Reynolds, 50, is semi-retired from an administrative job. He's the group's senior translator, thanks partly to his work in radio communications with the Canadian Armed Forces from 1975 to 1985, which helped him develop his listening skills. A sensitive ear is crucial because budgies talk at a rate of 150 to 200 words a minute, he says.

"I don't claim to be 100 per cent (accurate), but other people do hear what I hear. It's not my imagination," Reynolds says.

"It takes a lot of skill and concentration. Budgies have a particular way of pronouncing words. It's like picking up accents."

Apart from the research group, which numbers 1,000 psittalinguist collaborators from around the world, Reynolds mounted an extensive website that includes captioned recordings of budgies speaking (http://www.parrotresearch.com), and he's working on a book tentatively entitled, The Prophecies of Parrots - the Story of Victor the Budgie.

Reynolds says Victor predicted a "tsunami on the south bank of Asia" and warned of an upcoming "super volcano." In the weeks before he died, Reynolds says Victor told him God was coming to take him away.

"I don't know about predictive ability," says veterinarian Petra Burgmann of the Animal Hospital of High Park. "What frame of reference would it have for a tsunami? But I certainly believe it's possible they know when they're about to die."

Rupert Sheldrake, a London-based biologist, biochemist, philosopher and author, who trained at Cambridge and Harvard, researches unexplained perceptiveness in animals, such as telepathy, sense of direction and premonition.

He repeatedly tested N'kisi, a captive African Grey parrot who seemed to respond telepathically to the thoughts and intentions of his owner, Aimee Morgana. He wanted to find out whether the bird would use words matching randomly chosen pictures Morgana was looking at in another room.

"These findings are consistent with the hypotheses that N'kisi was reacting telepathically to Aimee's mental activity," Sheldrake reports on his website (http://www.sheldrake.org).

"The fact that these experiments statistically prove that N'kisi's use of speech is not random also give evidence of his sentience and intentional use of language."

Toronto parrot owner Margaret Evered, formerly a behaviour biologist and now a computer consultant, doesn't need science to prove that she and her female African Grey parrot have a psychic bond.

Evered recounts how the bird, Plato, anticipated her return after a one-year absence - even though not even her parents, in whose care she'd left the bird, knew when she was returning.

"One day she wouldn't go to bed. She just kept standing at the door, waiting. I rolled in at 2 a.m.," Evered says.

She and Plato have shared a home for 21 years, from the time Plato was captured in the Congo when she was about 1.

Evered says Plato understands what she says. She has a vocabulary of about 300 words, which she mixes and matches as circumstances warrant.

Plato uses intonation appropriate to the circumstances. She'll ask "okay?" softly when someone is unwell. Or she'll refuse to do something with a vociferous "no" as she bounces up and down.

Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, has revolutionized thinking about these birds by proving they do conceptualize - thanks to her 20-year collaboration with Alex, an African Grey parrot (http://www.alexfoundation.org).

Parrot owners have to realize their pets have the cognitive ability of a 5-year old, she says. Locking them up without stimulation eight to 10 hours a day causes emotional damage and leads to behavioural problems, such as screaming or feather-plucking.

That's not likely to happen with one Toronto bird. Still a baby at age 3, Angel, a double yellow-headed Amazon parrot, lives in a spacious aviary equipped with a TV and a window that looks out onto Queen St. W.

Her owner, Charlie Ravka, keeps her on the second and third storeys above his store, which serves as office and occasional sleeping quarters.

"She's unpredictable, hilarious," Ravka says. "I don't know what she'll do next. But when I wake up, she says, 'How are you?' And when I'm on the couch, she sits on the back and preens my hair.

"The parrot is my buddy."

This concept echoes scientific suggestions from the 1970s, but the new computer analysis claims to confirm this and provides an objective measure of the songs' structure and complexity.

Male humpback whales produce songs that last anywhere from about six to 30 minutes. These vocalisations vary greatly across seasons, and during breeding periods they are thought to help attract female partners. Their eerie sound and patterns have captured the attention of marine biologists for decades.
Too subjective

Researchers describe human language as hierarchical because it consists of sentences which contain clauses, which in turn contain words. This hierarchy helps us to extract meaning from what we hear. But some researchers remained sceptical that whale songs could contain this degree of organisation when Roger Payne and Scott McVay first offered the idea in 1971 (Science, vol 173, p 587).

At the time, some argued that the observation was too subjective, explains Ryuji Suzuki, a study co-author at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US.

He and colleagues developed a computer algorithm to analyse the complex patterns of moans, cries and chirps in 16 humpback whale songs. The software draws on mathematics such as probability, and considers the placement and repetitive nature of the smallest units of the animals' songs.

Abstract objects

Suzuki says the analysis objectively demonstrates that the whale songs have a hierarchical syntax. To hear the team's recording of humpback whales crooning off the Hawaiian coast, click here.

The algorithm can also assign a numerical value to a whale song to describe its degree of complexity. Shorter whale songs appear more complex than longer ones, according to the new study.

Suzuki stresses whale songs are still a far cry from our own means of expression. He says that the use of terms referring to distinct and sometimes abstract objects appears unique to human language. "We don't have any evidence of such things in whale songs."

"We're still very far from knowing the meaning of whale songs," he admits.

The strain, known as "extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis", or XDR-TB, has the potential to return TB treatment "to the pre-antibiotic era" in which the only treatment was cutting out parts of the lungs.

"XDR-TB is cause for concern because it is widely distributed and renders patients virtually untreatable," said Kenneth Castro, director of the division of TB elimination at the Centres for Disease Control. If the strain went unchecked, he added, deaths from TB - which affects 9 million people annually and kills 2 million - would rise.

TB is also the biggest killer of people with HIV, causing about 13 per cent of AIDS deaths.

But while cases of the debilitating and potentially fatal disease are subsiding in the US, the subset of infections resistant to some or most of the drugs used against TB is burgeoning, the WHO said. Between 2000 and 2004, 20 per cent of bacteria recovered from TB patients and tested at WHO-affiliated labs worldwide were resistant to the two main drugs, isoniazid and rifampin, used to treat the disease, earning them the label "multi-drug resistant".

Health authorities fear the development of drug resistance in tuberculosis because it transforms treatment of the disease from a six-month course of daily doses of the two main drugs into a regimen that stretches up to two years.

The regime uses a menu of six "second-line" drugs that are less effective, more expensive and more toxic to patients - the drugs can fail and lead to the death of patients.

Because TB-control programs around the world were complaining of patients who did not recover even with those lengthy treatment programs, the WHO undertook a second analysis to determine how resistant TB had become, said Marcos Espinal of the WHO's Stop TB Partnership.

When they rechecked their samples, the labs found that extensively drug-resistant TB - defined as a TB strain that resists not only the two main drugs, but at least half of the secondary drugs - had existed at least since 2000 and had been growing.

Overall, the WHO said, 347 cases of extensively drug-resistant TB had been found since 2000. By 2004 this had risen to 11 per cent of all drug-resistant cases in industrialised countries.

With 500,000 people worldwide suffering from multi-drug-resistant TB, the true rate of the extensively resistant form is likely to be higher than the labs have recorded, because many countries do not have the resources for TB surveillance and analysis, Dr Espinal said.

The study noted that while the most-resistant TB was identified in all regions, it was most common in Eastern Europe and western Asia.

Factors contributing to increases in drug resistance include interruption in treatment among TB-infected people, lack of testing and the absence of infection-control measures in large settings such as hospitals and prisons, researchers said.

An analysis done just in the US found 74 cases of XDR-TB between 1993, when the Centres for Disease Control began recording any case of drug resistance, and 2004.

Officials have ordered people in the Jordan Valley to eat poultry from their farms within a week or risk of having their birds culled. Authorities in Israel and the Palestinian territories imposed a similar measure after finding the virus in their poultry stocks.

Officials have also increased monitoring of birds on poultry farms in the valley.

Jordan had already imposed a ban on imports of poultry products and pet birds before the discovery this week.

The Middle Eastern country has reportedly imported 60,000 doses of Tamiflu, the frontline drug used to treat humans who develop bird flu, and it has set aside significant funds to handle a possible outbreak. It has said it would use the money to vaccinate poultry and to compensate farmers for the loss of their flocks.

Turkey, Iraq and Egypt, all of which have reported cases of bird flu, are the only countries in the region where the disease has been transmitted to humans who later died. The countries have engaged in extensive culling after finding the disease in their domestic birds.

In other bird flu news, a three-year-old Cambodian girl has died of the disease, becoming the first human victim of bird flu in the country in almost a year. The World Health Organization confirmed the death on Friday.

According to statistics compiled by the World Health Organization, 103 people in eight countries, mainly in Asia, have died of bird flu.

The findings are a stunning about-face from previous expert forecasts that such massive melting would take millennia to kick in, even with rising global atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

This new research, based on a comprehensive look at global warming in the distant past, says melting the two icy domains could eventually raise sea level worldwide by as much as five metres, enough to flood low-lying regions like the Netherlands and most Pacific atolls, as well push half a billion people inland.

The full five-metre rise could take several centuries but the world's oceans could easily be a metre higher by 2100, the researchers said.

"The melting is going to happen faster than we thought. It's already begun to happen," said University of Calgary ice researcher Shawn Marshall, the sole Canadian among the authors of the two studies published by the journal Science.

"We could be past the point of no return for Greenland this century," he said in an interview.

A 1998 federal government report rated most of P.E.I., the eastern coast of Nova Scotia and the Beaufort Sea shore in the Western Arctic as "highly sensitive" to a global sea level rise of under seven-tenths of a metre.

Marshall and the other researchers acknowledged they were taken by surprise by the breakneck escalation in the melting of glaciers and ice sheets in recent years. Since 1980 the portion of the Greenland ice cap experiencing annual melting has increased by 40 per cent.

"It's not a gradual change. It's like flipping a switch. Areas that haven't experienced melt in centuries suddenly do," said Marshall.



A widely quoted report in 2001 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that major melting was no threat in Greenland and Antarctica in this century.

But Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona, said the new research shows these massive ice sheets are much more sensitive to global warming than originally suspected.

"Once we're above two times the pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide we're in the danger zone," said Overpeck, who is lead author on one of the studies.

'The melting is going to happen faster than we thought. It's already begun to happen.

"Somewhere after that we'll pass a threshold where melting of the ice sheets and sea level rise is irreversible," he said.

Most experts agree that carbon dioxide concentrations double the pre-industrial level will be reached sometime after 2050 unless global emissions are at least cut in half. The current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is about 380 parts per million compared to 280 parts per million before widespread burning of fossil fuels began around 1870.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, industrialized countries have pledged to reduce their overall emissions of greenhouse gases to 5 per cent below 1990 levels starting in 2008.

But soaring emissions from China and other developing countries - and the Kyoto boycott by Australia and the United States - mean that global carbon dioxide levels are expected to continue rising steadily.

The new warning is based on using climate extremes from the last major global warming to check the reliability of future climate conditions projected by complex computer models.

A prolonged hot spell began 129,000 years ago because natural orbital variations caused the Earth's northern axis to tilt more toward the sun producing much higher temperatures in the northern hemisphere, especially the Arctic.

A decade-long international research project gathered an evidence of climate change from that period, including the disappearance of glaciers in Canada's Arctic archipelago, halving of Arctic sea ice coverage, major shrinking of the Greenland ice cap and a northward march of the boreal forest.

Examination of Australia's Great Barrier Reef also indicated that sea levels were four to six metres higher than today.

A group of U.S. researchers then produced many of the same results by simulating increased sun on the northern hemisphere in an advanced climate model which Calgary's Marshall beefed up to handle glacier movements and ice melting.

"The model got it about right for the past which gives us more confidence in its forecasts," said Marshall.

A second research team, led by Overpeck, then used the souped-up model to project what would happen to the Earth's ice cover if global temperatures were raised by higher levels of carbon dioxide rather than a shift in the planet's tilt.

They found that tripling pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels by 2100 caused widespread melting in Greenland and the Arctic but didn't raise sea levels the five metres recorded in the Australia reefs. The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet must also melt, the scientists concluded.

Even a two degree Celsius rise in global average temperature would cause thermometers to soar as much as eight or 10 degrees in the Arctic and Antarctic, a feedback process known as polar amplification.

"All the things we were worrying about happening did happen and it didn't take that much warming," said Overpeck.

Existing laws and preserving public wildlife reserves will not be enough. Measures are also needed to protect rainforests from the impact of profitable industries such as cattle ranching and soy farming, they added.

"By 2050, current trends in agricultural expansion will eliminate a total of 40 percent of Amazon forests, including six major watersheds and ecoregions," Britaldo Soares-Filho, of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil, said in a report in the journal Nature.

A watershed is an area of land where all of the water that is under it or drains from it goes into the same place. It supplies water and habitats for plants and animals.

Soares-Filho and his colleagues used computer models to simulate what would happen to the Brazilian rainforests in the future under different scenarios.

"For the first time, we can examine how individual policies ranging from the paving of highways to the requirement for forest reserves on private properties will influence the future of the world's largest tropical forest," Soares-Filho said in a statement.

Without further checks, the scientists predict nearly 100 native species will be deprived of more than half of their habitats and nearly 2 million square kilometres (772,300 sq mile) of forest will be lost.

But if more is done to control expansion and increase protected areas, 73 percent of the original forest would remain in 2050 and carbon emissions would be reduced.

The scientists said better conservation of the rainforest would have worldwide benefits so developed countries should be willing to pay to make it possible.

"By building a policy-sensitive crystal ball for the Amazon, we are able to identify the most important policy levers for reconciling economic development with conservation," said Daniel Nepstad, a co-author of the study who leads the Amazon program of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts.