SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) - Russia will discuss relaxing laws regulating foreign participation in offshore energy projects to attract investment from abroad, Natural Resources Minister Yuri Trutnev told Reuters on Saturday.

Encouraged by a surge in crude prices from 2002 to a peak in July 2008, Russia passed laws curbing foreign participation in tapping its mineral resources, but oil prices have plummeted since then.

"We will look into this issue (laws regarding foreign investment) first of all in relation to offshore exploration. We believe that state regulation creates many obstacles for exploration," Trutnev said in the resort of Sochi on the sidelines of an economic forum.

The minister also blamed state-controlled energy giants Rosneft and Gazprom, which are the only two firms carrying out offshore exploration in Russia at the moment, for underinvestment.

NASA's lunar-mapping satellite has just begun its four-year mission searching for water on the moon, but it has already turned up a discovery that has scientists scratching their heads.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's seven scientific instruments have indeed confirmed the presence of large amounts of hydrogen -- a marker for water -- in permanently shadowed south pole craters, where scientists had known there were deposits of hydrogen. But the instruments have also found the element in regions where the sun shines.

NASA scientists said Thursday that this could mean water is buried underground. Water could not exist on the surface, where it is exposed to daytime temperatures as high as 220 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Richard Vondrak, project scientist for the mission, known as LRO.

"We don't know the abundance or how deeply it is buried," Vondrak said at a briefing at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Nor do they know whether the hydrogen is water in the form of ice. If it is, the discovery would greatly improve the chances for a successful return to the moon by astronauts.

A proposed solar energy project in the California desert that caused intense friction between environmentalists and the developers of renewable energy has been shelved.

BrightSource Energy Inc. had planned a 5,130-acre solar power farm in a remote part of the Mojave Desert, on land previously intended for conservation. The company, based in Oakland, Calif., said Thursday that it was instead seeking an alternative site for the project.

The Wildlands Conservancy, a California environmental group, had tried to block the solar development, as had Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who proposed that the area become a national monument.

The land was donated by Wildlands to the Interior Department during the Clinton administration, with assurances from President Bill Clinton himself, the group says, that it would be protected in perpetuity. But the Energy Policy Act of 2005, a Bush administration initiative, opened the land to the development of solar projects.

OMA, Japan -- Fishermen here call it "black gold," referring to the dark red flesh of the Pacific bluefin tuna that is so prized in this sashimi-loving nation that just one of these sleek fish, which can weigh a half-ton, can earn tens of thousands of dollars.

Tuna lovers savoring bluefin tuna meat in Oma, Japan. Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Flags bearing wishes for good fishing fluttering over a boat at the Oma port.

The cold waters here once yielded such an abundance of bluefin, with such thick layers of tasty rich fat, that this tiny wind-swept seaport became Japan's answer to California's Napa Valley or the Brie cheese-producing region of France: a geographic location that is nearly synonymous with one of its nation's premier foods.

So strong is the allure of Oma's tuna that during the autumn fishing season, tens of thousands of hungry visitors descend on this remote fishing town, located on the northernmost tip of Japan's main island of Honshu. On a recent Sunday, dozens of tourists, filmed by no fewer than three local television crews, crowded into an old refrigerated warehouse on a pier where Oma's mayor presided over a ceremony to slice up a 220-pound bluefin into brick-size blocks for sale.

"This is a pleasure you can only have a few times in your life," said Toshiko Maki, 51, a homemaker from suburban Tokyo, as she popped a ruby-red cube of sashimi into her mouth.

But now the town faces a looming threat, as the number of tuna has begun dropping precipitously in recent years because of overfishing. This has given Oma another, less celebrated distinction, as a community that has stood out by calling for greater regulation of catches in a nation that has adamantly opposed global efforts to save badly depleted tuna populations.

By the end of this year, the world is projected to reach an unheralded but historic milestone: Half of the fish and shellfish we consume will be raised by humans, rather than caught in the wild.

Reaching this tipping point is reshaping everything from our oceans to the livelihoods and diets of people across the globe. It has also prompted a new round of scientific and political scrutiny, as researchers and public officials examine how aquaculture is affecting the world's environment and seafood supply.

"Hunting and gathering has reached its maximum," said Ronald W. Hardy, who directs the University of Idaho's Aquaculture Research Institute and co-authored a study on the subject in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We've got to grow more."

The drive to bring fish "from egg to plate," as Hardy puts it, has the potential to answer a growing demand for seafood worldwide, as well as reduce some of the imports that compose more than 80 percent of the fish and shellfish Americans eat each year. But without technological advances to improve efficiency, it could threaten to wipe out the forage fish that lie at the bottom of the ocean's food chain and potentially contaminate parts of the sea.

And consumers will have to accept that they are eating a different kind of fish than the ones that swim wild: ones that might have eaten unused poultry trimmings, been vaccinated, consumed antibiotics or been selected for certain genetic traits.

China has doubled its installed wind power capacity every year for the past five, and is on pace this year to supplant the United States as the world's largest market for new installations. But researchers from Harvard University and Beijing's Tsinghua University suggest that the Chinese wind power industry has hardly begun to tap its potential. According to their meteorological and financial modeling, reported in the journal Science last week, there is enough strong wind in China to profitably satisfy all of the country's electricity demand until at least 2030.

Harvard-Tsinghua project leader Michael McElroy and colleagues quantified China's wind energy potential by first modeling the availability of wind. To do this, they chopped the Chinese map into parcels 3,335 square kilometers each and used five years of recent meteorological data to generate a wind profile for each parcel. Next, they added industry-standard 1.5-megawatt wind turbines across each parcel (excluding unfriendly terrain such as steep hills, forests, and urban areas) in the model and estimated each parcel's energy output. Finally, they calculated the cost of the energy that could be produced as a function of the cost of installing the turbines.

The modeling reveals extensive regions, concentrated in northern and western China, where much energy can be generated at costs similar to the government-set energy rates earned by established wind farms, which range from 0.38 to 0.55 Chinese yuan (6 cents to 8 cents) per kilowatt-hour (kwh). For example, the model predicts that wind-farm operators could profitably generate 6.96 trillion kwh of wind energy -- more than double China's annual power consumption of 3.4 trillion kwh and comparable to the projected total demand by 2030 -- at a contract price of 0.516 Chinese yuan (7.5 cents) per kwh.

A campaign backed by automakers and some lawmakers to make electric or hybrid cars noisier in a bid to increase safety for pedestrians and cyclists has taken a strange, "Blade Runner"-type twist.

Nissan sound engineers have announced that the Leaf electric car set for release next year will emit a "beautiful and futuristic" noise similar to the sound of flying cars -- or "spinners" -- that buzz around 2019 Los Angeles in Ridley Scott's dystopian thriller based on a Philip K. Dick science fiction novel.

While virtually all of the largest developed and developing nations have made domestic commitments toward creating more efficient, renewable sources of energy to cut emissions, none want to take the lead in fighting for significant international emissions reduction targets, lest they be accused at home of selling out future jobs and economic growth.

[...]

On Tuesday, the leaders, including the heads of state or government of most economic powers, are to engage in a series of round-table discussions on outstanding climate change issues that will be less like negotiations than a series of college seminars designed to forge political momentum.

"They won't do it one by one," said Robert Orr, the United Nations assistant secretary general for policy planning. "Politically, they all have to jump together, and this is the essence of this summit. We will see if any governments are ready to say, `I am stepping through the door now; are you going to come with me?' That would be a huge break."