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Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore urged President Barack Obama and other world leaders to seal a quick deal to fight global warming despite the pervasive financial crisis.

Gore called Obama “the greenest person in the room” for making environmental funding a big chunk of the $819 billion economic stimulus bill passed by U.S. lawmakers this week.

“I think it’s important for the world leaders gathered here to fully appreciate the magnitude of the change in U.S. leadership,” Gore said.

The former U.S. vice president and environmental advocate, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, referred to frustration in many countries at the Bush administration’s refusal to sign international pacts on reducing emissions of carbon, blamed for global warming.

Gore, U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer and oil and insurance executives were discussing the fate of a U.N. meeting in Copenhagen later this year aiming for a global agreement on reducing emissions.

Questions remain over the new U.S. government’s position on the Copenhagen meeting, which is seen as crucial.

Gore remained upbeat. “The new administration is very serious about this,” he said. “We need an agreement this year, not next year or some other time.”

The panelists acknowledged that the financial crisis will be a key challenge to getting agreement on a climate pact.

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who will host the Copenhagen meeting, urged countries to agree to reduce global emissions by 50 percent by 2050, and said industrialized countries should reduce by 80 percent.

Animal rights activist and former “Baywatch” star Pamela Anderson has intervened on behalf of dogs condemned to death in India’s financial capital, urging authorities to sterilize strays instead of killing them.

Anderson wrote to Mumbai’s municipal commissioner this week after learning of plans to rid the city of many of its estimated 70,000 stray dogs. In December, a city court allowed authorities

to kill canines causing a nuisance.

“Dogs cannot use condoms, but with the municipality’s help, they can be ‘fixed’ - painlessly, quickly and permanently,” the Canadian-born actress wrote in a letter to Jairaj Pathak on

Wednesday.

“It is well established that killing stray dogs is not a permanent solution to controlling their populations,” she said.

But the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) wasn’t impressed.

“Every country has its own rules and laws and the problem will be tackled according to those,” a BMC spokesperson said.

Anderson, 41, is also expected to visit India later this year to further safeguard the lives of strays.

“We are expecting her here by July,” said Anuradha Sawhney, head of the India chapter of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

Stargazers are in for a treat next month as Comet Lulin is moving closer to Earth and will be visible to the naked eye.

The comet is swinging around the Sun and approaching the Earth. The photogenic Lulin has a bright tail and an “anti-tail”. At its closest approach in February, Comet Lulin is expected to brighten to naked-eye visibility, reaching a magnitude of six.

The comet is at present moving between the constellations Scorpio and Libra.

Lulin is expected to head towards Leo at an accelerated pace late next month.

The comet will pass 0.41 Astronomical Units from earth and reach its closest distance to Earth on February 24, about 14.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Lulin was the first comet jointly discovered by astronomers across the Taiwan Strait in 2007.

The discovery of Comet Lulin (C/2227 N3) was part of a major achievement made by the Lulin Sky Survey project to explore the various populations of small bodies in the solar system, especially objects that could be a hazard to the Earth.

Astronomers at the Taipei Astronomical Museum said the tail of Lulin would be most visible during the time it moves closest to the Earth.

Lulin will be observable low in the sky in an east-southeast direction before dawn, the museum said.

Archaeologists have found the remains of a Roman temple in a town in Nottinghamshire, UK, a discovery that experts say could re-write the history books.

According to a report in the website nottingham.co.uk, a wall dating back as far as 43AD, made from large smooth-faced sandstone blocks, has been unearthed at the former Minster School site in Southwell in Nottinghamshire.

Twenty meters long by 2.5 meters tall, it is part of an emerging complex of buildings, including a Roman bathing monument known as a nymphaeum.

The site also contains what is believed to be a large villa.

“This is a monumental discovery. I have never seen Roman archaeology looking like that in Notts,” said Ursilla Spence, senior archaeological officer for Notts County Council. “It is starting to re-write our understanding of Notts in the Roman period,” she added.

“You don’t expect to see a wall of this masonry. It looks as if it could be a pagan Roman temple. Not only are they using these huge blocks, but they were using smooth faces. It is very much a grand building,” Spence explained.

“We certainly were not expecting anything like this. We had nothing to say it was there. To us, it is new and very exciting,” she added.

It is only the second Roman pagan temple to be discovered in Notts, the other was found in 1963 near to the site where the East Midlands Parkway Station is being built.

The Southwell find is significant because there is no evidence of a Roman settlement in the town.

According to Bryn Walters, director and secretary of the Association for Roman Archeology, “This could change the way the history of Southwell is looked at. It is interesting that there might be something else and has not been found yet.”

“If there is a temple, there is going to be something else not far away,” he added.

Walters said that the discovery of the temple could mean that what was thought to be a villa, previously discovered at the site, might be a lavish resting place for pilgrims.

“There may well be something of great importance there. It is potentially a very, very interesting site indeed. Potentially, Southwell is hiding a lot of information,” he said.

“We think it’s a whole complex. We have got most of the elements. I am expecting another structure to turn up this week,” said Spence.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel faced rising pressure to step up stimulus measures in the face of the global financial crisis on Saturday, including calls from her own conservative colleagues to cut taxes now.

Merkel, whose government has launched a 500-billion euro bank bailout package as well as an economic stimulus plan in past weeks, has ruled out any tax cuts for 2009.

Merkel acknowledged in a newspaper interview that the effects of the global financial crisis on Europe’s largest economy were set to be felt well into next year.

“We have to expect the coming year, at least in the first months, to be a year of bad news,” she told Welt am Sonntag newspaper, according to an advance copy of the interview due to be published on Sunday.

Merkel said the stimulus package agreed by her government this month was meant to build a bridge for citizens and companies “so that things will turn upwards again in 2010.”

But Merkel’s Economy Minister Michael Glos said the measures, which are aimed at generating about 50 billion euros ($62.60 billion) in investment and contracts, were not enough.

Glos, a member of the Christian Social Union (CSU), sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), said the plan was a first step.

“But I think we have to act more decisively. It would help the economic situation if we were now cutting taxes for small and medium earners,” Glos told weekly magazine Der Spiegel.

Germany fell into recession in the third quarter when its economy shrank by a much sharper than expected 0.5 percent. A top economy ministry official has also said the outlook for the final three months of 2008 is little better.

Merkel, whose government has forecast GDP growth of 0.2 percent next year, has been trying to strike a balance between launching measures to stimulate growth and keeping a close watch on Germany’s budget situation.

German parliamentarians gave the government the go-ahead on Friday to raise 18.5 billion euros in net new borrowing in 2009, exceding the 10.5 billion euros originally planned, budget committee members said.

Merkel’s ruling grand coalition had hoped to balance the federal budget by 2011, but government officials have acknowledged it will be difficult to reach that goal.

Calls on Merkel to launch new measures to boost the economy also came from a section within her CDU that represents the interests of Germany’s small and medium-sized companies.

“We have to go significantly further in our response to the current financial and economic crisis,” Josef Schlarmann, the head of the CDU group told Der Spiegel, calling for a reduction in company taxes.

The president of Germany’s chambers of industry and commerce (DIHK), Ludwig Georg Braun, said the government should not postpone necessary tax cuts.

“Taxes down, that’s the best growth programme,” he told B.Z. daily. “There must be no delay on this.”

The US space agency NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from Earth.

“This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet,” said Adrian Hooke, team leader and manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

NASA and Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google Inc., in Mountain View, California, partnered 10 years ago to develop this software protocol. The DTN sends information using a method that differs from the normal Internet’s Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, communication suite, which Cerf co-designed.

Speeding 27,000 an hour around Earth, space shuttle Endeavour aimed for a docking with the international space station on Sunday to drop off a new house-mate and deliver equipment that will change the outpost into a two-kitchen, two-bath, five-bedroom home.

“It’s the eve of show-time,” space station commander Mike Fincke said last night. “Everyone get some rest. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow.”

As Endeavour closed in on the space station at about 965 kilometers per orbit for a today afternoon rendezvous, engineers on the ground pored over images from Friday night’s launch to determine if any debris hit the shuttle.

At least two pieces were spotted, but Mission Control told Endeavour’s seven astronauts that there were no obvious signs of damage.

Shuttle officials initially thought one piece may have been a narrow strip of thermal blanket that was yanked off the shuttle during launch, but images from the inspection showed no apparent damage, said flight director Mike Sarafin.

Analysts will continue studying images from the area at the tailof the shuttle, near the orbital-maneuvering engine pod on the left side, before reaching any conclusions.

“The good news is that it’s not an area of concern,” said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team.

Shuttle officials said they wouldn’t have enough information about the second debris piece until analysts were done examining the images.

As part of a routine, second-day inspection done on all shuttle missions since the Columbia disaster in 2003, Endeavour’s astronauts on Saturday surveyed the spacecraft’s heat shield for any damage using an extra-long inspection boom with a camera and sensors on its tip.

Reports indicate that the Mars rover Spirit is still working and is slowly recharging its batteries after a weekend dust storm that caused the craft’s power levels to drop to an all-time low.

The storm that hit Spirit came less than two weeks after similar weather in the far north sent NASA’s Phoenix Lander to an early grave.

Rover team members were awaiting a sign this week that the craft had survived the storm, which blanketed Spirit’s solar panels with dust.

According to a report in New Scientist, during the storm, the amount of energy available to the craft dropped to an unsustainable 89 watt-hours, the lowest level seen since Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, landed on Mars with about 10 times that amount in January 2004.

On November 11, the team commanded Spirit to shut down all unnecessary heaters on the craft, which was supposed to wake up once a day to survey the transparency of the atmosphere.

To conserve its energy, the rover was ordered to wait until November 13 to communicate with the Mars Odyssey spacecraft as it passed by overhead.

But no one was sure if the commands took, or if the craft had entered a ‘low-power fault mode.’

That would have shut down the rover’s heaters in order to funnel as much energy as possible to the batteries, according to Mars Exploration Rover project manager John Callas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Without the heaters, the rover would have been in a race to charge its batteries before they, and the rover’s electronics, were damaged by the extreme cold, he added.

“Either the rover was doing exactly what we told it to do, or it was going to be really bad news,” Callas told New Scientist.

But, Spirit beamed back telemetry on November 13 as scheduled, showing still-dusty skies but higher power levels.

The rover collected 161 watt-hours of energy on the Martian day ending November 13.

That energy level is not as high as it was before the storm, when the craft gathered some 240 watt-hours of energy per day. But, Spirit is now collecting enough solar power to replenish its batteries.

“We’re above the break-even level,” said rover project scientist Bruce Banerdt of JPL. “We’re not draining the batteries. We’re actually slowing charging them, as long as we don’t tell them to do very much,” he added.

Spirit is now parked on the sloping edge of a plateau called Home Plate in order to collect more sunlight.

Forget diamonds — one Swiss watchmaker is betting on watches made from moon dust, parts of the Apollo 11 space shuttle and bits of spacesuits to capture consumer cash as an economic slow down bites.

More than 600 watchmakers have the Swiss brand stamp, so Geneva-based Romain Jerome aims to use “inaccessible materials” to set its products apart from rivals such as Richemont’s Vacheron Constantin and independent watchmaker Patek Philippe.

“This gives value to the product and the brand. But the material must also be well known and it must be luxurious,” Romain Jerome Chief Executive Yvan Arpa said in an interview at the group’s headquarters.

In 2007, the four-year-old group sparked controversy with its “Titanic DNA” watches, made from steel and coal from the ocean liner that sank on its maiden voyage in 1912, with some critics saying the timepieces were in bad taste.

But demand for the Titanic watches has been strong and the privately owned group currently has an order backlog of 50 million Swiss francs ($42.48 million) for the watches, which range in price from around 7,000 francs to 500,000 francs.

“We had to launch the second collection faster than we wanted to because otherwise Romain Jerome would have become the “Titanic” brand,” said Arpa.

“We chose the space conquest,” he said. “Going to the moon was the biggest adventure of human kind.”

The group will make 1,969 watches — matching the year of Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s first journey to the moon — for the “Moon Dust-DNA” collection.

The watches, which start at $15,000 and can cost as much as $500,000, will be launched in Geneva on Wednesday and presented to customers at next year’s Baselworld, the largest annual fair for the watch and jewelry industry.

The watches’ dials, which feature tiny craters, will have dust in them from the moon rock that was taken from the first visit to the Earth’s satellite.

Steel from the Apollo 11 space shuttle will be used for the case and the strap will be made up of fibers from a spacesuit worn during the ISS mission, Arpa said.

Romain Jerome, which expects sales to double to 70 million francs in 2009, says it has four types of customers: the investor, the collector, the fashionista and fans of history and art.

“The collector is suffering a little bit,” Arpa said. “We are definitely seeing a slow down in demand for watches that cost more than 150,000 francs, especially in Russia and the Ukraine.”

But the collection has one major omission — watches for women.

“I don’t know how to make watches for ladies. I love ladies. But I don’t understand them,” Arpa said.

Tyrannosaurus Rex could sniff out distant prey even at night, yet another reason the flesh-ripping predator reigned supreme as king of the dinosaurs, according to a study published on Wednesday.

Earlier research had shown that the towering T-rex could see better than an eagle and would have been able to run down the fastest of humans.

The new study now unveils a previously unheralded weapon in the fearsome theropod’s arsenal: a dangerously keen sense of smell.

Any trace of the brains of dinosaurs, which roamed Earth for tens of millions of years up to the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago, has long since disappeared.

But a trio of scientists led by Darla Zelenitsky at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada found a novel way to gage the sniffing prowess of T-rex and a couple dozen other meat-eating dinosaurs and primitive birds.

By examining fossil skull bones, the researchers were able to measure the size of indentations made by olfactory bulbs, the part of the brain associated with the sense of smell.

“Living birds and mammals that rely heavily on smell to find meat have large olfactory bulbs,” Zelenitisky said in a statement.

The same animals also tend to prowl for prey at night, and cover vast areas, he added.

Of all the dinosaurs examined, the T-rex had the largest olfactory bulb relative to its overall size.

The study, published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, also found that primitive birds had high-performance odor detectors, challenging a long-held assumption about the evolution of winged vertebrates.

“It has been previously suggested that smell had become less important than eye sight in the ancestors of birds, but we have shown that this wasn’t so,” said Zelenitsky.

Archaeopteryx, for example, which took to the skies during the Jurassic Period some 150 million years ago, had a sense of smell comparable to meat-eating dinosaurs along with excellent eye sight, the study said.

Somewhere along the way birds began to lose their sense of smell, but the decline probably happened far later than previously thought, the study concludes.