The GOES-N satellite took off about 6 p.m. on a Boeing Delta 4 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The satellite separated from the rocket as scheduled about 10:30 p.m., putting it on a path for orbit.

The last time a Delta 4 rocket flew - a test flight of the rocket's heavy-lift model in December 2004 - it failed to put a dummy satellite into its intended orbit.

A launch scheduled last August was scrubbed after an alarm indicated low voltage on batteries powering the system that allows the rocket to transmit data to ground stations. The delay was the latest in a series of setbacks dating to last May.

The GOES-N is a step in the development of a family of weather satellites designed and built by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration since 1975. It is the first in a series of three new satellites.

"It's not revolutionary ... but it has evolutionary improvements," said Steve Kirkner, GOES program manager for NOAA. "What this will provide is better knowledge ... better information."

GOES stands for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites.

The satellite carried instruments to transmit high-resolution images, infrared data, and temperature and moisture profiles of the atmosphere. The instruments would allow meteorologists on the ground to take images of weather problem spots and improve short-term forecasts locally.

Steve Letro of the National Weather Service likened the new satellite to a Christmas gift. It gives meterologists another tool in "the fight against hurricanes, tornadoes and other types of severe weather," he said.

The spacecraft probably won't be in use for at least two years, until one of two satellites currently in orbit runs out of fuel or fails.

"Given the state of the infrastructure down there and the levees, gosh, that's just not good news. But that's what the climate signals look like," Watson said.

Watson, who has partnered with University of Central Florida statistics professor Mark Johnson, also predicted that oil production in the Gulf of Mexico will be disrupted for a minimum of a week at a cost of 7-8 million barrels of oil.

Up to 25 percent of U.S. oil production in the Gulf was shut down last year and 20 percent is still out.

Watson gave a one in 10 chance that oil rigs will sustain enough damage to reduce production by 278 million barrels this year, further escalating prices for gasoline.

The forecasters, who have worked with the oil and gas industry and with state insurance regulators, base their forecast in part on the paths of storms over the past 155 years and expected global climate conditions this year.

Watson and Johnson said a weak La Nina weather condition and warmer-than-normal Gulf of Mexico water temperatures were contributing factors. U.S. government weather experts say the La Nina phenomenon in place earlier this year has dissipated and should not be a factor during the hurricane season.

On Tuesday, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the 2006 hurricane season was expected to produce 13 to 16 named storms, including four to six "major" hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher. No leading forecasters came close to predicting what happened in 2005, when 28 tropical storms spawned a record 15 hurricanes.

The 2006 forecast for News Orleans was worse than Watson's prediction for the city last year, he said. But for now, he considers the 2005 season an aberration rather than a trend or a definitive sign of effects from global warming.

"If it happens again this year or next year, then we're in a different climate world than we were in the last 100 years or so," Watson said.

Of 28 coastal cities evaluated under the forecast model, New Orleans ranked top with a 29.3 percent chance of experiencing hurricane-force winds in the storm season that begins officially on June 1.

Other top candidates include Mobile, Alabama, with a 22 percent chance of being buffeted by hurricane-force winds, and the Florida cities of Key West and Pensacola, which both have a 20 percent chance.

West Palm Beach, Florida, which suffered severe damage during last year's Hurricane Wilma, came in just after Key West and Pensacola with a 19 percent chance of being struck yet again by hurricane-force winds.

Watson and Johnson have published a number of research papers on storm and wind damage modeling.

According to the seismological base of the Geophysics Institute of Tehran University, the quake occurred at 21:26 hours local time (17:56 GMT).

The quake was felt in an area measuring 53.99 degrees in longitude and 26.97 degrees in latitude, the report added.

There have been no reports of any casualty or damage to property caused by the quake.

Iran is often hit by quakes of varying magnitudes as it sits on some of the world's most active seismic faultlines.

"Over the past few hundred years, it has only happened a couple of times."

The quake took place in the south-eastern parts of Stockholm shortly after 1am local time, he said.

Some residents initially thought the noise caused by the tremor was a large explosion, and emergency services were flooded with calls from scared locals.

Some residents even left their homes to seek shelter on the street when their windows started shaking, Swedish media reported.

But Bodvarsson said it was unlikely the quake caused any damage to the city.

"If a building was damaged by this, it must have already been in very bad shape," he said.

The previous clusters all involved someone who was infected by a sick bird and then spread the virus to others. This new cluster appears to involve a cascade of transmission, said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a telephone briefing from Geneva.

The family members' close physical proximity is probably responsible for the spread of the disease, Hartl said.

"It fits the kind of pattern perfectly which we've seen so far," Hartl told The Associated Press. Global and U.S. health officials say tests on virus samples taken from the family do not indicate any significant changes.

Investigators say the family, living in the remote northern Sumatra village of Kubu Sembelang, were infected with a strain of H5N1 bird flu that was genetically the same as the virus found circulating in the area earlier. Tests are still being carried out on poultry there.

Infections have not been detected in health-care workers or others in the village, but those who may have come in contact with the family are being given Tamiflu as a precaution, Gerberding said.

WHO has suspected that in rare cases bird flu may have passed from one person to another, although people usually catch it from chickens and other poultry.

Experts have long believed the virus is spread when people breathe it in - possibly in dust from bird droppings or in droplets sneezed or coughed by humans into the air.

But it remains unclear exactly how the virus spreads in family groups - whether through respiratory systems, food, infected surfaces or a combination of these, Hartl said.

"Which transmission mode is most important, we really don't know yet," he said. "When you get all of these things together, it becomes perhaps more likely."

Other experts have suggested family members have a genetic weakness to the disease. In all four family clusters recorded so far, only direct blood relatives - not spouses - have caught bird flu.

WHO will leave its pandemic alert level unchanged at 3, where it has been for months, meaning there is "no or very limited human-to-human transmission."

Six of the seven family members who caught bird flu have died, the most recent on Monday. An eighth family member who died was buried before tests could be done, but she was considered to be among those infected with bird flu.

"... It apparently can only spread between human to human when there is extensive and close contact between someone who is already showing clinical signs of the disease and the uninfected person," Hartl said.

In the three previous family clusters - in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam - the number of infected relatives was much smaller, Hartl said.

CDC officials noted that the evidence for human transmission was stronger in the Indonesia and Thailand clusters, but human transmission could not be ruled out in the Vietnam cluster.

Health workers have found no sign the latest Indonesian case has moved outside the family, and there is also "no evidence that efficient human-to-human transmission has occurred," WHO said in a statement.

Still the size of the cluster and the failure to determine the source of the infections was worrying, Peter Cordingley, spokesman for WHO's Western Pacific region.

Bird flu has killed 124 people worldwide since the virus started ravaging poultry stocks across Asia in 2003.

LONDON - Trying just one cigarette may not be so harmless for non-smokers after all.

Scientists have discovered that a single cigarette has a "sleeper effect" that can increase a person's vulnerability for three years or more to becoming a regular smoker.

"We know that progression from experimenting with one cigarette to being a smoker can take several years," said Jennifer Fidler of University College London.

"But for the first time we've shown that there may be a period of dormancy between trying cigarettes and becoming a regular smoker -- a 'sleeper effect' or vulnerability to nicotine addition," she added.

Fidler and her team analyzed the impact of smoking a single cigarette on more than 2,000 children aged between 11 and 16 over five years.

Of the 260 children who by age 11 had tried one cigarette, 18 percent were regular smokers by the time they reached 14. But only seven percent of 11-year-olds who had never smoked had taken up the habit three years later.

"The results also indicate that prior experimentation is a strong predictor of taking up smoking later," said Fidler, who reported the findings in the journal Tobacco Control on Thursday.

The scientists are not sure why a single cigarette has such an impact but they said the exposure to nicotine could change pathways in the brain which could make children more vulnerable to stress or depression, which can make them more likely to try it again.

The first cigarette could also remove fears about getting caught or how to smoke, which would have prevented them from taking up the habit.

Jean King, of the charity Cancer Research UK, said the findings have important implications for anti-smoking campaigns.

"Any research that helps unravel the processes involved in young people becoming addicted to nicotine is key to developing effective and targeted ways to prevent them from starting smoking in the first place," she said.

"Of the planets that pass in front of their stars, XO-1b is the most similar to Jupiter yet known, and the star XO-1 is the most similar to our Sun," said McCullough, of the Space Telescope Science Institute. "But XO-1b is much, much closer to its star than Jupiter is to the Sun."

More to come

By scouring the skies with many telescopes made from relatively inexpensive equipment instead of a few large observatories, the search for extrasolar planets could pick up dramatically.

"This discovery suggests that a fleet of modest telescopes and the help of amateur astronomers can search for transiting extrasolar planets many times faster than we are now," McCullough said.

To find XO-1b, the team built their telescope, which they call the XO prototype telescope, from two commercially available 200-millimeter telephoto camera lenses. The setup, which resembles a pair of high-powered binoculars, is mounted on the summit of the Haleakala volcano in Hawaii.

The XO prototype telescope cost about $60,000, which is far less than the many millions spent on typical professional observatories.

The team scanned the sky from September 2003 to September 2005 and observed tens of thousands of bright stars. A computer sifted through the data for tiny decreases in a star's light. If a normally bright star appears slightly dimmer in one picture, it could be because a planet is passing in front of it.

Backyard help

Once the team identified a few dozen promising candidates, McCullough assigned four stars to amateur astronomers for further observation, including the star XO-1.

After observing XO-1 in June and July 2005, astronomers confirmed that the roughly 2 percent dips in the star's brightness are caused by a planet-sized object that eclipses the star every four days. Astronomers at the McDonald Observatory in Texas verified the object as a planet, named XO-16, and determined its mass was slightly less than that of Jupiter.

"It was a wonderful feeling because the team had worked for three years to find this one planet," McCullough said. "The discovery represents a few bytes out of nearly a terabyte of data: It's like trying to distill gold out of seawater."

This technique is called the transit method, and it allows astronomers to determine a planet's mass and size, which can be used to estimate other characteristics, such as the planet's density.

So far, of the roughly 180 extrasolar planets detected, including XO-1b, only 10 have been discovered using the transit method. Most have been spotted indirectly by noting a gravitationally-induced wobble in the host star.

The search continues

There is still much to be learned about XO-1b, including whether it shares its star with other planets.

"By timing the planet's passages across the star, both amateur and professional astronomers might be lucky enough to detect the presence of another planet in the XO-1 system by its gravitational tugs on XO-1b," McCullough said. "It's even possible that such a planet could be similar to Earth."

As McCullough continues searching for other planets, he believes XO-1b is a good candidate for investigation by the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. Hubble could precisely measure the star's distance and the planet's size, while Spitzer might be able to provide an image of the planet based on its infrared radiation.