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TULUM, Mexico - Hurricane Dean slammed into the Caribbean coast of Mexico on Tuesday as a roaring Category 5 hurricane, the most intense Atlantic storm to make landfall in two decades. It lashed ancient Mayan ruins and headed for the modern oil installations of the Yucatan Peninsula.

Dean's path was a stroke of luck for Mexico: It made landfall in a sparsely populated coastline that had already been evacuated, skirting most of the major tourist resorts. It weakened within hours to a Category 3 storm, with maximum sustained winds of 125 mph.

The eye of the storm hit land near Majahual, a port popular with cruise liners, and it was racing across the Yucatan Peninsula toward a Tuesday evening entry into the Bay of Campeche, where the state oil company evacuated the oil rigs that produce most of Mexico's oil.

In the largely Mayan town of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, at one point about 30 miles from the center of the storm, people stared from their porches at broken tree limbs and electrical cables crisscrossing the streets, some of which were flooded with ankle-deep water.

Tin roofing ripped from houses clunked hollowly as it bounced in the wind whistling through town.

"We began to feel the strong winds about 2 in the morning and you could hear that the trees were breaking and some tin roofs were coming off," said Miguel Colli, a 36-year-old store employee. "Everyone holed up in their houses. Thank God that the worst is over."

With the storm still screaming, there were no immediate reports of deaths, injuries or major damage, Quintana Roo Gov. Felix Gonzalez told Mexico's Televisa network, though officials had not been able to survey the area. In the Quintana Roo state capital, Chetumal, the storm downed trees and sent sheets of metal flying through the air.

At landfall, Dean had sustained winds near 165 mph and gusts that reached 200 mph — faster than the takeoff speed of many passenger jets. It was moving west-northwest near 20 mph across the Yucatan Peninsula.

The hurricane killed at least 12 people across the Caribbean, picked up strength after brushing Jamaica and the Cayman Islands and became a monstrous Category 5 hurricane Monday. Sections of the Jamaican capital and the island's east suffered severe damage in the storm, and the country postponed Aug. 27 general elections.

Only three Category 5 storms, capable of catastrophic damage, have hit the U.S. since 1935. Dean is the first Category 5 to make landfall in the Atlantic region since Hurricane Andrew hit south Florida in 1992.

Thousands of tourists fled the beaches of the Mayan Riviera. Though expected to escape a direct hit, Cancun still could face destructive winds.

"There's a lot of noisy wind now with this creature all over us," state civil protection official Francisco de la Cruz said from his hurricane-proof offices in Chetumal.

The hurricane center said Dean could gain power as it crosses the Bay of Campeche and would likely be a major hurricane when it makes landfall a second time on Wednesday. The storm's track would carry it into the central Mexican coast about 400 miles south of the Texas border.

"We often see that when a storm weakens, people let down their guard completely. You shouldn't do that," said Jamie Rhome, a hurricane specialist. "This storm probably won't become a Category 5 again, but it will still be powerful."

At 7 a.m. EDT, Dean's eye was over the Yucatan Peninsula, 40 miles northwest of Chetumal.
Meteorologists said a storm surge of 12 to 18 feet was possible at the storm's center, which could push sea water deep inland. Heavy rains threatened to inundate the swampy region.

Petroleos Mexicanos evacuated all 18,000 offshore workers and shut down production rigs on the Bay of Campeche — resulting in a production loss of 2.7 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day.

On Tuesday, Dean threatened the Yucatan's most vulnerable population — the Mayan people — many of whom have seen little of the riches from oil or tourism, and still live in traditional wooden slat huts in small settlements all over this low-lying area.

President Felipe Calderon said he would cut short a trip to Canada where he is meeting with President Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and travel Tuesday to the areas where the hurricane was expected to hit.

Trees fell and debris flew through the air in Corozal on Belize's northern border with Mexico. The government had evacuated Caye Caulker and Ambergris Caye — both popular with U.S. tourists — and ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew from Belize City to the Mexican border.

Authorities evacuated Belize City's three hospitals and were moving high-risk patients inland to the nation's capital, Belmopan, founded after 1961's Hurricane Hattie devastated Belize City.

Mayor Zenaida Moya urged residents to leave Belize City, saying it does not have shelters strong enough to withstand a storm of Dean's size.

At the southern tip of Texas, sandbags were distributed in the resort town of South Padre Island, and residents were urged to evacuate.

The crew of the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour prepared to land a day early Tuesday because of the threat NASA had once feared Hurricane Dean would pose to Mission Control in Houston.

In Mexico during the past three days, officials put more than 50,000 people on flights leaving various parts of the Yucatan peninsula, the federal Communications and Transportation Department said in a statement.

Cancun, well north of Dean's landfall, saw strong winds since the storm swirled over 75,000 square miles, about the size of Nebraska.

Cancun's tourist strip is still marked with cranes used to repair the damage from 2005's Hurricane Wilma, which caused $3 billion in losses. Dean is expected to be even stronger than Wilma, which stalled over Cancun and pummeled it for a day.

Dean had a minimum central pressure of 906 millibars just before landfall, the third lowest at landfall after the 1935 Labor Day hurricane in the Florida Keys and Hurricane Gilbert, which hit Cancun in 1988.

"A very low pressure indicates a very strong storm," said Hurricane Center meteorologist Rebecca Waddington.

The worst storm to hit Latin America in modern times was 1998's Hurricane Mitch, which killed nearly 11,000 people and left more than 8,000 missing, most in Honduras and Nicaragua.

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By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Mon Aug 20, 1:49 AM ET

WASHINGTON - Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer.

Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life."

"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. "We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."

That first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA — may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you'll have to look in a microscope to see it.

"Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe," Bedau said. "This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role."

And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.
Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:

• A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow good ones, and the ability to multiply.

• A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.

• A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and then changes it into energy.

One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step — creating a cell membrane — is "not a big problem." Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step — getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.

His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.

"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.

In Gainesville, Fla., Steve Benner, a biological chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution is attacking that problem by going outside of natural genetics. Normal DNA consists of four bases — adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (known as A,C,G,T) — molecules that spell out the genetic code in pairs. Benner is trying to add eight new bases to the genetic alphabet.
Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could "run amok," but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.

"When these things are created, they're going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," he said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."

(This version CORRECTS Bedau quote to "shed new light")

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The Yangtze River dolphin, one of the world's rarest mammals, is no more, a victim of China's breakneck economic growth and competition for food with one of the world's most common large mammals - human beings.
"We can say that the animal is functionally extinct," says August Pfluger, head of the Zurich-based Baiji.org Foundation, which in December co-sponsored a six-week, 2,000-mile (3,500-km) survey of the Yangtze without finding a single remaining member of the critically endangered species. The dolphin, one of only four exclusively freshwater species in the world, may have the unhappy distinction of being the first aquatic mammal to go extinct in more than half a century - and the first large mammal driven into oblivion by environmental degradation.
Nicknamed the "goddess of the Yangtze," and long considered auspicious by fishermen, the pale-colored, human-sized dolphins have always been rare: a 1997 survey recorded only 14 left in the river. (A captive dolphin died of old age in a Chinese zoo in 2002). But Pfluger says human pressure pushed the baiji past the tipping point. "The main reason is overfishing. The Chinese still use unsustainable fishing methods like dynamite. There's still a lot of illegal fishing, so the dolphins were competing with humans for food."
According to Wang Ding, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Hydrobiology and a leading expert on the baiji, damming on the river and noise from heavy boat traffic may have disoriented the dolphins, which are mostly blind and search for food in the sandy shallows using sonar. The confused and starving animals may then have wandered into boat propellers. Heavy dredging in shipping channels could also have made it harder for the animals to locate each other and hunt for increasingly scarce fish. "Dredging is a very serious problem," Wang says. "It destroys spawning grounds of fish. There are also too many boats. The baiji depend on their sonar ability to survive."
As top-level predators, dolphins like the baiji are an "indicator species" - bellwethers of the general health of an ecosystem. Their disappearance bodes ill for the Yangtze, which supports more than 400 million people, roughly 6% of the world's total population. Wang says the Yangtze is relatively unpolluted. But untrammeled commerce and massive hydrological projects like the Three Gorges Dam have dramatically altered the river's landscape. With as many as 60 boats per km of river in some areas, the Yangtze already looks less like a river than a highway during rush hour. "Baiji are at the top of the food chain just like human beings," Wang says. "If the river can't support baiji, someday it won't support humans either."
Indeed, baiji aren't the only animal facing extinction. Wang says the finless porpoise, another large cetacean native to the river, has also seen its population plummet because of shipping and hydrological engineering. When Wang surveyed the river in the early 1990s, he found about 1,200 of the porpoises; 15 years later, there were fewer than half that number left. But Wang says it may not be too late to save the species. Galvanized in part by the baiji's disappearance, Chinese scientists are taking aggressive steps to rescue the finless porpoise, including breeding the animals in a lake preserve. In fact, Wang believes it may not even be too late for the baiji: there may be a handful of baiji dolphins left in some isolated backwater of the Yangtze. If they can be located and captured, he says, breeding might yet save their species. Pfluger, however, is not so optimistic. "Maybe one or two are left," he says. "But they don't have any chance to survive."

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Lane Garrison, who pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter and drunken driving in a crash that killed a teenage passenger, was ordered Thursday to undergo a 90-day evaluation to help a judge decide his sentence.

The former "Prison Break" actor will undergo a "diagnostic" by parole officers and psychologists in a prison before returning for an Oct. 31 appearance before Superior Court Judge Elden S. Fox.

Garrison, 27, was driving a 2001 Land Rover on Dec. 2 when he lost control and rammed a tree. The crash killed Vahagn Setian, a Beverly Hills High School student who would have been 18 on Wednesday.
Two other passengers, both 15-year-old girls, survived. Garrison had a blood-alcohol content of 0.20 percent, more than twice the legal limit for driving, and was under the influence of cocaine, according to police. About a dozen of the victim's friends and relatives were in court Thursday, all wearing T-shirts with Setian's picture on the front and the James Dean saying "Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today" on the back.

Garrison pleaded guilty in May to one count of vehicular manslaughter without gross negligence, one count of driving under the influence with a blood-alcohol level of 0.15 percent or higher, and a misdemeanor of providing alcohol to a minor.

He apologized to Setian's family during the court proceeding. "I relive that night every day and I think about the bad decision I made that day. All I can say to you is, `I'm so sorry,'" he said. Garrison's character on Fox's "Prison Break" was killed in the show's Oct. 2 episode.

The Dallas native's other credits include the film "Crazy." He was recently featured in a public service announcement that encourages viewers not to drink and drive. The PSA re-enacts his crash and he appears to be holding back tears as he talks about what a stupid and costly mistake he made.

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