Nearly 18 million British people will experience more water shortages and 160,000 will be affected by coastal flooding by the end of the century if temperatures are left unchecked, according to new Met Office analysis.

But new projections of likely rainfall, soil moisture and evaporation suggest that farmers from Cornwall to the north of Scotland should benefit from warmer temperatures, longer growing seasons and fewer frosts that can be expected with climate change, says the report.

The data, which was launched at the UN climate talks in Durban, shows all 24 countries included in the report have warmed since the 1960s and the frequency of extremely warm temperatures has increased, while very cold temperatures have become less frequent. [guardian]

Scientists have found the biggest black holes known to exist - each one 10 billion times the size of our sun.

A team led by an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley discovered the two gigantic black holes in clusters of galaxies 300 million light years away. That's relatively close on the galactic scale.

The previous black hole record-holder is as large as 6 billion suns. A black hole is formed by the collapse of a super-size star. It's a region where nothing, not even light, can escape.

Would you choose to take someone's life in order to prevent the deaths of several other people? A new study using 3D simulations found that nine out of 10 people would answer "yes."

In the experiment, subjects donned a head-mounted device that placed them in a 3D setting with realistic digital characters. The participants also wore sensors attached to their fingertips to monitor their emotional arousal. In the virtual world, participants were standing near a railroad switch where two sets of tracks veered off from each other. As a coal-filled boxcar approached, the subjects could choose to do nothing and allow the boxcar to kill five hikers, or pull a joystick "switch" to reroute the boxcar to a different track, where it would kill one hiker.

Of the 147 participants, 14 allowed the boxcar to kill the five hikers; eleven of these subjects did not pull the rerouting switch at all, while three did so but then changed their minds and returned it to its original position. About 90 percent, or 133 participants, chose to pull the switch that diverted the boxcar to kill just one hiker. [ls]

The threat of cyberattacks on the U.S. power grid should be dealt with by a single federal agency, not the welter of groups now charged with the electric system's security, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported on Monday.

While acknowledging there is no absolute insurance against such attacks, the MIT researchers said a single U.S. agency would be better able to address the problem than the disparate federal, state and local entities responsible for various aspects of safeguarding the power grid.

In a report on the future of the U.S. electric grid, through 2030, the team recommended that the federal agency should work with industry and have the appropriate regulatory authority to enhance cybersecurity preparedness, response and recovery.

• Living Earth Simulator could predict the spread of disease and impending financial meltdowns
• Creator describes it as 'nervous system for entire planet'
• EU Commission to pledge £900m to help get it built

A £900million scheme to produce a computer system which could predict the next financial crisis has been backed by leading scientists.

The Living Earth Simulator Project (LES) aims to 'simulate everything' on the planet, using anything from tweets to government statistics to map out social trends and predict the next economic crisis. Using vasts reams of data fed into the internet, trends can be spotted by analysing information with 'the world's most powerful computers'. [dm]

Stories abound of animals behaving oddly in the moments before an earthquake: dogs bark incessantly, birds gather in tight flocks, toads flee their ponds. What could they be sensing that humans don't?

That question led a group of University of Virginia physicists to start grinding rocks and measuring gases in a lab experiment designed to mimic an earthquake and see what might be setting the animals off. What they found was dramatic: The rocks they crushed produced ozone gas at levels up to 100 times higher than a smoggy Los Angeles day.

"Even the smallest rock fracture produced ozone," team member Catherine Dukes told OurAmazingPlanet. "The question is, can we detect it in the environment?"

If that answer is "yes," the ozone signal Dukes and her colleagues saw might someday be used to warn of impending quakes.

Hundreds of metres under one of Iceland's largest glaciers there are signs of a looming volcanic eruption that could be one of the most powerful the country has seen in almost a century.

Mighty Katla, with its 10km (6.2 mile) crater, has the potential to cause catastrophic flooding as it melts the frozen surface of its caldera and sends billions of gallons of water surging through Iceland's east coast and into the Atlantic Ocean.

"There has been a great deal of seismic activity," says Ford Cochran, the National Geographic's expert on Iceland. There were more than 500 tremors in and around the caldera of Katla just in October, which suggests the motion of magma... "And that certainly suggests an eruption may be imminent."

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Thursday it will take days to clean up after what he called a “once in a generation” wind event, and he urged residents to stay indoors and brace for another night of strong winds.

“I’m asking for your patience,” Villaraigosa said.

He urged residents to stay in their homes if possible and to drive cautiously if driving is unavoidable.

An otherwise nondescript binary star system in the Whirlpool Galaxy has brought astronomers tantalizingly close to their goal of observing a star just before it goes supernova.

The study, submitted in a paper to the Astrophysical Journal, provides the latest result from an Ohio State University galaxy survey underway with the Large Binocular Telescope, located in Arizona.

In the first survey of its kind, the researchers have been scanning 25 nearby galaxies for stars that brighten and dim in unusual ways, in order to catch a few that are about to meet their end. In the three years since the study began, this particular unnamed binary system in the Whirlpool Galaxy was the first among the stars they've cataloged to produce a supernova. [sd]

• Conspiracy theorists predict 'end of the world'
  
• Expert says it's a misreading - it's a symbolic date
• Refers to a new period in the religious calendar

An inscription found in the Mayan temple of Tortuguero make a prediction of an apocalyptic even in 2012 - with some conspiracy theorists predicting the world being swallowed by a black hole, the sun, or just clipped by a passing asteroid.

The Mayan inscriptions refer to Bolon Yokte 'descending from the sky' in 2012 - a god associated with war and the underworld. But a German expert, Sven Gronemeyer, says that the whole thing could just be a misreading. [dm]

Animals may sense chemical changes in groundwater that occur when an earthquake is about to strike. This, scientists say, could be the cause of bizarre earthquake-associated animal behavior.

Researchers began to investigate these chemical effects after seeing a colony of toads abandon its pond in L'Aquila, Italy, in 2009 - days before a quake.

They suggest that animal behaviour could be incorporated into earthquake forecasting.

The team's findings are published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. In this paper, they describe a mechanism whereby stressed rocks in the Earth's crust release charged particles that react with the groundwater. [bbc]

RADIATION STORM AND CME ALERT: A solar radiation storm is in progress around Earth. At the moment, the storm is classified as minor, which means it has little effect on our planet other than to disturb HF radio transmissions at high latitudes. Bigger effects, however, may be in the offing. The same explosion on Nov. 26th that caused the radiation storm also hurled a CME into space at about 930 km/s (2 million mph). According to analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab, the CME will reach Earth on Nov. 28th at 17:21 UT (+/- 7 hours). Click to view an animated forecast track:

The impact of the cloud could trigger a geomagnetic storm. Indeed, NOAA forecasters estimate a 58% chance of severe storming around the poles when the CME arrives. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras after nightfall on Monday.

• Scientist responsible is bracing himself for a media storm
• Just five tweaks to H5N1 makes it more contagious
• Contagious version of bird flu could cause pandemic
• Scientists divided over whether findings can be released

A group of scientists is pushing to publish research about how they created a man-made flu virus that could potentially wipe out civilization.

The deadly virus is a genetically tweaked version of the H5N1 bird flu strain, but is far more infectious and could pass easily between millions of people at a time.

The research has caused a storm of controversy and divided scientists, with some saying it should never have been carried out.

Enigmatic cosmic rays that strike Earth with giant amounts of energy might come from hot gaseous "superbubbles" in space, a new study reveals.

Cosmic rays have perplexed scientists for a century. These electrically charged particles bombard Earth with energies dwarfing anything we are capable of, but their origins remain a mystery.

Since cosmic rays are electrically charged, they can get pushed and pulled around by interstellar magnetic fields in the gas between the stars as they zip through space, obscuring where they come from.

One suspected fountain of cosmic rays are star-forming regions. The massive stars within these stellar nurseries can spew out massive amounts of energy and explode as supernovas.

Most experts had cited only one surviving reference to the date in Mayan glyphs, a stone tablet from the Tortuguero site in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco.

But the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a statement that there is in fact another apparent reference to the date at the nearby Comalcalco ruin. The inscription is on the carved or molded face of a brick. Comalcalco is unusual among Mayan temples in that it was constructed of bricks.

"There is little chance that we will be able to achieve this mission," the deputy head of Roscosmos, Vitaly Davydov, was quoted as saying by the Itar-Tass news agency. "We need to be realists. Since we could not establish contact for so long, the chances to carry out this expedition right now are very slim."

The unmanned Phobos-Grunt spacecraft blasted off toward the Red Planet on Nov. 9, where it was hoped to bring back rock and soil samples from the moon Phobos.

A chain of three stores that sells survival food and gear reports a jump in sales to people who are getting prepared for the “possible collapse” of society.

“We had to order fifty cases of the meals ready to eat to keep up with the demand in the past three months,” said manager Steve Dorsey at Uncle Sam’s Safari Outfitters Inc. in Webster Groves. “That’s not normal.  Usually we sell 20 to 30 cases in a whole year.”

Dorsey says business has been brisk since the spring uprisings in the middle east, as customers share concerns about political uprisings, the world economy and the future of the United States.

Judging by the run of successful natural disaster films in the past few years, people are fascinated by the idea of the end of the world. In Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, a virus ravaged the UK and beyond; an asteroid was the world-ending threat in Deep Impact and Armageddon; and climate change got a starring role in The Day After Tomorrow.

In the real world, we don't know how the Earth (or humanity) might meet its end or when that will happen. Pondering and predicting the event has usually been a job for the world's great religions: all of them have some idea about how humans will meet their maker. Indeed, "the end" (or judgement day) is usually a deity's way of cleansing our planet, to allow a fresh race of people who are morally purer to repopulate the resulting clean slate. Usually, there is too much sin or debauchery and the time has come to start again.

Stories of brimstone, fire and gods make good tales and do a decent job of stirring up the requisite fear and jeopardy. But made-up doomsday tales pale into nothing, creatively speaking, when contrasted with what is actually possible. Look through the lens of science and "the end" becomes much more interesting.