LONDON (AFP) - - A 19-year-old actor from the Harry Potter films has been arrested after police allegedly found cannabis in his car and his mother's home, reports and Scotland Yard said.  James Waylett, who plays Vincent Crabbe, a Hogwart pupil and Potter-hating bully, was detained with another young man in central London last Thursday. "Two 19-year-old occupants were found in the vehicle. Both men were arrested and taken to Central London police station," said a Scotland Yard spokesman, adding that officers later raided his mother's home in Camden, north London.

At least 10 cannabis plants worth 2,000 pounds (2,900 dollars, 2,200 euros) were found, said media reports including the tabloid Sun, which printed the story under the headline "Harry Pothead."

The maximum punishment in Britain for cannabis production, which is considered a class B drug, is a 14-year jail sentence.

The latest Harry Potter film in which he stars, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," will be released in Britain in July 17.

Last month a 22-year-old man was jailed for at least 20 years for stabbing and killing another actor from the latest Potter film, Rob Knox, in May last year in southeast London.

The Harry Potter series of books by J.K. Rowling have sold over 400 million copies, been translated into 67 languages, and spawned a successful series of films and a theme park.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - - Journalists based in the United States got a shock Thursday when they dialed a toll-free number to join a conference call with senior officials accompanying US President Barack Obama in London.   The number turned out to be a sex chat line inviting callers to use their credit card numbers. "Do you have any hidden desires?" a sultry voiced woman asked. "Well, do you feel like getting nasty? Then you came to the right place -- brought to you by the girls of Swank magazine," she said.

Reporters finally got through to the two officials in London -- National Security Advisor James Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- when they gave up on the US "800" number and instead dialed an international number.

The White House did not offer an explanation when asked how it sent the wrong number in an email listing both numbers -- one for journalists in the United States and the other for those overseas.

"Lots of important issues to cover today!" Thomas Vietor, a White House spokesman, told AFP when asked about the mistake in a follow-up email.

When pressed further about the number, Vietor replied: "I haven't dialed whatever number you're referencing. Please call such numbers on your free time!"

Jones and Clinton were being interviewed about the NATO summit on Friday in Strasbourg, but the contents of the call cannot be released until 0400 GMT, in line with rules stipulated by the White House.

TROMSOE, Norway (AFP) - - Potentially fatal to the polar bear, global warming has already left its mark on the species with smaller, less robust bears that are increasingly showing cannibalistic tendencies. Top experts who gathered this week in Tromsoe in northern Norway to discuss ways of protecting the species sounded alarm bells over the dramatic consequences of the melting ice.   "We don't have hard evidence about climate change but we have evidence about the numerous symptoms of climate change on polar bears," Andrew Derocher, chair of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, an international network of researchers, said.

The primary observation is that as the sea ice shrinks away, so are the polar bears -- they're not growing as big as they used to.

In Canada's Hudson Bay, home to a large polar bear population, the ice season is now three weeks shorter than it was 30 years ago, chipping away at the bears' opportunity to hunt seals, their primary source of food and an essential source of fat needed for their long summer fast.

Females today weigh around 230 kilos (500 pounds), some 65 kilos less than in 1980, and measure about 185 centimetres (6.07 feet) on average, compared to around 220 centimetres a few decades ago.

The melting ice means not only shorter hunting seasons, but it also means the bears, who number some 20,000 to 25,000 worldwide, have to cross greater distances to reach their icy hunting grounds.

This has led to a deterioration of the bears' health, impacting their reproductive capacities and the cubs' chances of survival, experts warned.

"The chain of events starts with a drop in body condition that subsequently leads to a drop in reproduction which leads to a drop in survival," Derocher said.

Climate change also appears to have altered the bears' behavioural patterns.

Several recent incidents of cannibalism in Alaska have observers worried.

"We knew of polar bears killing and eating other polar bears," Steven Amstrup, a research wildlife biologist with the US Geological Survey, told AFP.

"But the difference was that this time the polar bears were clearly deliberately hunting other bears, attacking for example females in their denning area" in northern Alaska, he said.

"We assume that it was linked to nutritional stress."

Faced with the growing uncertainty concerning the ice, pregnant polar bears are increasingly denning on land, researchers have noticed.

In northern Alaska, two-thirds of bears now choose to den on land in order to give birth early in the year, an inverse proportion of what was observed a few years ago.

"They are refugees rather than immigrants. This is not a chosen exile, this is a forced exile," Derocher told AFP.

The shrinking sea ice is also sometimes forcing the bears to swim ever further afield, encountering more treacherous waters.

Polar bears are accomplished swimmers -- their Latin name is ursus maritimus -- yet in late 2004, four polar bears were found dead after drowning in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska, likely the victims of a heavy sea.

According to scientists' estimates, some 25 polar bears may have died in that incident.

"Any of these symptoms taken alone might not be so worrying but seen in their totality it shows a bleak picture of how climate change is impacting polar bears already now," said Geoff York, a polar bear expert at environmental group WWF.

"And it's only forecast to get worse," he said.

PARIS (AFP) - - People who drink their tea piping hot run a higher risk of throat cancer than counterparts who prefer a cooler cuppa, according to an investigation published Friday by the British Medical Journal. Cancer of the oesophagus is linked especially to smoking and alcohol abuse but hot beverages have also been considered a risk factor, possibly because of damage to throat tissue. Interested in finding out more, Iranian researchers went to Golestan province, which has one of the highest rates of oesophageal cancer in the world.

Inhabitants there sip large quantities of hot black tea -- typically drinking more than a litre (1.8 pints) per day per person -- but also have a low incidence of tobacco and alcohol use.

A team led by Reza Malekzadeh of the Digestive Disease Research Centre at Tehran University of Medical Sciences looked at 300 people who had been diagnosed with a throat tumour and a matched group of 571 healthy people who lived in the same area.

Those who drank hot tea (between 65-69 degrees Celsius, 149-156 degrees Fahrenheit) were twice as likely to develop throat cancer compared with those who drank warm or lukewarm tea, whose temperature was 65 C (149 F) or less.

Drinking very hot tea (at least 70 C, 158 F) was associated with an eightfold increased risk compared with warm or lukewarm tea.

In an editorial, The Lancet said the study backed evidence that scorching fluids may cause damage to the throat's epithelial lining and lead to cancer, although exactly how this happens remains unclear.

But it also said that there was no cause for panic, as most people tend to drink tea at a warm temperature. Previous studies in Britain have reported an average temperature preference of 56-60 C (133-140 F).

It recommended that tea junkies wait at least four minutes before drinking from a freshly boiled cup.

The study said there was no association between the amount of tea that was consumed and the risk of cancer.

Its scope did not include an assessment of risk for coffee and other hot beverages.

CHICAGO (AFP) - - Seductive chemicals are hidden in sloppy kisses, scientists say, but even the most chaste caress can spark an intense hormonal response. "Men like sloppier kisses with more open mouth and that suggests to me that they are unconsciously trying to transfer testosterone to trigger the sex drive in women," said Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Kissing can certainly open the door to sex, Fisher said. But it can also close it: a recent study found that the first kiss was the "kiss of death" for budding relationships. "Should you drool more? You don't want to turn off your partner," Fisher warned.

Kissing is a natural instinct that likely serves a number of evolutionary purposes, said Fisher, one of the leading experts in the biology of love and attraction.

Men's preference for sloppy kisses with lots of tongue may help them over come their poor sense of smell and taste.

"What they might be doing is trying to pick up the estrogen cycle in a woman to figure out the degree of her fertility."

Kissing also stimulates an enormous part of the brain, but love can do even more, according to an experiment Fisher ran with MRI brain scans.

Fisher found people who had recently fallen in love had high levels of activity in the reward system in the brain that produces dopamine and is linked to craving, motivation, focused attention and goal-oriented behavior.

"Rejected people showed a great deal of activity in several areas directly associated with addiction," Fisher told reporters gathered at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Long term lovers showed activity in the same "reward" area as new lovers but also showed activity in a region associated with the feeling of calm that produces the chemical serotonin and in the area that produces oxytocin, which is associated with pair-bonding.

Kissing raises oxytocin levels among men and also lowers stress hormones in both men and women, according to a study that will be presented at the conference Saturday.

Wendy Hill, a neuroscience professor at Lafayette College, tested the saliva and blood of 15 couples who spend 15 minutes either kissing or holding hands and talking.

She found that the women had significantly higher levels of the pair-bonding hormone than the men before the experiment started, but those levels dropped when they were tested after the experiment was completed.

It was a surprising result, which Hill said could be attributed to the fact that the test was run in the college's health center and that a bit of soft music and some flowers were not enough to get the women in the mood.

"We're running the setting again in a more romantic setting," Hill said. "It's a secluded room in an academic building. It has a couch, it has flowers, it has candles - electric because of fire hazard issues - and we have light jazz playing."

CHICAGO (AFP) - - Earth-like planets with life-sustaining conditions are spinning around stars in our galactic neighborhood, US astrophysicists say. They just haven't been found yet.  "There are something like a few dozen solar-type stars within something like 30 light years of the sun, and I would think that a good number of those -- perhaps half of them have Earth-like planets," Alan Boss told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of  Science (AASS).  "So I think there is a very good chance that we will find some Earth-like planets within 10, 20 or 30 light years of the Sun," the astrophysicist from the Carnegie Institution for Science told his AAAS colleagues meeting here since Thursday.

One light year equals the distance light travels in one year at the speed of 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) per second, or 9.46 trillion kilometers (5.88 trillion miles).

Boss is convinced that the Earth-sized planets could be found either by the Kepler space telescope US space agency NASA plans to launch on March 5, or by the French-European telescope-equipped COROT satellite that has been in orbit since 2006.

"I will be absolutely astonished if Kepler or COROT didn't find any earth-like planets, because basically we are finding them already," Boss told a press conference Saturday when asked why he felt so confident.

COROT has already discovered the smallest extraterrestrial planet so far. At a little over twice the Earth's diameter, the planet is very close to its star and very hot, astronomers reported earlier this month.

Boss said Kepler and COROT will likely find so many Earth-like planets that they will "tell us how to go ahead and build the next space telescope to go and examine these planets, after we know they are there."

The images from those new planets, he added, should identify "light from their atmosphere and tell us if they have perhaps methane and oxygen. That will be pretty strong proof they are not only habitable but actually are inhabited."

"I am not talking about a planet with intelligence on it. I simply say if you have a habitable world ... sitting there, with the right temperature with water for a billion years, something is going to come out of it.

"At least we will have microbes," said Boss.

Raymond Jeanloz, professor of astronomy, earth and planetary science at the University of California at Berkeley, delved further into the matter.

"I can strongly reinforce Alan Boss's point that life from this perspective that is very much driven by our understanding from the genome, is in some sense 'inevitable,'" if the same basic building blocks of life that exist on Earth are present.

"The distinction will be more between a class of life form that can communicate with us versus ... the vast abundance of life forms recorded in our fossil records, namely microbial life."

On the possibility of finding an extra-terrestrial civilization, Boss said the research "is an interesting one and an important one to do because, even though there is a small probability of success, if you actually find something, it is an immense discovery to make.

"So you say, 'yes, this is worth doing.'"