tom Bourdillon, who was also on the mission, gave the prints to a friend, Michael Davies. On the back of one he said: “We came across them on a high path on the Nepal-Tibet watershed during the 1951 Everest expedition… What it is I don’t know, but I am quite clear that it is no animal known to live in the Himalaya and that it is big.” Read more in the Telegraph.

The BBC reported on a Russian woman giving birth to a baby weighing 7.75gk (17.5lbs), more than double the weight of an average newborn.

The mother of the little girl, who has been named Nadia, said that they were all in shock, and that the father could not say anything – he just stood there blinking.

Among the heaviest babies on record are a 10.2kg (22.5lb) boy born in Italy in 1955, and a 10.8kg (23.8lb) boy born in the USA in 1879 but who died 11 hours later.

Nasa has successfully launched a new probe which will help scientists learn more about how the Solar System was formed, reported the BBC this week.

Nasa’s Dawn space probe has embarked on an eight-year journey to visit the small worlds of Ceres and Vesta in the Solar System’s asteroid belt. The asteroids are thought to be the leftovers of when the planets were made.

"Visiting both Vesta and Ceres enables a study in extraterrestrial contrasts," said Dawn's principal investigator, Christopher Russell, of the University of California, Los Angeles. "One is rocky, and is representative of the building blocks that constructed the planets of the inner Solar System; the other may very well be icy, and represents the outer planets. "Yet, these two very diverse bodies reside in essentially the same neighbourhood. It is one of the mysteries Dawn hopes to solve."

A novel way of tackling global warming that involves churning the ocean with millions of plastic tubes, has been proposed by two extremely highly regarded environmental scientists this week, reports the Guardian.

James Lovelock, the author of Gaia, and Chris Rapley, newly appointed director of the Science Museum in London, suggest that by dotting the world’s oceans with 200-metre tubes we would be able to bring nutrients from the deep up to the surface, encouraging algae to bloom. At the same time this would suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and lock it away.
While there is a strong scientific basis to the idea, Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace, warned of the dangers associated with it: "This kind of geo-engineering is no substitute for reducing our emissions and changing our energy producing and consuming culture substantially."