The plane, an LET 410 with 17 passenger and two crew members, belongs to the airline Team. It took off from Macae, the base for offshore oil operations in Rio de Janeiro state, at 5:19 p.m. (2019 GMT) It was due to arrive at 18:02 p.m. at Rio de Janeiro's Santos Dumont airport, the aviation authority Infraero said.

Officials later told the TV station TV Globo around 11:30 p.m. that search operations had been suspended.

The engineers have used everything legal to get rid of the California sea lion, who may weigh 1,000 pounds or more. They have installed grated exclusion gates and tried huge firecackers, rockets, rubber bullets, and noises sea lions don't like.

But C404 has given them the flipper.

He and a handful of cohorts already are waiting for the spring run of chinook salmon, which starts in earnest in April.

Then C404, named because of a brand applied by a state and federal program, will personify a larger problem, as 100 or more of his buddies join him.

Last year they ate about 3.5 percent of the migrating run at a time when salmon numbers were down and demand was up. This year's commercial salmon season may be cancelled because of river problems elsewhere. The loss percentage is climbing.

Robert Stansell, a fish biologist at Bonneville with the Corps of Engineers, knows the lively and alert C404 all too well.

"If he were in a litter of puppies, he's the one you would pick," he said.

He said C404 has been showing up each year since at least 2003 and has learned to rub it in. Last year he appeared in a window where fish counters keep track of salmon migrating upstream. The data helps predict the size of future runs.

"He even rolled over a little so we could get a look at his brand," Stansell said.

Other marine mammals haven't learned to pull that trick off.

Stansell says the sea lions are intelligent and can be taught. He would rather they not be taught by C404.

But he said the animals are showing up earlier and in greater numbers, and they are staying later. Now they have begun crawling onto the rocks to rest.

"They're becoming comfortable here," he said.

The run peaks in about September, but the sea lions head back to southern California breeding grounds around late May when the water temperature in the river rises.

They'll be back next year with their friends, and maybe their friends' friends too.

The animals have always been in the river. But now that the fish mass at the base of the dam, they provide a quick and easy meal for the sea lions.

C404 and his kind aren't endangered, but they are protected under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act and can't be killed.

Incorrigibles can be singled out for "lethal removal," a long, complicated process, Stansell said.

He said that nearly happened at the Ballard Locks in Seattle, where sea lions that nearly wiped out a winter steelhead run in the 1990s were marked for death.

But the Humane Society sued and then-President Clinton urged clemency. The worst of the miscreants were packed off to Sea World in Orlando, Fla.

Then-Vice President Al Gore called Sea World to say thanks.

While at the University of Florida a few years ago, Benner's team collaborated with scientists at The Scripps Research Institute to explore what kind of chemistry is necessary to support life.

In the process of trying to synthesize a living, evolving molecule in his lab, Benner seized upon minerals containing the element boron, the substance that makes some fireworks glow green.

Was boron the ingredient that enabled the Earth to go green as well?

Benner found that boron, with calcium at hand, had the talent of helping hold together the chain of carbon needed to stabilize a ribose sugar, the backbone of ribonucleic acid, the scaffolding for our genes. Without boron and calcium, heat, water and lightning would cause ribose to disintegrate into a tarlike mess, unable to support genes.

For geologic reasons, Benner's boron finding points directly to Mars as a likely source for Earth life, said Cal Tech geobiologist Joseph L. Kirschvink.

"When Steve told me of his work on ribosynthesis with boron, I said, 'Steve you've just proven to me that we're Martians.' "

That's because the boron needed to make ribose must come as calcium borate, a mineral that's soluble in water, Kirschvink believes.

A few places on Earth, including Death Valley, have a good supply of calcium borate, but they were under water at the time the first evidence of microbes appears on Earth, Kirschvink said. That was not the case on Earth's nearest neighbor, Mars, which was sending off bits of rock and dust in the Earth's general direction every time it took a hit from a meteorite.

"We know we have about a ton of Martian rock coming in a year," Kirschvink said. "And it wouldn't take more than a few spores to seed the Earth with life."

Could Mars possibly have had spores?

Space exploration and powerful telescopes have revealed that the red planet has polar ice, just like our own planet. In 2004, NASA's Opportunity rover found evidence that it once had liquid water running across its surface.

And 3 billion or 4 billion years ago, at the time when the Earth apparently was covered with water, Mars may have had a warmer atmosphere and abundant microbial life.

"It's entirely reasonable that there was life on Mars, but maybe long extinct," said Gerald Joyce, a professor at Scripps in La Jolla, Calif., who has collaborated with Benner. "The way to find it is to go there, drill down a bit, bring back samples to Earth and look at them."

Unfortunately, a plan to do just that has fallen victim to NASA budget cuts.

"It's very sad," Joyce said.

Plus, President Bush's budget request to Congress for next year proposes slashing funding for astrobiology research in half.

Kirschvink fears religious sentiment may be playing a role in the money cuts.

"There are fundamentalists who don't like the idea that their creator put life anywhere other than Earth," he said.

In the meantime, Joyce and other scientists are going as far as they possibly can with their science here on Earth.

In the journal Chemistry & Biology, Joyce's lab describes using evolutionary principles to convert RNA into DNA and keep its chemical activity intact.

Such conversion may have been necessary for more advanced life to evolve. It's one more clue as to how life might have assembled, Joyce said.

Meanwhile, the Marsophiles are excited about a new paper from Martin Fisk, a University of Oregon marine geologist. Fisk has studied several pieces of Martian meteorite, including one called Nakhla, donated from the Smithsonian Institution. In the journal Astrobiology, Fisk describes finding tunnels etched into the Martian rock - tunnels just like ones he has seen in Earth rock. On Earth, only microbes cause those types of tunnels.

"They are not known to be made by any other process that we know of," Fisk said.

It's a controversial notion, one that has been debated since 1996, when another bit of Martian meteorite stored at NASA labs near Houston was found to contain organic material and what appeared to be fossilized microbes.

At the time, critics shot down the idea, insisting that inorganic activity might have made the marks in the rock.

Fisk notes that his samples contained no DNA, the code for life.

Benner thinks it's not a deal-breaker.

"The failure to find DNA in the Martian rock is assumed to argue against Martian life. But this logic is coherent only if Martian life must use the same type of DNA as Earth life uses," Benner said.

Kirschvink agreed. "DNA would not survive 4 billion years, even on Mars," he said. "It barely survives in frozen mammoths that are only 12,000 years old."

For now, there are more skeptics of Mars' seeding life on Earth than there are advocates.

Conel Alexander, a geochemist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, suspects life arose organically on Earth.

"The worry is nobody really understands how well microbes would survive the shock that is required to put something into orbit. To knock it off Mars, how would it survive the radiation? That's one of the many questions," Alexander said.

"Nonsense," retorts Kirschvink. "The European Space Agency demonstrated more than five-year survival to space conditions, and some of the Martian meteorites get here within one year of a major impact on Mars."

Matt Schrenk, a geobiologist at the Carnegie Institution, favors the deep-sea vent theory, although he's not ruling anything out yet.

"The simplest explanation is that life started here," Schrenk said. "This is the one place where we know life does exist on Earth. But I think as evidenced by this Stardust mission, there's plenty of organic material coming in constantly from space. That must have played some role in the origin of life on Earth."

A January Homeland Security Department inspector general report found that Customs "does not have an effective method to screen and inspect the 350 truckloads of municipal solid waste that enter the U.S. daily through the Detroit and Port Huron ports of entry."

X-rays cannot penetrate the dense trash containers to reveal whether weapons or terrorists or other dangerous cargo is secreted inside, according to the Senate report "An Assessment of U.S. Efforts to Secure the Global Supply Chain."

Toronto, Canada, shipped approximately 100,000 containers of trash across U.S. borders into Michigan in 2004 alone, according to the DHS report. It has been exporting waste to Michigan since 1998. Mexico also ships solid waste to the United States.

The DHS inspector general report was issued in January but marked "for official use only." The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on investigations released it publicly Thursday after its second hearing on the precarious state of port security

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the ranking member of the subcommittee, is also calling for Congress to adopt provisions approved by the Senate to impose a fee on Canadian trash shipments to cover the cost of a more rigorous inspection regime.

Canadian trash is just one of the many problems the Senate committee investigation found with port security, according to the report.

The Congressional Budget Office put a price tag on the potential economic cost of not securing a port from terrorist attack or contamination. If the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach -- the two largest -- were attacked and shut down, it would cost the United States $150 million a day in lost gross domestic product, or $70 billion a year.

"The economic impact of closing the ports could be comparable to both the attacks of 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina," said Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., chairman of the Senate subcommittee that conducted the three-year investigation underpinning the report. "We cannot afford the devastation these findings imply. We must secure our supply chain before we pay the high price of an attack."

Despite major legislation and an overhaul of port security undertaken in 2002, the U.S. supply chain of consumer goods "remains vulnerable to the proverbial Trojan Horse" to smuggle weapons of mass destruction or even terrorists into the country.

The United States stepped up its global port security efforts after the Sept. 11 attacks, putting in place a number of programs. Among them was the "container security initiative," in which the Customs agency identifies high-risk containers when they are still overseas and inspects them. Just 5 percent of all containers are physically inspected overseas, which represents just 17.5 percent of cargo designated high-risk by U.S. Customs.

U.S. Customs agents generally are not the ones inspecting the containers overseas. That is left to foreign shipping companies and government officials, who in some cases decline to inspect designated containers or do not have the manpower to carry out the inspections, the report said. Moreover, no minimum standards for inspections exist.

The United States also has a program of benefits to induce shipping companies to implement best security practices in their terminals and on their vessels. However, only 27 percent of those companies receiving benefits under the Customs/Trade Partnership Against Terrorism have actually been inspected to see if their security practices comply with program standards. Benefits are conferred upon agreement, rather than after the security practices are verified.

Two incidents in 2005 illustrate that participation in CSI and C/TPAT does not guarantee good security. Twice in 2005 containers full of illegal Chinese immigrants were shipped through a CSI and C/TPAT-protected port and shipping company in Hong Kong to the port of Los Angeles without being detected until they arrived and were unloaded.

The failure to detect the stowaways may be due to the unreliable data that Customs uses to determine which containers qualify as high risk. According to the Senate report, the targeting methodology has never been tested or validated.

Fewer than 40 percent of cargo containers entering the United States are screened for nuclear or radiological materials, largely because less than a third of the planned radiation monitors have been fielded by the Homeland Security Department.

The Senate report points to a few encouraging areas: the Homeland Security Department has created the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office to provide a single point for the distribution and management of radiation detectors which will ease some of the problems with fielding the devices.

There is also a pilot program ongoing at the Port of Hong Kong -- the busiest port in the world -- that uses a combination of imaging machines, radiation scanners and a system to identify containers to screen 100 percent of containers. The program's performance so far suggests it may be possible to significantly boost the number of containers screened as they come into the United States without slowing the supply chain.

First, let's look at the most common wrong way to do it. Remember the old "anticipation" commercials from the 1970s? The bottle is held upside down, then the hungry diner waits... and waits. Most people I know attempt to improve on this by tapping the bottom (that is, the upper end when the bottle is upside-down). That may help, but not necessarily for the reasons you imagine.

Ketchup can be regarded as a highly viscous liquid, or a thixotropic (flows under pressure) solid. Neither term is exactly correct, but the problem is not what to call it. The problem is how to get the ketchup out of the bottle, in measured quantities, without making a mess.

In order for the ketchup to emerge, air must enter the bottle. With an ordinary liquid such as water, a very narrow (dropper) neck would prevent the displacement of water by, air, but even a ketchup bottle has a neck that is much too thick to prevent water escaping, and air rising in, when the bottle is inverted. In the case of ketchup, however, the sauce is thick enough that the gravitational pull on the ketchup does not suffice.

Ketchup will certainly fall, of its own accord. In the case of a partly empty bottle, tapping the base can expel some ketchup without the need for air to enter. This is because the air that is already inside the bottle can slightly de-pressurize. Tapping the inverted base may slightly liquify the ketchup, enough for some to drop out even though no air is taken in. But in a full bottle, the ketchup must move to the side so that the air can rise through the neck at the same time that the ketchup escapes. The weight of ketchup is not great enough for this to happen in most circumstances.

So, in the case of the full ketchup bottle, the problem can be divided into two issues: (1) How can I get the ketchup to move aside, so that air can enter on the opposite side? (2) How can I give the ketchup "extra weight," so that it will be pulled out of the bottle faster?

The first issue is solved by holding the bottle sideways, with a slight downward tilt, rather than upside-down. In this position, the ketchup naturally is pulled to the lower side of the neck, and the air naturally will channel along the higher side of the neck. Anyone who pours an ordinary liquid from a bottle knows this. Yet it is amazing how the experience is forgotten when it comes to ketchup.

Merely holding the bottle in the correct position is not very effective. It is necessary to "increase the weight" of the ketchup by applying some G-force. This can be done by making a fist, and tapping the bottle downwards against the fist, to bring the bottle to an abrupt halt. Don't hurt yourself! If your hands are delicate, you may try some other method of applying an abrupt stop to the bottle, provided that the stop is not rigid or fragile, and that you mind where the ketchup is going to emerge. Striking the bottle at the upper side of the neck is much less effective, since it applies the G-force in the wrong direction.

Tapping the inverted bottom of a full bottle – the customary way – is counterproductive. If you do that, most of the G-force will tend to keep the ketchup in the bottle. But now you know the right way, thanks to the amazing power of the Internet to unleash this kind of information. Of course, it would be possible to print instructions on the side of the ketchup bottle, but you wouldn't read them if they were there, now would you?