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.

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

Canada’s pristine western coastline could be endangered by a plan to build a new oil pipeline from Alberta to the coast in order to export oil overseas, say environmental activists and native people who rely on these waters.

Oil company Enbridge plans to link the oil sands of Athabasca, in central Alberta, to the port town of Kitimat in British Columbia, with a new pipeline that would carry 525,000 barrels of oil to the coast per day.

There’s just one problem: the pipeline would pass through watersheds important to Canada’s commercial fishing industry and brush past Coastal First Nations lands and the Great Bear Rainforest, a protected coastal area filled with red cedars, spruce, and the elusive all-white “spirit bear.”

While the Northern Gateway pipeline itself wouldn’t pass through the 4.4-million-acre (1.8-million-hectare) Great Bear Rainforest, activists say it’s a little too close for comfort. The International League of Conservation Photographers recently performed a Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition (RAVE) in the area, sending a dozen photographers to the rain forest to document the ecosystem they believe is at risk. A pipeline means more tankers, and because the Kitimat terminal is separated from the open ocean by more than one hundred miles of channels and fjords, the photographers argue that a tanker spill would imperil the local environment. “These are highly treacherous waters, with tremendous currents,” said Cristina Mittermeier, ILCP president.

The danger is not just to plants and wildlife: The lifestyle of the First Nations people living in and around the rain forest, such as these Gitga’at fishermen gathering crab in a photo from the Great Bear RAVE, would be at risk. “One major oil spill on the coast of British Columbia would wipe us out,” Coastal First Nations director Gerald Amos said in a statement.

In recent decades documented biological changes in the far Northern Hemisphere have been attributed to global warming, changes from species extinctions to shifting geographic ranges. Such changes were expected because warming has been fastest in the northern temperate zone and the Arctic.

But new research published in the Oct. 7 edition of Nature adds to growing evidence that, even though the temperature increase has been smaller in the tropics, the impact of warming on life could be much greater there than in colder climates.

The study focused on ectothermic, or cold-blooded, organisms (those whose body temperature approximates the temperature of their surroundings). Researchers used nearly 500 million temperature readings from more than 3,000 stations around the world to chart temperature increases from 1961 through 2009, then examined the effect of those increases on metabolism.

“The expectation was that physiological changes would also be greatest in the north temperate-Arctic region, but when we ran the numbers that expectation was flipped on its head,” said lead author Michael Dillon, an assistant professor of zoology and physiology at the University of Wyoming.

Freshwater is flowing into Earth’s oceans in greater amounts every year, a team of researchers has found, thanks to more frequent and extreme storms linked to global warming. All told, 18 percent more water fed into the world’s oceans from rivers and melting polar ice sheets in 2006 than in 1994, with an average annual rise of 1.5 percent.

“That might not sound like much — 1.5 percent a year — but after a few decades, it’s huge,” said Jay Famiglietti, UC Irvine Earth system science professor and principal investigator on the study, which will be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He noted that while freshwater is essential to humans and ecosystems, the rain is falling in all the wrong places, for all the wrong reasons.

“In general, more water is good,” Famiglietti said. “But here’s the problem: Not everybody is getting more rainfall, and those who are may not need it. What we’re seeing is exactly what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted — that precipitation is increasing in the tropics and the Arctic Circle with heavier, more punishing storms. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people live in semiarid regions, and those are drying up.”