Today's Delhi:weather

Budget paints in green and brown

A minimum price for carbon and more cash for the Green Investment Bank (GIB) are among the Budget's tools to encourage a UK green energy expansion.

Last year, initial capitalisation was set at £1bn; this Budget will see that increased to £3bn. But GIB will only be able to borrow money from 2015.

The Treasury will delay tax increases on petrol and air travel, and will not yet tax private jets.

A "fair fuel stabiliser" will balance taxes between oil firms and drivers. Chancellor George Osborne's final measure - a surprise, and one heavily applauded from the government benches - was to announce a 1p cut in fuel duty from 6pm Wednesday. From now on, he said, the "fuel escalator" that hikes prices every year will cease to operate.

Instead, when oil prices are high, oil companies will pay extra revenue to the Treasury; if prices fall, motorists will pay more and the companies less.

"That's the fair fuel stabiliser, and the result for Britain's hard-pressed families," Mr Osborne told MPs. He said moves to reform air taxation had been hampered by the realisation that some of the proposed changes - such as taxing passengers rather than aeroplanes - would be illegal.

Soft floor

The announcement of a carbon floor price, meanwhile, sets the UK apart from other countries in the EU Emission Trading Scheme (ETS).

The market carbon price has been bumping around 15 euros (£13) per tonne for several years, which is generally accepted as being too low to drive significant innovation.

The UK will now support the price for the electricity generation sector. It will be set at £16 per tonne from 2013, rising to £30 per tonne by 2020.

The low market price has principally arisen because the recession caused a major fall in greenhouse gas emissions across the EU, creating an effective surplus of emission allowances.

Environmental groups warned the floor price could hand a windfall to existing nuclear operators.

But Vincent de Rivaz, CEO of energy multinational EDF Energy that is among companies planning to build new nuclear power stations in the UK, hailed it as a step forward.

"The carbon price floor is important for all low carbon technologies as it restores the carbon price to what was originally intended.

"It will support the economics of renewables and carbon capture and storage, and can reduce the need for specific measures to support those technologies.

"For nuclear, helping to restore the carbon price to what was originally intended is important to encourage investment in existing plants and in new build."

However, there are moves at European level to tighten caps on emissions, and this could mean that the carbon price rises beyond the minimum levels set in the Budget.

Surveying the Budget overall, executive director of Greenpeace UK John Sauven, said that it did not match up to the Coalition's declared ambition of being the UKs "greenest ever government".

"George Osborne and his officials have crafted a budget that sabotages that ambition," he said.

"There's almost nothing in this Budget to protect the environment and spark a clean-tech jobs boom.

"As things stand, [David Cameron will] leave office with Britain still hooked on oil and China and California surging ahead in the race to build the low carbon technologies that should be developed here at home."

Green Investment Bank must not be compromised, say MPs

The UK could lose out on hundreds of billions of pounds in green investment and fail to meet climate change targets if the government compromises on its Green Investment Bank, MPs have warned.

The Environmental Audit Committee said the bank must be free to raise additional capital from investors.

The government has pledged to establish the bank with £1bn of capital to fund clean energy and low-carbon projects.

Concerns are growing the coalition could water down its plans.

These also involve placing unspecified proceeds from the sale of government assets into the bank.

The MPs said there have been reports of disagreement within the government about whether the Green Bank should be a fully-fledged investment bank, with the ability to borrow money and raise capital, or simply a fund.

There are concerns that if the Office for National Statistics classifies the bank as public sector it could undermine the government's deficit reduction strategy, the committee said.

"Setting up a Green Investment Bank without the power to borrow would be a bit like trying to buy a house without first getting a mortgage offer," said Joan Walley, chair of the committee.

"George Osborne has got the deposit, but if he doesn't allow the bank to raise extra capital, the sums are going to fall far short of what is needed."

Significant

Business Secretary Vince Cable said he also wanted the Green Investment Bank to grow into a "significant institution", which would help to promote economic growth.

"We agree with the committee that the Green Investment Bank should be an enduring bank, which takes investment decisions at arm's length from ministers and be able to reinvest the proceeds from its investments."

He said his department was looking at european state aid rules and would announce its plans for the bank's role by the end of May.

Environment campaign group Greenpeace called on the government to act sooner and outline its decision in the Budget later this month.

"A clear announcement is needed at the Budget so investment can start to flow into Britain's clean energy industries, which would drive the sustainable growth and jobs that are so badly needed in our country," said executive director John Sauven

Cuckoo in egg pattern 'arms race'

Cuckoos' egg forgery skills are increasingly being put to the test, as host birds evolve better defences, say scientists.

These brood parasites, as they are called, are master deceivers - hiding their eggs in other species' nests.

To avoid detection, cuckoos have evolved to mimic colour and pattern of their favoured host birds' eggs.

But researchers have developed "birds eye view" models to find out how the hosts see the intruders' copycat eggs.

If host birds do not reject cuckoo eggs, the newly hatched cuckoo chick ejects other eggs from the nest by hoisting them onto its back and dumping them over the edge.

This study revealed details about the "evolutionary arms race" in which cuckoos are embroiled; as they evolve better mimicry, their hosts evolve the skills to spot these damaging intruders.

Mary Cassie Stoddard and colleagues from the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, UK, published their findings in the journal Evolution.

Previous egg pattern research has focused on assessing differences between colour and markings based on human visual inspection."But birds have better colour vision than humans do," Ms Stoddard told BBC News.

"Birds have four [colour-sensitive cells] known as cones in their retinas, while humans only have three."

"This additional cone in birds is sensitive to ultraviolet wavelengths [of light]. As a result, birds can see a wider range of colours than humans can.",

The team used a technique called spectroscopy to measure the amount of light reflected from the different coloured egg shells.

They modelled these colour values to work out how the egg patterns appeared from a bird's perspective

Avian invaders

Cuckoos have target hosts. For example, a cuckoo that lays eggs in a redstart nest lays a blue egg. To the human eye, this is identical to the redstart egg.

However, the cuckoo that targets a dunnock nest lays a white egg with brown speckling, visibly different from the dunnock's immaculately blue egg. Yet despite this obvious colour mismatch, dunnocks readily accept the foreign eggs, whereas redstarts are much more likely to eject the cuckoo's egg.

To investigate this optical conundrum, the team used their technique to study cuckoo and host bird eggs from 248 invaded nests held in the Natural History Museum in Tring, Hertfordshire.

They found that redstarts and their invading cuckoos' eggs had a high degree of "colour overlap", so the cuckoo egg was a good copy.

The scientists think the cuckoos have been forced to evolve this high degree of mimicry because redstarts are so good at identifying these alien eggs.

Even seen with this birds eye view, the cuckoos that targeted dunnocks' nests showed very little colour overlap, so the forgeries were poor replicas.

The fact that the dunnock usually accepted these forgeries, suggested that it lacked the defensive skills the redstart had evolved.

Exactly why many hosts accept such obviously alien eggs continues to baffle biologists.

Researchers think that naive hosts, like the dunnock, are still at early stages of the evolutionary arms race and; "they accept alien eggs, because they have not yet evolved defences against parasitism," explains Ms Stoddard.

"Another' hypothesis is that tolerating cuckoo eggs may be the most stable strategy for some hosts."

So, for birds that do not often suffer cuckoo invasions, the overall "cost" of mistakenly

ejecting their own eggs might be higher than the cost of tolerating the occasional parasite.

Salmon run helps shape ecosystems

Pacific salmon plays an important role in providing nutrients to part of the world's largest old-growth temperate rainforest, a study has shown.

The annual migration sees salmon return to western Canada to spawn, but many are caught by bears and wolves, which carry carcasses away from the streams.

This allows nutrient-rich plants to thrive in these areas.

Writing in Science, the team said a shift in salmon numbers would have "far-reaching impacts" on biodiversity.

"Along the Pacific coast, all salmon die after spawning so carcasses can line rivers, but many of them are killed before by bears and wolves," explained co-author John Reynolds, professor of ecology at Simon Fraser University (SFU), Canada.

"This adds up to a huge amount of nutrients being dumped into the stream or on to the banks," he added.

"The question is where do all these nutrients, which the fish consumed while they were growing at sea, actually end up?"

Bear necessities

Professor Reynolds and lead author Dr Morgan Hocking, also from SFU, examined 50 river systems in the Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia.

They found a distinct pattern in where the nutrients were found, and how it affected the plant diversity.

"Most of the carcasses that are left behind by the bears and wolves, who only normally only eat a small part of the salmon, are dropped within the first five to 15 metres of the stream," Professor Reynolds told BBC News.

"Bears, for example, have feeding platforms; once they have fished out a salmon, they will take it up on to a bank, eat it and then go and get another one.

"So we predicted before we started that we would see the biggest impact, if any, closer to the stream. That's exactly what we found by doing these different surveys."

The team found that nearer the stream, the plant community was dominated by species that thrived on large amounts of nitrogen.

However, this was at the expense of diversity - which suggested that nutrient-rich plants such as salmonberry and elderberry were able to out-compete other species.

"As you move away from the stream, you tend to switch to a community of species which are less dependent on this extra nitrogen," Professor Reynolds observed.

The researchers found that in areas that had streams containing fewer salmon, the bordering plant life consisted of species with lower nutrient contents, such as blueberry and huckleberry.

In their paper, the two researchers said that predicting how salmon affected terrestrial ecosystems would play a key role in shaping effective conservation and habitat management techniques.

UK space given boost from Budget

The Chancellor George Osborne has promised regulatory change and some extra money to help boost the competitiveness of the UK space sector, which is growing at about 10% a year.

£10m will go to fund new technologies used in spacecraft systems.

Mr Osborne has also signalled changes to the Outer Space Act.

These reforms are designed to lower the sector's insurance costs and to make it easier for future space tourism companies to operate out of the UK.

The government says it has recognised the success the British space sector has achieved in recent years and wants to offer it further support to maintain and grow its global market position.

Annual turnover is worth some £7.5bn, and employment is rising at about 15% a year.

The best performing areas are in so-called downstream activities - services such as satellite broadcasting and telecommunications.

But even the upstream sector - such as satellite manufacturing - has been performing well, averaging annual growth of 3% over the period 2006/07 to 2008/09.

The £10m on offer is part of a £100m injection of capital investment into science. The space money will be matched by industry. It will start a National Space Technology Programme, supporting the development of new components and systems that companies can then sell around the world.

The 1986 Outer Space Act is the primary piece of legislation in Britain governing all matters to do with space activity. Commentators have long called for it to be updated, especially in relation to the liabilities that cover space operations - if there was an accident involving a British spacecraft, for example.

At the moment, liabilities are essentially unlimited and this makes insurance premiums much more expensive for UK companies than their international competitors.

Mr Osborne has instructed the UK Space Agency to assess how this situation can be changed.

He also wants the licensing clarified for emerging space tourism companies, such as Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic venture. They will use vehicles that are part-aeroplane and part-rocket, and it is felt the Act needs to be adjusted to cover their unique status. Until that reform is made, commentators say, space tourism companies may be reluctant to base themselves in Britain.

'Paper filings' awaazindia.tv

When the coalition government came to office in May last year it indicated that it would endeavour to implement the findings of industry's own Space Innovation and Growth Strategy (SIGS). This report identified key market opportunities - from internet provision via satellite to space tourism.

It claimed that if its recommendations were followed, the domestic space industry could have a 10% share of the global market within a few decades.

Industry figures saluted the Budget announcements, including the London-based satellite telecommunication giant Inmarsat.

"Inmarsat welcomes the government's recognition of space as a growth sector and its contribution to the UK economy," a company spokesman told BBC News.

And Ian Godden, the chairman of ADS, an umbrella group for the UK aerospace, defence and security sectors, added: "The space sector is an unsung success story, supporting 70,000 jobs in the UK and generating £7.5 billion per year to the economy. Industry and government have in place a shared plan to grow this to £40bn and this additional investment will assist in achieving that aim."

In its growth document released to coincide with the Budget, the government said it would also make efforts to try to secure more orbital slots for UK companies to position their satellites. This move was applauded by Colin Paynter of spacecraft manufacturer and services company Astrium UK.

He said: "There has been much discussion in the space community that 'paper filings' by organisations who reserve orbital slots with little intention of ever launching a satellite have impeded the development of even more innovative space services. A move to resolve this situation will make it easier for new entrants to the satellite services marketplace - which could greatly benefit the UK."

The £90m of non-space-related capital investment in science will be split between the national research campuses at Daresbury, Norwich and Cambridge (£80m) and the Isis neutron source at Harwell (£10m). The latter's money will be used to develop three new instruments. Isis is a giant machine that can probe the structure of matter. Scientists exploit its insights to advance a host of new technologies from drug design to improved mobile phones.

Tokyo water 'unfit for babies' due to high radiation

Tokyo's tap water is unfit for babies to drink after radiation from Japan's quake-hit nuclear plant affected the capital's water supply, officials said.

Radioactive iodine levels in some areas were twice the recommended safe level.

People in Fukushima prefecture, where the nuclear plant is located, have been told not to eat certain vegetables because of contamination worries.

Workers have been temporarily evacuated from the plant after black smoke was seen rising from reactor No 3.

Engineers have been trying to cool the reactors and spent fuel rods to avoid a major release of radiation, after power to the cooling systems was knocked out by the earthquake and tsunami.

The authorities are warning people living in Tokyo not to allow babies less than a year old to drink water from the tap.

The level of radiation picked up in tests carried out on Tuesday was more than twice the level that is safe for infants to drink.

But officials have stressed that children would have to drink a lot of it before it harmed them. There is no immediate health risk to others.

The government has also ordered people living in Fukushima not to eat 11 types of green leafy vegetable grown locally that have been contaminated by radiation.

Local producers have been ordered not to send the goods to market, and in the neighbouring prefecture of Ibaraki they have been told to halt shipments of milk and parsley with immediate effect.

The Japanese Cabinet Secretary, Yukio Edano, said: "Even if these foods are temporarily eaten, there is no health hazard.

"But unfortunately, as the situation is expected to last for the long term, we are asking that shipments stop at an early stage, and it is desirable to avoid intake of the foods as much as possible."

He told a news conference that importers of Japanese foods should take a "logical stance".

Hong Kong has banned a variety of food imports.

The Food and Drug Administration in the US said that all milk and milk products and fresh fruits and vegetables from four Japanese prefectures - Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi and Gunma - would be stopped from entering the United States.

Countries including China, Taiwan and South Korea have already been carrying out rigorous checks of Japanese food imports.

Setbacks

The confirmed death toll from the earthquake and tsunami has risen to 9,408, and more than 14,700 people are listed as missing.

An estimated half a million people have been made homeless and some 300,000 people remain in evacuation centres or temporary housing.

Japan has said it will cost as much as 25 trillion yen ($309bn; £189bn) to rebuild the country after the disaster.

Meanwhile, work has been halted at the Fukushima Daiichi plant after black smoke was seen rising from reactor 3.

Radiation levels were reported to be unusually high before the smoke was spotted; they later fell but remain higher than in recent days.

Engineers were earlier forced to halt testing of the electrical system at reactor 2 after radiation levels spiked. There is also concern about the rising temperature at reactor 1.

Power cables have been connected to all six reactors, and lighting has been restored at reactor 3.

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), had hoped to try to power up water pumps to reactor 3 on Wednesday but it is unclear whether that will now happen.

Tepco has said restoring power to all the reactor units could take weeks or even months. Engineers' efforts have been frequently hampered by smoke and spikes in radiation.

On Tuesday, an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) senior official, James Lyons, said he could not confirm that the damaged reactors were "totally intact" or if they were cracked and leaking radiation.

"We continue to see radiation coming from the site... and the question is where exactly is that coming from," Mr Lyons told a news conference.