As many as six major hurricanes could form in the Atlantic Basin during a busy 2011 summer storm season, forecasters announced today.

Twelve to 18 named tropical storms with winds of at least 39 miles (63 kilometers) an hour could form in the Atlantic Basin, which includes the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) head Jane Lubchenco.

Six to ten of those named storms could intensify into hurricanes—meaning they’d have winds of at least 74 miles (119 kilometers) an hour, Lubchenco said during a press briefing.

Tepco sticks to timetable for ‘cold shutdown’, despite revelations plant suffered greater damaged than previously thought

The firm at the centre of Japan’s worst nuclear accident insisted on Tuesday it would bring stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant under control by January 2012, despite evidence that the complex is more seriously damaged than previously thought.

Getting involved in astronomy doesn’t always require a telescope. In fact, there’s a whole class of space researchers who get more mileage out of microscopes: They’re called astrobiologists.

According to NASA, astrobiology is:

“the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. This multidisciplinary field encompasses the search for habitable environments in our Solar System and habitable planets outside our Solar System, the search for evidence of prebiotic chemistry and life on Mars and other bodies in our Solar System, laboratory and field research into the origins and early evolution of life on Earth, and studies of the potential for life to adapt to challenges on Earth and in space.”

That means many an astrobiologist gets to spend time visiting some of the most beautiful places on Earth, searching for extremely odd bacteria, ancient fossils, and other signs of life that may offer clues to what aliens could be like and how life might have evolved on other planets.

Week in Wildlife part 2

A bumblebee collects pollen from a dog rose in Germany. Bumblebees transport the pollen with the aid of hairs on their legs and use it to feed their young.

Hamaoka nuclear plant, which sits near a major fault line, to be made more resistant to earthquakes and tsunamis

The operator of Japan’s “most dangerous” nuclear plant has said it will comply with a government request to temporarily close the facility and carry out work to improve its ability to withstand earthquakes and tsunamis.

Tungurahua Volcano

Ecuador’s Tungurahua volcano (satellite map)—seen here from the town of Cotalo—shot truck-size boulders nearly a mile (1.6 kilometers) away Friday, prompting the evacuation of at least 300 people, according to the Associated Press.

Tungurahua—”throat of fire” in the indigenous Quechua language—sits high in the Andes mountains, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of Quito, Ecuador’s densely populated capital.

Eruptions are nothing new for the 16,500-foot (5,000-meter) volcano, which roared back to life in 1999 after nearly 80 years of dormancy.

From tiny coral polyps grew a marvel: Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

“Reefs for me are places for solitude and thought,” says Australian marine scientist Charlie Veron, here admiring a garden of stony corals on the northern Great Barrier Reef. “But I know there is fragility in their existence. I fear what lies ahead.”

From urban red-tailed hawks to mysterious humpback whales, via sunbathing turtles, here are the week’s finest images from the natural world

A butterfly sits on a flower in a garden in Dhulikhel near Kathmandu, Nepal

Supernova Origins

In 1572, people on Earth saw the bright light of a supernova. Now, by combining different intensities of x-ray data, scientists using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have created a new image of the debris left from that explosion, which hints at the origins of the cosmic blast.

Known as Tycho’s supernova remnant, the space puffball includes a cloud of expanding debris (yellow) enveloped by a high-energy blast wave (blue). The latest image also shows an arc of high-energy x-rays (bottom left) that seems to be coming from a faster moving ball of material.

Astronomers think that the supernova happened when a white dwarf star siphoned so much material from a companion star that it exploded. The blast blew material off the sunlike companion, and that debris is now emitting the arc of x-rays.

Conservation International is celebrating 20 years of its rapid assessment programme, which sends field scientists into remote habitats and has discovered more than 1,300 new species. To mark the anniversary, the organisation has named the top 20 ‘stars’ of the programme’s history, that scientists say are ‘some of the most biologically surprising, unique, or threatened discoveries’

Uroplatus phantasticus, the satanic leaf-tailed gecko, was observed on an RAP survey in the Mantadia-Zahamena corridor of Madagascar in 1998. This gecko is the smallest of 12 species of bizarre-looking leaf-tailed geckos that are nocturnal, arboreal and endemic to Madagascar. They are only found in primary, undisturbed forests, so their populations are very sensitive to habitat destruction. In 2004, WWF listed all of the uroplatus species on their ‘top 10 most wanted species list’ of animals threatened by illegal wildlife trade.