Hottest on record

First half of year: hottest on record - In what should come as no surprise to many people living in the United States in the last month or so, the first half of 2012 was officially the hottest ever recorded.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the period from January through June was "the warmest first half of any year on record for the contiguous United States."

The average temperature was 52.9 degrees Fahrenheit, or 4.5 degrees above average, the NOAA said on Monday. Twenty-eight states east of the Rockies set temperature records for the six-month period. The 12 months ending June 30 was the warmest 12-month period of any on record, according to the NOAA.

Frank Moralez sells cold beverages to motorists in Philadelphia, July 7, 2012. (Joseph Kaczmarek/AP)

Record-breaking temperatures blistered most of the United States in June, with more than 170 all-time temperature records broken or tied during the month. On June 28 in Norton, Kansas, for instance, the temperature reached 118 degrees, an all-time high. On June 26, Red Willow, Nebraska, set a temperature record of 115 degrees, eclipsing the 114-degree mark set in 1932.

The first six months of the year were also drier than most, with precipitation totals 1.62 inches below average. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, more than half of the country (56 percent) experienced drought conditions--the largest percentage in the 12-year history of the service.

The NOAA report comes on the heels of a heat wave that's been blamed for at least 30 deaths and shattered more than 3,000 temperature records in July alone.

Not all states have experienced the record-breaking heat, however. The state of Washington had its seventh coolest June on record, the NOAA said. ( The Lookout )

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Lionel Messi’s tremendous free kick in the Supercopa second leg

Lionel Messi’s tremendous free kick in the Supercopa second leg - After two early goals from Real Madrid gave them a 4-3 lead on aggregate in the Supercopa de Espana and Barcelona midfielder Adriano was sent off for an American football tackle on Cristiano Ronaldo, Leo Messi did what Leo Messi does to get his side back in it.

With a free kick in good position from a distance, Lionel Messi got a goal back for Barcelona just before halftime. He curled a bullet around the wall that Real Madrid keeper Iker Casillas had no chance to save and just like that, what was shaping up to be a terrible day for Barcelona was suddenly a little less terrible.

UPDATE: That Messi goal proved to be the last of the tie and Real won the Supercopa on away goals. This marks the first time Real Madrid have won the Supercopa since 2008, and after they edged out Barca to win La Liga last season, this could reinforce a swing in momentum in the rivalry atop Spanish football back their way. At least until the next Clasico on Oct. 7, where Barcelona will try to further chip away at Real Madrid's sluggish start to the new season.

Meanwhile, after scoring a world-record 73 goals in all competitions last season, Messi doesn't look ready to slow down yet. Including the Supercopa, he already has six goals in four matches with Barcelona this season. ( Dirty Tackle )

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Washington state's first 'zombie bees'

Washington state's first 'zombie bees' reported — The infection is as grim as it sounds: "Zombie bees" have a parasite that causes them to fly at night and lurch around erratically until they die.

And experts say the condition has crept into Washington state.

"I joke with my kids that the zombie apocalypse is starting at my house," said Mark Hohn, a novice beekeeper who spotted the infected insects at his suburban Seattle home.

Hohn returned from vacation a few weeks ago to find many of his bees either dead or flying in jerky patterns and then flopping on the floor.

He remembered hearing about zombie bees, so he collected several of the corpses and popped them into a plastic bag. About a week later, the Kent man had evidence his bees were infected: the pupae of parasitic flies.

"Curiosity got the better of me," Hohn said.

The zombie bees were the first to be confirmed in Washington state, The Seattle Times reported (http://is.gd/ji7UNX).

San Francisco State University biologist John Hafernik first discovered zombie bees in California in 2008.

Hafernik now uses a website to recruit citizen scientists like Hohn to track the infection across the country. Observers also have found zombie bees in Oregon and South Dakota.

The infection is another threat to bees that are needed to pollinate crops. Hives have been failing in recent years due to a mysterious ailment called colony collapse disorder, in which all the adult honey bees in a colony suddenly die.

The life cycle of the fly that infects zombie bees is reminiscent of the movie "Alien," the newspaper reported. A small adult female lands on the back of a honeybee and injects eggs into the bee's abdomen. The eggs hatch into maggots.

"They basically eat the insides out of the bee," Hafernik said.

After consuming their host, the maggots pupate, forming a hard outer shell that looks like a fat, brown grain of rice. That's what Hohn found in the plastic bag with the dead bees. Adult flies emerge in three to four weeks.

There's no evidence yet that the parasitic fly is a major player in the bees' decline, but it does seem the pest is targeting new hosts, said Steve Sheppard, chairman of the entomology department at Washington State University.

"It may occur a lot more widely than we think," he said.

That's what Hafernik hopes to find out with his website, zombeewatch.org. The site offers simple instructions for collecting suspect bees, watching for signs of parasites and reporting the results.

Once more people start looking, the number of sightings will probably climb, Hohn said.

"I'm pretty confident I'm not the only one in Washington state who has them," he said. ( Associated Press )

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Mysterious Ancient Rock Carvings Found Near Nile

Mysterious Ancient Rock Carvings Found Near Nile - An archaeological team in the Bayuda Desert in northern Sudan has discovered dozens of new rock art drawings, some of which were etched more than 5,000 years ago and reveal scenes that scientists can't explain.

The team discovered 15 new rock art sites in an arid valley known as Wadi Abu Dom, some 18 miles (29 kilometers) from the Nile River. It’s an arid valley that flows with water only during rainy periods. Many of the drawings were carved into the rock faces — no paint was used — of small stream beds known as "khors" that flow into the valley.

Some of the sites revealed just a single drawing while others have up to 30, said lead researcher Tim Karberg, of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in Germany.

“We asked the local people about the rock art and they said that it would be very old, before their grandfathers,” Karberg told LiveScience.

Knight rider

A number of the images appear to date back around 1,500 years ago, to a period when Christianity was spreading in Sudan. They include depictions of crosses, a church, which may show a nearby, ancient monastery called al-Ghazali, and one remarkable picture of a knight riding an animal with horns.

"One is a depiction of an armed rider, with a lance and a shield, a kind of knight depiction," Karberg said, suggesting this may be an image of St. George, the legendary soldier said to have slain a dragon.

Drawings of St. George are known from Sudan and texts discussing him have been found within the country. “Our texts attest to the popularity of the Saint in Christian Nubia,” wrote historian Gerald Brown, in a study he did on the subject.

The team also found detailed representations of cattle at Wadi Abu Dom that, based on rock drawings found at other sites, are probably from the late Bronze Age. During this time, more than 3,000 years ago, the northern parts of the country were occupied by the Egyptian empire.

Mystery carvings

Another, even more mysterious, set of rock art appears to be at least 5,000 years old and shows a mix of geometric designs.

The "oldest rock art we found are the spiral motifs," said Karberg, which, as their name suggests, twist up in a way that is hard to interpret. Similar drawings have been found in the Sahara Desert.

They were created at a time when Africa was a wetter place, with grasslands and savannah dominating Sudan; people were moving to a lifestyle based on animal husbandry and, in some instances, farming.

Understanding what these drawings mean is difficult. Some researchers connect the "spiral motifs to some astronomical or astrological forms," Karberg said, but he thinks it might have more to do with math. "The regularity of the spiral might be one of the earliest mathematical ideas the people developed."

A second set of geometric drawings, probably a bit younger than the spirals, is "hard to describe," Karberg said. They consist of "amorphous patterns which are not circular. ... It looks like an irregular-shaped net," Karberg said.

There is no evidence that people were fishing in this area 5,000 years ago, ruling out fishing nets. One possibility is that these irregular "nets" may actually be animal hides. Similar drawings found in Uganda were identified as showing the hide of a crocodile or some other animal, Karberg said.

Music in the desert?

Finally, what artist wouldn't like to relax with a bit of music? The team also uncovered several "rock gongs," large rocks that someone would have smacked a small rock against to make a sound. When the archaeologists experimented with them they found that some of the gongs could produce multiple tones.

Karberg said that it’s difficult to pin down when they were used; it could have been centuries ago or millennia. They may have been used for signalling rather than for actual music. But one thing is for sure, they would have made a pretty decent sound. "As we tried out the sound of many of those rock gongs you could hear (them) quite a long distance," Karberg said.

The research at Wadi Abu Dom is ongoing and the rock art discovery was first presented last year at the 12th International Nubian Studies Conference. ( LiveScience.com )

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As Dinosaurs Waned and Mammals Rose, the Lowly Louse Kept Pace

As Dinosaurs Waned and Mammals Rose, the Lowly Louse Kept Pace - Biologists have found a new way to peer back 130 million years in time, illuminating the catastrophic period in which the dinosaurs perished and birds and mammals arose.

The new approach rests on reconstructing the family tree of lice. Vincent S. Smith, a louse taxonomist at the Natural History Museum in London, has found that the tree stretches so far back in time that the host of the first louse would have been a dinosaur, probably one of the theropod dinosaurs that were the ancestors of birds.

Dr. Smith and his colleagues reconstructed the louse family tree by analyzing DNA from present-day louse species that parasitize birds and mammals. Most lice are specialists, feeding on a single species to whose fur or feathers their claws are adapted. The adaptation is so precise that when a louse’s host species evolves into a new one, the louse will diversify into different species, too.

The human head louse, for instance, evolved from the chimpanzee louse when the ancestors of humans and chimps split apart some five million years ago. The human pubic louse, on the other hand, is related to the gorilla louse, from which it parted company some 13 million years ago. Species of human lice thus mirror the splits in the tree of ape and human evolution.

In the same way, species of lice on living animals and birds reflect the splits in animal and bird ancestry back to the time that lice first arose. Family trees based on DNA can be given precise dates at all their branch points if a few datable fossils of the right age are available. But this is difficult to do with lice, for which almost no fossils are known. Dr. Smith was fortunate that two fossil lice discovered in the last few years — one of them 44 million and the other 100 million years old — provided the necessary anchors for his tree.

The assembled family tree shows that lice started to radiate into new species well before the end of the Cretaceous period, Dr. Smith and his colleagues report in the current issue of Biology Letters. The finding implies that their hosts, both mammals and birds, had also begun to flourish and speciate before the reign of the dinosaurs was over.

The new tree bears on a longstanding dispute about the rise of birds and mammals. One school holds that both groups proliferated early in the Cretaceous period, which began 145 million years ago, and that many lineages survived the cataclysm that brought the Cretaceous and the dinosaurs to a sudden end: the strike of a large asteroid 65 million years ago. The opposing view is that mammals and birds did not become successful and radiate into many different species until after the demise of the dinosaurs.

Unfortunately, the new finding will probably not settle the issue of whether birds and mammals speciated before or after the asteroid hit. “I would put this down as an entry in the debate,” Dr. Smith said. “The louse phylogeny adds one more piece of data to this puzzle. It says lice are old, predate the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, and must have been living on something.”

The issue is contentious because the fossil record suggests that placental mammals did not expand, in terms of the number of different species, until after 65 million years ago. A plausible reason is that all the dinosaurs had been killed off, except the line that evolved into birds, and the placental mammals speciated into the ecological niches that had been left vacant.

But biologists reconstructing the mammalian tree of evolution from the DNA of living species have come to a different conclusion. Their molecular clock data suggest a much earlier speciation, perhaps prompted by the breakup of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana around 120 million years ago. In this view, placental mammals evolved into distinct species before the asteroid hit of 65 million years ago, and many would have survived the mass die-out that polished off the dinosaurs.

Michael Novacek, an expert in mammalian paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said the louse tree was very interesting and showed that lice were diversifying during the Cretaceous. But the fossil record of placental mammals is reliable and does not record a speciation until later. “The fossil record continues to show that the origin of modern placental mammals postdates or is at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary,” he said. “So the contradiction between the fossils and molecular clocks remains.”

In his view, the hosts on which lice were speciating during the Cretaceous could have been a different branch of the mammalian family tree, all of whose species are extinct.

Dr. Smith said Dr. Novacek was correct in saying that there were nonplacental mammals around in the Cretaceous on which lice would doubtless have fed. But these nonplacental mammals, which included several lineages of marsupials, all became extinct, taking their parasites with them. These lice would not show up in his tree, Dr. Smith said, unless they had been able to transfer to the placental mammalian species, and most lice do not regularly switch hosts.

Dr. Smith believes that lice infested birds before mammals, in part because lice are so common on birds. Every bird family but one has lice, and there is a species of bird, the great tinamou, that harbors 18 different species of lice, perhaps because it has many different kinds of feathers, each offering a special niche. Given the ancient root of the louse family tree, it is likely that the first louse infested the feathered dinosaurs that were e birds’ ancestors, he concludes. ( nytimes.com )

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Five myths about gas prices

Five myths about gas prices - Gasoline prices have been steadily climbing for several months, and Americans are feeling the pain at the pump. The possible culprits (from greedy oil execs to Mideast turmoil) are as plentiful as the proposed solutions (more offshore drilling, green energy or government reserves). But what is really driving prices up? And what, if anything, can be done about it? Let’s take a moment to fill up on information about our fuel.

1. Fighting in Libya is sending gas prices higher.

Libya is not a big enough global oil supplier for the battles there to have a meaningful effect on gas prices. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Libya was a major U.S. supplier, selling us around 700,000 barrels of oil per day. But today, we import less than 50,000 barrels per day from Libya — a tiny fraction of the 9.2 million barrels per day the United States imported in 2010. Worldwide, the story is no different: Of the 86 million barrels consumed globally each day, less than 2 percent come from Moammar Gaddafi’s regime.

Prices at a gas station in San Francisco, Calif. on March 9.

So why are gas prices up? Though Gaddafi’s fate is largely irrelevant to the oil market, unrest throughout the greater Middle East is not. The Persian Gulf region produces almost 24 million barrels of oil per day, more than 25 percent of global oil consumption. The Arab spring that has brought protests to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen makes markets nervous, and when markets fret over a possible disruption to oil supplies, gas prices rise — whether the disruption materializes or not.

2. Tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a smart way to reduce gas prices.

The U.S. government maintains a 727 million-barrel oil reserve — 38 days’ worth at current levels of consumption — to protect against potential supply disruptions. But just about every time prices rise, politicians want to access the oil in the reserve to increase supply and bring prices back down. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), for instance, has been calling for oil releases from the SPR for more than a decade. In a letter to President Bill Clinton in 1999, he endorsed the release of several hundred thousand barrels a day from the SPR because, according to a news release about the letter, oil prices had made a “meteoric ascent to nearly $25 per barrel.”

Had Clinton dipped into the reserve then, as Schumer requested, we almost certainly would have gotten a raw deal. What if that $25-per-barrel oil could be replenished only at $75 per barrel? Tapping the SPR makes the government an oil speculator, and any nation running record deficits that becomes a commodity trader is playing a dangerous game.

The SPR exists to buy time in a true supply emergency. If we use it as a political tool to keep voters happy by stemming rising gas prices, we may be forced to buy back oil at even higher prices, or we may be left with an insufficient supply in a real crisis.

3. Oil companies produce less in the spring to make gas prices increase.

Almost every year, gasoline prices rise in the spring. At the same time, refineries produce less fuel. This isn’t because oil companies want to keep inventories low to drive prices higher. It’s because what’s in our gasoline — specifically, butane — changes from season to season.

Butane is a cheap ingredient in gasoline that boils at low temperatures. In winter, this isn’t a problem. But in summer, butane evaporates from gas, polluting the air while leaving us with less fuel in the tank than we paid for. As temperatures rise, refineries replace butane with more costly ingredients and draw down winter inventories just as beach season begins.

Chemistry, not corporate conspiracy, limits supply.

4. The Obama administration is driving up gas prices.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says EPA regulations are a “back-door national energy tax” that pushes prices up. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin says the White House drilling moratorium shows President Obama’s “culpability in the high gas prices hurting Americans.”

Blaming the president for rising gas prices is nothing new, and it’s a bipartisan tactic. In 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) blamed President George W. Bush for higher gas prices and for continuing to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as oil prices climbed.

Just one problem: Even if domestic supplies were developed, American presidents couldn’t really control oil prices. The U.S. government has estimated that there are 18 billion barrels of oil in the outer continental shelf of the lower 48 states that are off limits to development. That may sound like a lot, but it is only about 21 / 2 years of supply for the United States, and it would take several years to allocate leases and drill exploratory wells. Even if the estimated 10 billion barrels of oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge were available for development, today’s policy decisions would have no impact on gasoline supplies for as much as a decade. Obama can’t dictate what you’ll pay for premium tomorrow.

5. Americans can’t live without cheap gas.

Yes, Americans love to drive, and Americans love cheap gas. But across an ocean, there’s a continent filled with people a lot like us who’ve lived with high gas prices for years. They’re called Europeans.

While U.S. gasoline heads toward $4 per gallon, Europeans have been paying much higher prices for years because of high taxes on fuel. This month in Britain, gas hit 6 pounds, or about $9.76, per gallon. Because gas is so dear, Europe’s per capita energy use is half that of the United States, leaving Europe less vulnerable to oil price shocks yet not undermining its citizens’ standard of living.

The United States, built on cheap oil, is much less densely populated than the Old World, with more wide-open spaces to traverse. But that doesn’t mean we can’t embrace some of the things that have helped Europeans keep their gasoline bills down — such as high-speed rail, public transportation and green energy.

In fact, Americans have shown that they can adjust their behavior when faced with sticker shock at the pump. As gas prices rose from $2.31 per gallon in 2005 to $3.30 per gallon in 2008, sales of the Toyota Prius eclipsed those of the Ford Explorer, and public transit use reached a 50-year high. When it costs $30 to fill up a Geo Metro with regular, all options are on the table. ( washingtonpost.com )

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Al Gore Explains 'Snowmageddon'

Al Gore Explains 'Snowmageddon' - If the planet is warming, why is a third of America locked in a deep freeze, with record-low temperatures as far south as the Mexican border, where the thermometer in Ciudad Juarez plummeted Wednesday night to a bone-chilling 9-below zero?

Self-proclaimed planetary climate czar Al Gore thinks he has answer.

"As it turns out, the scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now, and they say increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming," Gore write in a blog post. The Nobel Prize-winning former vice president was responding to a question posed by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, who wondered on air why global warming was such an urgent science policy priority when the New York City area had become a “tundra” this winter.

Hundreds of cars were stranded on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, Wednesday, Feb. 2, after a winter blizzard of historic proportions wobbled the otherwise snow-tough city.

Gore also indicated that he believes a rise in global temperatures is creating “all sorts of havoc,” from hotter dry spells to colder winters and ever more violent storms. This is even endangering certain species of animals and leading to forest fires and floods.

But not surprisingly, some climate-change skeptics are a bit hot under the collar over Gore’s “scientific” explanation.

“Gore’s statement actually indicates a deeper problem -- lack of precise predictions,” said Dr. William M. Briggs, a statistician and climate scientist. His research shows that there are no increased weather problems because of global warming, Briggs told FoxNews.com.

“He’s saying that anything bad that happens must be because global warming caused it. Activists like Gore are great at identifying events after the fact as being caused by global warming, but terrible at predicting them beforehand,” Briggs said.

Meteorologist Art Horn agreed, noting the extensive history of devastating weather over the millennia -- none of which he connects with global warming.

“If one actually studies the history of weather over the last 2,000 years, you see massive storms, amazing heat, brutal cold waves, devastating droughts, terrible floods and disastrous hurricanes -- none caused by global warming,” he told FoxNews.com.

“Gore has no appreciation for large natural variability in weather,” Horn said.

Other scientists were quick to leap to Gore's support, arguing that the extreme cold weather is a logical, expected outcome for our warming planet.

“It’s not hard at all to get temperatures cold enough for snow in a world experiencing global warming,” meteorologist Jeffrey Masters told FoxNews.com. “There will still be colder than average winters in a world that is experiencing warming with plenty of opportunities for snow.”

The contretemps over global warming and winter weather -- and the bickering among scientists about man's effect on the climate -- has had a profound impact on public opinion around the globe.

A January poll by Rasmussen Reports indicates that Americans are still more inclined to believe global warming is primarily caused by long-term planetary trends, although the gap narrowed a bit this month. But Americans don't blame global warming for this winter’s weather.

Skepticism is very clearly increasing overseas; a poll released this week by the Office for National Statistics in the U.K. indicated that the number of climate skeptics there had nearly doubled during the last four years. The proportion of people who said they were “not very concerned” about global warming now numbers more than one in five, the U.K. government said.

But many still argue that global warming is real, and the ultimate cause of the wretched weather. One environmental consultant pointed FoxNews.com to an article that detailed a polar bear's nine-day swim to find an ice raft for refuge -- due to global warming’s impact on the environment of Alaska.

Others take a less anecdotal approach, and say that pure science supports Gore's global-warming argument.

“It’s basic atmospheric physics,” said Meg Wilcox, a spokeswoman for Ceres, a national network of investors and environmental organizations. “Warmer air holds more moisture. This fact is apparent when you see water vapor hanging in the air after turning off a hot shower. When warm air holding moisture meets cooler air, the moisture condenses into tiny droplets that will fall as precipitation, rain or snow, depending upon atmospheric conditions.”

Warm air meets cold air seems simple enough. So why can't scientists agree?

If it all seems confusing and contradictory, other experts say, the real blame lies not with the climate, or with science, or even scientists or former politicians, but with the incompetent media for failing to provide critical context for readers.

“The last 2,000 years is full of incredible weather events that dwarf what we see today,” said Horn. “Nature isn't cooperating with the global warming camp and theory.”

He points to a New York Times story from the 1970s, which said the planet was getting so cold that humanity was in danger of starving to death. The article argued that the world’s weather would soon be so frigid that it could no longer permit the cultivation of crops for food. The Times’ headline on August 8, 1974, was simple enough: “Climate changes Endanger World’s Food Output.”

“First we were told the world was cooling. Then it was getting hotter,” Dan Gainor, a spokesman for the Media Research Center, tells FoxNews.com. “Then cooling again. Then hotter. Now it’s just climate change -- so they can’t be wrong no matter what change occurs.” ( foxnews.com )

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Scientists try to mate Galapagos tortoise — again

Scientists try to mate Galapagos tortoise — again - Will Lonesome George ever become a dad?

Scientists are still hoping to mate the near century-old giant tortoise from the Galapagos — even though efforts over the past two decades have failed.

The Galapagos National Park said in a statement Thursday that they are providing two new female partners for George, who is believed to be the last living member of the Geochelone abigdoni species.

Giant tortoise named `` Lonesome George '' - In this July 21, 2008 file photo released by the Galapagos National Park, a giant tortoise named 'Lonesome George' is seen in the Galapagos islands, an archipelago off Ecuador's Pacific coast. Scientists are still hoping to mate the elderly giant tortoise from the Galapagos - even though efforts over the past two decades have failed. On Thursday, park officials said that they are providing two new female partners for George, who is believed to be the last living member of the Geochelone abigdoni species

George is estimated to be between 90 and 100 years old — and could have at least 50 more years ahead of him. For the past 20 years, he has lived with two previous female partners, of the similar but different Geochelone becki species. The females laid eggs in 2008, 2009 and last year, but none resulted in viable offspring.

Scientists believe George may have a better chance of reproducing with his two new partners, of the Geochelone hoodensis species.

The two potential mates arrived on Santa Cruz island, where George lives, on Thursday from the archipelago's Spanish Island.

Genetic studies conducted by Yale University have shown that the newly arrived tortoises "are genetically closer ... more compatible, and could offer greater possibilities of producing offspring," the park's statement said.

The Galapagos island chain, about 620 miles (1,000 kms) off Ecuador's coast, is home to unique animal species that inspired Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution. (Associated Press )

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