The refreezing of sea ice during the long, dark polar night of winter is also reportedly declining sharply.

Scientists believe this is all due not only to higher average temperatures of the air but also to the water, contributing to an Arctic that could be ice-free in summer far sooner than predicted only a year ago.

"It's continuing the pattern of extreme sea-ice loss," Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center said to ABC News. "What we're seeing in 2006 is way below the average ice extent over the 20 years ending in 2000."

There are still three weeks to go before the Arctic's "summer sea ice minimum," and already experts at the data center can see the bad news - and you can, too, at "Figure 2" when you click here.

That light-blue line snaking down and hugging the dotted line? It's bad news.

It shows the 2006 summer melt back of sea ice virtually as great as that in the summer of 2005 - which all means major changes under way for life, natural and human - in the Arctic, the United States and worldwide.

The public is getting smarter and smarter about the importance of sea-ice loss, Serreze says.

The arcane craft he and his colleagues practice in the academic quiet of their labs and computer rooms is no longer quite so lonely.

All sorts of people now call up wanting to know what's up with Arctic melt back.

"That's why we created this new blow-by-blow site," Serreze said. "People can watch along with us" as each warming Arctic month shatters ever more sea ice - and often records as well.

Bad News Bears

It's also more bad news for the world's polar bears, as confirmed in a new article in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Arctic.

Claire Parkinson, a NASA ice expert and author, told ABC News about new satellite data that show "the date at which the sea ice breaks up each summer, forcing polar bears back onto land, has been coming seven [days] or eight days earlier each decade" in Canadian Arctic regions she studies.

Polar bears - Latin name Ursus maritimus or "Sea Bear" - get virtually all their food, principally seals, on the sea ice.

The scientists say global warming means that summer melt backs are now dumping polar bears on land three weeks earlier each summer than in the mid-'70s, which means more hungry bears on land and more trouble for humans.

The Holy Grail - 'What We Really Need to Know'

"But sea-ice volume is what we really need to know," Serreze said.

"It's the Holy Grail" for sea-ice experts, he says, adding that the news here is probably worse than any we've heard about sea-ice extent.

News from NASA that Arctic summer sea ice melted back 30 percent in the last 30 years - and could well be gone completely by about the year 2070 - made headlines in the summer of 2005.

But those findings measured only the loss of surface area, not the thickness - thus the volume - of the ice.

Satellites are close to being able to measure ice thickness accurately, Serreze said.

New techniques are closing in on how to measure the amount of ice "freeboard" floating above the surface, which with a little fancy math can tell scientists the volume of the ice.

The world's first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, made the first submarine sonar measurements of Arctic sea-ice thickness in 1958.

"In the early '60s, they found thicknesses in the North Pole region of about 3½ meters [about 11 feet], and then in the late '80s and early '90s it was down to about 2½ meters [7 feet or 8 feet,]" Serreze said to ABC News.

"They needed that info back then for two reasons. First, to know where they could surface in an emergency. Second, to know where they could surface if there was a 'boomer' and they needed to fire off some missiles."

A third reason now adds great value to those ice-thickness measurements from Cold War submarines - the accelerating advance of global warming.

Both U.S. and former Soviet Union ice-thickness measurements have been declassified and are available to the world's ice experts.

Serreze says that a number of his colleagues are now working on Arctic summer sea-ice thickness, and that their findings so far show massive volume loss over the last 30 years.

Serreze cites work by Wieslaw Maslowski of the U.S. Navy Post Graduate School in Monterey, Calif., that strongly suggests it's not only Earth's warming atmosphere that is melting the Arctic ice from above.

"Wieslaw is saying it's also the warming sea currents melting the sea ice from below. He's been arguing that 2070 is way too far out in the future - way too conservative. I suspect he may be right," Serreze said.

Both these reporters walking out on the Arctic sea ice last summer in the company of scientists and Coast Guard officers of the Ice Breaker USCG Healy, were, as Arctic first timers, naturally worried about walking on thin ice a mile and a half above the sea floor.

"How thick? Is it safe?" we asked several times, stepping from small landing craft onto the beautiful white and blue undulating planes of ice reaching to the horizon.

We always got answers something like: "It's still OK - it's about four feet thick. It used to be eight feet thick, but now it's about four in most places."

Coasties and scientists are watching that thickness ever more closely now as they step off their landing boats, racing to gather what knowledge they can of this largely unknown and breathtakingly beautiful environment that is now melting away fast.

Onboard the Starship Enterprise, sci-fi fans saw Shatner freely 'explore the final frontier, seeking out new life and strange new worlds' in 79 episodes of the 40-year-old TV series.

However, apart from the Virgin craft being called Enterprise in tribute to the intrepid show, the similarities end there for Shatner as he insists getting him into space will cost Vigin boss Branston a lot more than just a free £114,000 ticket.

He added: "I do want to go up but I need guarantees I'll definitely come back."

But other celebrities like Alien's Sigourney Weaver are a little more enthusiastic about space travel. She has already booked her place on the two-and-a-half hour flight.

By studying the data collected by the Cluster satellites of European Space Agency (ESA), scientists found that high-speed flows of electrified gas, known as bursty bulk flows (BBFs), are generated by magnetic substorms.

Auroras are caused mostly by energetic BBFs spiraling down Earth's magnetic field lines and colliding with atmospheric atoms at about 100 kilometers altitude.

"When magnetic substorms occur, BBFs strike our atmosphere, making auroras shine," Cao explained.

BBFs contain electrons and other charged particles such as protons coming from the magnetotail, a region of space on the night-side of Earth where the sun's particle winds push Earth's magnetic field into a long tail, said the scientist.

At the tail's center is a denser region known as the plasmasheet. Violent changes of the plasmasheet are known as magnetic substorms. They last up to a couple of hours and somehow hurl electrons and protons earthward, Cao said.

Scientists were able to discover how the process works by using the four Cluster spacecraft, nicknamed Rumba, Samba, Salsa and Tango, launched in 2000.

The four spacecraft, all carrying identical instruments, flew through Earth's magnetosphere, or the region where the planet's magnetic field is dominant.

Cao became one of several Chinese co-researchers of the ESA's Cluster mission in 1996. His paper about magnetic substorms has been published in the authoritative science magazine, Journal of Geophysical Research.

Another key finding is that the average duration of a BBF is longer than previously thought, said Cao.

"The multiple spacecraft data offered by Cluster revealed more about Earth's magnetic environment than data collected by a single spacecraft," Cao said.

Apart from creating beautiful light shows, substorms also excite Earth's ionosphere, disturbing the reception of GPS signals and communications between Earth and orbiting satellites, said the scientist.

Clarifying the origin of Earth's aurora phenomena will help human beings understand weather in space, which is a key factor in ensuring the safety of space probe missions and astronauts, said Pu Zuyin, a professor at the School of Earth and Space Sciences at Beijing University.

According to Cao, the research team's next task is to build an aurora monitoring system, capable of forecasting and analyzing aurora movements.

The colorful auroras regularly light the higher latitudes in the northern and southern hemisphere. In China, people can see it only in the city of Mohe in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.

But the history of aurora observation in China can be dated back more than 2,000 years.

The woman lying unresponsive in her hospital bed could understand people talking to her and was able to imagine playing tennis or walking around her home, recorded by a brain scanner, in response to a request from the researchers.

It is the first time scientists have found a way to show preserved conscious awareness in a patient diagnosed as vegetative. If the findings are confirmed, this could force a reassessment of attitudes to patients in a vegetative state who have been thought to be unaware of their surroundings.

The researchers said in Science: "Her decision to co-operate... represents a clear act of intention which confirmed beyond any doubt that she was consciously aware of herself and her surroundings."

The discovery has astounded neuroscientists who believe it could have dramatic implications for life and death decisions over other patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS).

Last year, an intense legal battle over the life of Terri Schiavo, a woman diagnosed as PVS, was brought to an end when US courts upheld the decision to remove her feeding tube in March. She died 13 days later in a Florida care home.

"This is extremely important. It's the difference between life and death. From cases in the UK and the U.S., we know that end-of-life decisions are of course extremely important and this will definitely change the way we deal with these patients. When you have signs of consciousness, you cannot decide to stop hydration and nutrition," said Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liege and co-author of the study.

But Paul Matthews, professor of neurology at the University of Oxford, challenged the claims: "When patients are in a vegetative state they can react to stimuli but not in a truly meaningful way. Contrary to the claim of the authors, the observations do not establish either that the patient made a 'decision to co-operate' or that she had self-awareness. Response to stimuli does not provide evidence of a decision to respond."

"We don't know what 95 percent of the universe is made of -- which is a bit embarrassing for a subject that claims to be fundamental," Cox said. "There is Dark Matter. It is all over the place but we have no idea what it is."

DARK ENERGY

"There is also something called Dark Energy, and that is an even bigger question. It makes up about 70 percent of the energy in the universe but again we have absolutely no idea what it is.

"It is an incredibly exciting machine. It will be turned on next year and run for at least a decade and probably 20 years and the first results -- if the machine behaves itself -- should start coming out within a year," he added.

If the theories are correct, the machine will create tiny Black Holes that evaporate and possibly even find particles that offer evidence that the three dimensions known to mankind are just a fraction of those that actually exist.

"That would be an even bigger headline than the Black Holes. It could be that there is a whole new universe a millimeter away from our heads but at right-angles to the three dimensions that are here," Cox said.

"That would be a real paradigm shift -- our relegation to a little sheet in a multi-dimensional universe. That kind of thing is really profound and will capture the imagination that perhaps the origin of mass won't, although it should.

"For the first time in many decades we have built a machine that exceeds our powers of prediction. New processes are bound to be discovered," he added. "We are truly journeying into unknown territory."

Cox dismissed worries that by adventuring into the unknown and creating tiny Black Holes, the machine could even threaten to destroy the planet.

"The probability is at the level of 10 to the minus 40," he said.