An 8-million-year-old bacterium that was extracted from the oldest known ice on Earth is now growing in a laboratory, claim researchers.

If confirmed, this means ancient bacteria and viruses will come back to life as ice melts due to global warming. This is nothing to worry about, say experts, because the process has been going on for billions of years and the bugs are unlikely to cause human disease.

If true, however, Falkowski's findings could considerably extend the record for the oldest DNA frozen in ice. Last month, a team of researchers led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark announced that they had recovered DNA from the Greenland ice sheet that was up to 800,000 years old.

Human-induced climate change has affected global rainfall patterns over the 20th Century, a study suggests.

Researchers said changes to the climate had led to an increase in annual average rainfall in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

Climate models have, for a number of years, suggested that human activity has led to changes to the distribution of rain and snow across the globe.

"We show that anthropogenic forcing has had a detectable influence on observed changes in average precipitation within latitudinal bands," the researchers wrote in the paper.

Indiana regulators exempted BP from state environmental laws to clear the way for a $3.8 billion expansion that will allow the company to refine heavier Canadian crude oil. They justified the move in part by noting the project will create 80 new jobs. The company will now be allowed to dump an average of 1,584 pounds of ammonia and 4,925 pounds of sludge into Lake Michigan every day.

Odin, a five-year-old White Bengal Tiger dives for a piece of meat thrown to him by a trainer during a big cat show 14 June 2007 at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, California, some 33 miles northeast of downtown San Francisco.

Where wild tigers once numbered close to 100,000, their numbers have dwindled to less than 5,000. Some scientists, said Chris Drelick, a new trainer at the park, believe that wild tigers could be extinct in a decade due to habitat loss and rampant poaching.

Trainers regularly leash the tigers and stroll them around the grounds. The claw marks on some trees indicate the cats' preferred scratching posts.

There is a tiger splash lineage in Vallejo. Odin learned his diving from a now 'retired' tiger named Kuma, and has since passed the trick on to a much younger cub named Fedor.

The world's tigers face "ecological extinction" due to a combination of "increased poaching, habitat destruction, and poor conservation efforts by governments", Reuters reports.

In India, isolated populations now occupy just seven per cent of the territory they enjoyed a century ago. The country, in common with others, was "inadequately implementing conservation policies and mismanaging funds set aside for the survival of the big cats", the report notes.

The biggest threat to the world's tigers may be China's appetite for exotic cat, the report states. The country plans to lift its 1993 ban on the domestic trade of tiger parts, a move "sure to re-ignite interest among more than a billion consumers in emerging economies".

The US appears to have rejected draft proposals by Germany for G8 members to agree tough measures in greenhouse gas emissions, leaked documents have shown.

"The US still has serious, fundamental concerns about this draft statement," a red-inked note reads.

"The treatment of climate change runs counter to our overall position and crosses 'multiple red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot agree to," it continues.

"We have tried to 'tread lightly' but there is only so far we can go given our fundamental opposition to the German position."

Greenpeace Director John Sauven described the US position as "criminal".

"The US administration is clearly ignoring the global scientific consensus as well the groundswell of concern about climate change in the United States," he said.

The US has not signed the Kyoto Protocol, which sets out targets for lowering emissions until 2012.

Washington objects to the draft's targets to keep the global temperature rise below 2C this century and halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

The draft, prepared by the German G8 Presidency, says action is imperative.

Japanese news organisations recently reported that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government was also planning to push fellow G8 members for tough targets.

As well as objecting to mention of targets for global temperature rise and greenhouse gas emissions, Washington is also seeking to remove a section acknowledging that the UN is the "appropriate forum" for agreeing further action.

"It lies in the hands of Prime Minister Blair and Chancellor Merkel, whether it's all sweetness and light or whether they are prepared to stand up and say 'I'm sorry, but the rest of the world is moving in a different direction from you'," he said.

When paleontologists find fossilized dinosaur bones during a dig, they usually do everything in their power to protect them, using tools like toothbrushes to carefully unearth the bones without inflicting any damage. However, when scientists found a massive Tyrannosaurus rex thigh bone in a remote region of Montana a few months ago, they were forced to break the bone in two in order to fit it into the transport helicopter. This act of necessity revealed a startling surprise: soft tissue that had seemingly resisted fossilization still existed inside the bone. This tissue, including blood vessels, bone cells, and perhaps even blood cells, was so well preserved that it was still stretchy and flexible.

Does this discovery of soft dinosaur tissue mean that scientists will soon be able to clone a Tyrannosaurus rex? Probably not – most scientists believe that DNA cannot survive for 70 million years. Then again, before this discovery, most scientists believed that soft tissue could not survive for 70 million years either.

The Crocodile Man, Steve Irwin, is dead. He was killed in a freak accident in Cairns, police sources said. It appeared that he was killed by a sting-ray barb that went through his chest, Queensland Police Inspector Russell Rhodes said.

He was swimming off the Low Isles at Port Douglas where he had been filming an underwater documentary when it occurred. Ambulance officers confirmed they attended a reef fatality this morning at Batt Reef off Port Douglas.

It is understood Mr Irwin was killed instantly.

A source said Mr Irwin was already dead when his body was brought onto the Isle.

When trap-jaw ants need to get out quick, they use their heads, not their legs to escape. This large species of Costa Rican ant smashes its jaw into the ground, causing the ant to catapult up and away from danger.

Videos of Odontomachus bauri show that this ant can propel itself 8 centimetres up into the air using jaws that snap shut at a speed of nearly 65 metres per second - perhaps the fastest predatory strike measured.

The snapping jaw gives the ants a bizarre multi-purpose tool for hunting and defence. The ants often approach other insects with their jaws cocked open. Snapping them shut can both give the ant a quick escape and also knock down the combatant, stunning it so the ant can come back with a successful attack.

Helped by these skills, O. bauri thrives throughout Central and South America. They are amazing because of the way they work together to stay safe, says Fisher. "A group of ants can confuse predators by performing multiple, simultaneous escape jumps, creating what I call the popcorn effect."