The gas leak from the Elgin platform in the North Sea has been stopped, according to oil firm Total.

The company's platform was evacuated when the gas began leaking on Sunday 25 March.

An attempt to stop the leak by pumping heavy mud into the well got under way on Tuesday.

Total said the operation had stopped the well leak within 12 hours and described the development as a "major turning point".

Yves-Louis Darricarrère, Total's president of exploration and production, said: "Our absolute priority was to stop the gas leak safely and as quickly as possible.

"We shall now fully complete the ongoing task and take into account the lessons learnt from this incident."

Scottish Secretary Michael Moore, said: "This is welcome news from the Elgin platform and good progress.

"The UK government has been in touch with the company throughout this incident, and DECC has closely monitored progress throughout.

"I am certain that key lessons will be learned from this leak which can be applied across the sector."

Scottish Environment Secretary Richard Lochhead, added: "This is clearly good news from Total that the initial efforts to stop the Elgin gas leak appear to have been successful.

"Further monitoring will be needed to ensure that this is a lasting solution, but this is a welcome step in the right direction."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In a major new climate finding, researchers have calculated that dinosaur flatulence could have put enough methane into the atmosphere to warm the planet during the hot, wet Mesozoic era.

Like gigantic, long-necked, prehistoric cows, sauropod dinosaurs roamed widely around the Earth 150 million years ago, scientists reported in the journal Current Biology on Monday.

And just like big cows, their plant digestion was aided by methane-producing microbes.

“A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate,” researcher Dave Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University said in a statement.

“Indeed, our calculations suggest that these dinosaurs could have produced more methane than all modern sources – both natural and man-made – put together,” Wilkinson said.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with as much as 25 times the climate-warming potential as carbon dioxide.

This gas is enough of a factor in modern global warming that scientists have worked to figure out how much methane is emitted by cows, sheep and other plant-eating animals.

The inquiry raised questions about whether the same thing could have happened in the distant past.

Wilkinson and co-author Graeme Ruxton of the University of St. Andrews worked with methane expert Euan Nisbet at the University of London to make an educated guess about the degree to which gaseous emissions from sauropods could have warmed the atmosphere.

Calculating methane emissions from modern animals depends only on the total mass of the animals in question. A mid-sized sauropod probably weighed about 44,000 pounds, and there were a few dozen of them per square mile (kilometer), the researchers found.

They reckoned that global methane emissions from sauropods were about 520 million tons per year, comparable to all modern methane emissions. Unlike emissions of carbon dioxide, which come from natural sources but also from the burning of fossil fuels, methane emissions have decreased substantially since the start of the Industrial Revolution some 150 years ago.

Before the fossil-fuel intensive Industrial Revolution took off, methane emissions were roughly 200 million tons annually; modern ruminants, including cows, goats, giraffes and other animals, emit between 50 million and 100 million tons of methane a year.

(Reporting By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent; Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and Todd Eastham)

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Chinese scientists have cloned a genetically modified sheep containing a “good” type of fat found naturally in nuts, seeds, fish and leafy greens that helps reduce the risk of heart attacks and cardiovascular disease.

“Peng Peng”, which has a roundworm fat gene, weighed in at 5.74 kg when it was born on March 26 in a laboratory in China’s far western region of Xinjiang.

“It’s growing very well and is very healthy like a normal sheep,” lead scientist Du Yutao at the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) in Shenzhen in southern China told Reuters.

Du and colleagues inserted the gene that is linked to the production of polyunsaturated fatty acids into a donor cell taken from the ear of a Chinese Merino sheep.

The cell was then inserted into an unfertilized egg and implanted into the womb of a surrogate sheep.

“The gene was originally from the C. elegans (roundworm) which has been shown (in previous studies) to increase unsaturated fatty acids which is very good for human health,” Du said.

China, which has to feed 22 percent of the world’s population but has only 7 percent of the world’s arable land, has devoted plenty of resources in recent years to increasing domestic production of grains, meat and other food products.

But there are concerns about the safety of genetically modified foods and it will be some years before meat from such transgenic animals finds its way into Chinese food markets.

“The Chinese government encourages transgenic projects but we need to have better methods and results to prove that transgenic plants and animals are harmless and safe for consumption, that is crucial,” Du said.

Apart from BGI, other collaborators in the project were the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Shihezi University in Xinjiang.

The United States is a world leader in producing GM crops. Its Food and Drug Administration has already approved the sale of food from clones and their offspring, saying the products were indistinguishable from those of non-cloned animals.

U.S. biotech firm AquaBounty’s patented genetically modified Atlantic salmon are widely billed as growing at double the speed and could be approved by U.S. regulators as early as this summer.

(Editing by Paul Tait)

Researchers have demonstrated a way of distinguishing between carbon dioxide in the air coming from fossil fuel burning and that from natural sources.

The trick could complement existing carbon accounting methods used to monitor how much CO2 countries and regions are producing, principal among them the self-reporting of fossil fuel usage.

"While the accounting-based approach is probably accurate at global scales, the uncertainties rise for smaller-scale regions," said the Earth System Research Laboratory's John Miller, lead author of the study.

"And as CO2 emissions targets become more widespread, there may be a greater temptation to under-report. But we'll be able to see through that."

However, the method may not stretch down to a level of geographic detail that is increasingly important for single CO2 sources such as power plants.

"Other types of physical measurement (of CO2 levels) are being driven by emissions trading, and I'm not sure how far this would be able to extend to application at the individual site and installation level," said Jane Burston, head of the Centre for Carbon Measurement at the UK's National Physical Laboratory.

The centre's head of emissions Rod Robinson explained that much work needs to be done to validate the assumptions of the method and ensure it gives similar quality results as existing physical and accounting measurements.

Nevertheless, Ms Burston said the method would be a valuable tool in the quest to understand fully how carbon is released and distributed.

"For things like CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, the best way of going about it is just getting as many measurements as you can from the ground, from the atmosphere, and from satellites," she told BBC News.

"The more measurements we have from different sources, the more accurate we can make them all."

Carbon emissions from goods imported and consumed in the UK are rising faster than the domestic fall in greenhouse gases, MPs say.

The cut in greenhouse gases since 1990 was the result of switching from coal to gas for electricity generation and the fact that what is consumed is more often manufactured in countries such as China – rather than because of policies to tackle climate change, the committee said in a report on Consumption-Based Emissions Reporting.

Energy and Climate Change Committee chairman Tim Yeo said: "Successive governments have claimed to be cutting climate change emissions, but in fact a lot of pollution has simply been outsourced.

"We get through more consumer goods than ever before in the UK and this is pushing up emissions in manufacturing countries like China."

The committee urged the government to consider consumption-based emissions in designing climate change policies and working out data on UK's greenhouse gas emissions.

Ministers should take a more 'honest approach' to Britain's overall impact on the climate in international negotiations on carbon emissions, Mr Yeo said.

The MPs asked the government to take on board its independent climate advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, to work out how the UK could incorporate emissions from imported goods in its policies.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said: "We account for our emissions according to international rules that are followed by all countries that are signed up to the Kyoto Protocol, and that are the basis for international negotiations on climate change."

The DECC believes it is difficult to calculate and verify figures relating to consumption-based emissions, and it would be hard to negotiate a global reduction treaty on this basis.

"Ultimately, the best way to reduce the UK's consumption emissions is to persuade all countries to manage down their territorial emissions through a global deal on climate change," he added.

Environmental charity WWF-UK's head of climate change Keith Allott said:" However you measure the UK's emissions, it's clear that a lot more needs to be done to reduce them through improving energy efficiency and decarbonising the power sector through renewables, and also by reducing and managing our consumption."

Some glaciers on Asia's Karakoram mountains are defying the global trend and getting thicker, say researchers.

The French scientists, from the National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Grenoble, compared two models of land surface elevation derived from satellite observations, for 1999 and 2008, and report their findings in the Nature Geoscience journal.

The method has been used before in other mountain ranges, but it is not as straightforward as it might sound.

"It's not been used more because these elevation models are quite difficult to acquire – you need clear sky conditions and reduced snow cover," said lead researcher Julie Gardelle.

Other factors that can change the height of the ice surface, other than changes to the ice itself, also need to be accounted for.

Having done all these calculations, the team found that between 1999 and 2008 the mass of the glaciers in this 5,615 sq km (2,168 sq miles) region of the Karakoram increased marginally, although there were wide variations between individual glaciers.

Why this should be is not clear, though it is well known from studies in other parts of the world that climate change can cause extra precipitation into cold regions which, if they are cold enough, gets added to the existing mass of ice.

"We don't really know the reason," Ms Gardelle told BBC News.

"Right now we believe that it could be due to a very specific regional climate over Karakoram because there have been meteorological measurements showing increased winter precipitation; but that's just a guess at this stage."

Whatever the region, it is clear that the trend contrasts with other parts of the wider Himalayas-Hindu Kush region, home to an estimated 210 million people and where glaciers act as fresh water stores for about 1.3 billion living in river basins below.

Late last year, the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (Icimod) released data showing that across 10 regularly studied glaciers, the rate of ice loss had doubled since the 1980s.

However, it also made clear just how sparse data is from the region, finding only these 10 intensively studied glaciers among a total of more than 54,000.

Measurements by the GRACE satellite mission, which detects minuscule variations in the Earth's gravitational pull, have also shown a net loss of mass across the whole region.

Graham Cogley, the scientist from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who first publicly questioned the IPCC's 2035 figure, comments in Nature that reconciling the different mass loss figures found by different methods of study "will keep glaciologists busy for some time".

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Scientists are to try to turn a honey bee parasite's natural defences against itself in a bid to beat the pest.

As active genes also use RNA, it should be possible to subvert this defence mechanism by making it think one of the genes keeping the mite living is actually an invader.

Varroa mites' genomes are being sequenced to discover which genes are being actively expressed and are potential targets.

Dr Bowman hoped to have identified likely genes by the autumn and to start small-scale trials in 2013.

Beekeepers are being asked to send in live varroa mites so the researchers have a stock of bugs on which to test candidate treatments.

Dr Bowman said it was unlikely that the research would produce a treatment that would completely rid hives of the pest.

"I do not think we are expecting any silver bullets and it's probably the wrong approach to look for them these days," he said. "It'll be another piece in the arsenal and at the moment it's a very small arsenal."

Max Watkins, technical director of Vita Europe, which is providing some of the research money, said finding treatments that kill mites but leave bees and the environment unharmed was very difficult.

"The challenge is heightened because the relatively short life cycle of the varroa mite means that resistance to a single treatment can often develop quite quickly," he said.

Honey bees, solitary bees and bumble bees play a hugely important role in pollinating crops, said Friends of the Earth as it kicked off its Bee Cause campaign.

The pressure group estimates that it would cost the UK about £1.8bn a year to hand-pollinate crops if all bees died out.

It has called on David Cameron to back a national bee action plan that would limit urban expansion and pesticide use.

Wild rabbits are causing erosion and eating fragile upland plants in one of Scotland's most striking landscapes, according to a new report.

Scientists from the Macaulay Institute, now part of the James Hutton Institute, carried out long-term monitoring to help assess the impact of grazing sheep and rabbits.

In their report for Scottish Natural Heritage, they suggested fewer sheep would reduce erosion and loss of plant life.

The scientists said a decline in hill sheep farming may lead to this situation without the need of intervention.

However, they said rabbits would need to be controlled because of their "significant" contribution to erosion.

The report said numbers of the animals, thought to have been introduced to Skye in the 1800s, were "high" around the base of the Storr.

The scientists said: "It is recognised that controlling rabbit numbers could be an expensive exercise which would require an ongoing commitment of manpower and finance.

"The possible benefits, in relation to the costs of rabbit control on a scale that would achieve noticeable benefits therefore require greater consideration before further action is taken."

Gulls are increasingly at home on Wales' school playing fields according to the latest Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) figures.

The list includes the herring gull which is on a conservation 'red list' due to a decline of more than 50% in its numbers over 25 years.

Over 110,000 birds were counted in this year's Big Schools' Birdwatch.

The top bird remains the blackbird which was seen at 85% of the 100 schools involved in the count.

Herring gulls were still only seen in just over 10% of schools but numbers spotted have risen over the last five years by more than 46%.

The gulls forage for food by stamping their feet on the ground to bring invertebrates to the surface.

"The Big Schools' Birdwatch is a brilliant way of getting young people interested in nature and excited about what they can see through the classroom window," said Jon Gruffydd, RSPB Cymru's lifelong learning manager.

"It's all too easy for them to miss those opportunities to get outside and understand the world around them. Big School's Birdwatch gives children the chance to step up for nature."

Scotland's renewable energy targets must not be "blown off course" by US tycoon Donald Trump's protests, environmental group WWF Scotland has said.

Mr Trump is against proposals for 11 turbines off the Aberdeenshire coast, near his golf resort.

He has decided to bankroll an anti-wind farm campaign "to save Scotland".

WWF Scotland director Dr Richard Dixon said Mr Trump's efforts should be resisted.

Dr Dixon said Scotland's energy aims are needed and achievable.

He said: "Scotland's renewable energy targets are both deliverable and necessary if we are to reduce climate emissions, create jobs and protect householders from rising energy prices caused by the dwindling availability of fossil fuels.

"Plans by Donald Trump to spend millions holding Scotland back from becoming a cleaner, greener, job creating nation are wrong and should be strongly resisted by all in the Scottish Parliament."

Mr Trump may spend more than £10m campaigning against offshore wind turbines, his son said on Tuesday.

Mr Trump Snr has previously called the turbines "ugly monstrosities" and "horrendous machines".

The wind farm which is planned close to Mr Trump's golf resort is a £150m venture by Vattenfall, Technip and Aberdeen Renewable Energy Group.

A decision on the offshore application is expected later this year.