2012: Hottest Year on Record for Continental U.S.

Temperatures across the continental United States soared in 2012 to an all-time high, making last year the warmest year on record for the country by a wide margin, scientists say. (Related: "July Hottest Month on Record in U.S.—Warming and Drought to Blame?")

"2012 marks the warmest year on record for the contiguous U.S., with the year consisting of a record warm spring, the second warmest summer, the fourth warmest winter, and a warmer than average autumn," Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at the National Climatic Data Center at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said in a press conference Tuesday.

According to a new NOAA report, the average temperature for the lower 48 states in 2012 was 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius), which is higher than the previous 1998 record by one degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degree Celsius).

A single degree difference might not seem like much, but it is an unusually large margin, scientists say. Annual temperature records typically differ by just tenths of a degree Fahrenheit.

"That is quite a bit for a whole year averaged over the whole country," said Anthony Barnston, chief forecaster at Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), who was not involved in the study.

2012: An Odd Year

To put that difference in perspective, said NOAA's Crouch, consider that the entire range of temperature increase between the coldest year on record, which occurred in 1917, and the previous hottest year in 1998 was just 4.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 degrees Celsius).

"2012 is now more than one degree above the top of that. So we're talking about well above the pack in terms of all the years we have data for the U.S.," he added.

2012 was also the 15th driest year on record for the nation: The average precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 26.57 inches (67.5 centimeters), 2.57 inches (6.5 centimeters) below average.

Moreover, every single one of the lower 48 states had above average temperatures. Nineteen states had their warmest year on record and an additional 26 states experienced one of their top ten warmest years on record.

2012 was unusual in another way for the nation, according to the NOAA report. Last year was the second most extreme year on record for the U.S., with 11 natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy and a widespread drought that each cost at least a billion dollars in losses. (See pictures of the U.S. drought.)

Global Warming at Play?

The country's record year can't be explained by natural climate variability alone, noted Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the Boulder, Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research.

"It is abundantly clear that we are seeing [human-caused] climate change in action," Trenberth, who also did not participate in the NOAA report, said in an email. "These records do not occur like this in an unchanging climate." (Test your global warming knowledge.)

(Also see "Climate Predictions: Worst-Case May Be Most Accurate, Study Finds.")

Just how much of a role climate change played is still unclear, however. "That's kind of hard to state at this point," NOAA's Crouch said.

"Climate change has had a role in this ... but it's hard for us to say at this time what amount of the 2012 temperature was dependent on climate change and what part was dependent on local variability."

For example, Columbia University's Barnston pointed out, an atmospheric weather pattern known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) was in the positive phase for much of the winter of 2012, which lead to warmer winters in the eastern U.S.

Warming Trend May Continue

There's no guarantee that the weather pattern will continue in 2013. "It could be in the negative phase, which would make it more like it was a few years ago when we had very snowy winters in the eastern part of the country," Barnston said.

The NAO is an example of "a factor that makes the U.S. annual mean temperature kind of jog up and down from year to year. It won't just gradually go straight up with global warming. It can take big dips and have big jumps."

But if climate change continues unchecked, heat records will become more common, NOAA's Crouch said.

"If the warming trend continues, we will expect to see more warmer than average years."

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Hospitals Flooded With Flu Patients

U.S. emergency rooms have been overwhelmed with flu patients, turning away some of them and others with non-life-threatening conditions for lack of space.

Forty-one states are battling widespread influenza outbreaks, including Illinois, where six people -- all older than 50 -- have died, according to the state's Department of Public Health.

At least 18 children in the country have died during this flu season, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The proportion of people seeing their doctor for flu-like symptoms jumped to 5.6 percent from 2.8 percent in the past month, according to the CDC.

Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago reported a 20 percent increase in flu patients every day. Northwestern Memorial was one of eight hospitals on bypass Monday and Tuesday, meaning it asked ambulances to take patients elsewhere if they could do so safely.

Dr. Besser's Tips to Protect Yourself From the Flu

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Most of the hospitals have resumed normal operations, but could return to the bypass status if the influx of patients becomes too great.

"Northwestern Memorial Hospital is an extraordinarily busy hospital, and oftentimes during our busier months, in the summer, we will sometimes have to go on bypass," Northwestern Memorial's Dr. David Zich said. "We don't like it, the community doesn't like it, but sometimes it is necessary."

A tent outside Lehigh Valley Hospital in Salisbury Township, Pa., was set up to tend to the overflowing number of flu cases.

A hospital in Ohio is requiring patients with the flu to wear masks to protect those who are not infected.

State health officials in Indiana have reported seven deaths. Five of the deaths occurred in people older than 65 and two younger than 18. The state will release another report later today.

Doctors are especially concerned about the elderly and children, where the flu can be deadly.

"Our office in the last two weeks has exploded with children," Dr. Gayle Smith, a pediatrician in Richmond, Va., said

It is the earliest flu season in a decade and, ABC News Chief Medical Editor Dr. Besser says, it's not too late to protect yourself from the outbreak.

"You have to think about an anti-viral, especially if you're elderly, a young child, a pregnant woman," Besser said.

"They're the people that are going to die from this. Tens of thousands of people die in a bad flu season. We're not taking it serious enough."

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Mock Mars mission reveals salty surprise

They survived a "mission to Mars" that helped us understand the challenges of long-term isolation. Now the crew who participated in a mock trip to the Red Planet may have helped overturn a long-standing assumption of how our body deals with dietary salt.

The Mars 500 mission, which ended in November 2011, was a dry run for a real Mars mission. It saw six volunteers confined for 520 days in a mocked-up spacecraft at the State Research Centre Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow, Russia. It also provided a chance to perform otherwise difficult experiments on diet.

It is known that dietary salt is rapidly excreted in urine. As it passes through the kidneys it helps them to eliminate unwanted fluids. But too much salt in the bloodstream can hamper the ability of kidneys to remove water, increasing blood pressure and adversely affecting health.

Salt cycle

It is a challenge to measure the long-term effects of salt because of difficulties in regulating dietary intake. However, Mars 500 "mission controllers" were able to dictate the amount of salt that the crew received each day.

During this mission, and a preliminary mission with a different crew that lasted 105 days, 12 crew members consumed either 6, 9 or 12 grams of salt per day for 29 to 60 days. Previous research suggests that there should be roughly the same amount of salt in urine as has been eaten that day.

Instead, the crew excreted different amounts each day, revealing a six to seven-day cycle of salt retention and excretion. The patterns varied between crew members, but were consistent within individuals. For example, on a 12-gram daily salt diet a crew member might excrete as little as 6 grams on day three of the cycle, and peak at 18 grams on day five.

Sleepy time

The fluctuations tallied with levels of the hormones aldosterone and cortisol. It is not yet known why the cycles lasted six to seven days. Jens Titze of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who headed the study, suspects it could be influenced by sleep.

In the 105-day mission, crew members performed a night shift every six days. Blood pressure on the morning after a night shift was higher compared with day shifts. No night shifts were performed during the experiment on the longer mission, however.

Graham MacGregor of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine in London says the results are fascinating, but adds that they don't compromise previous studies. "It doesn't matter if there are [cyclic] fluctuations, because if you average single results across a large number of people, you'll still get a close correlation between the salt going in and out," he says.

Salt stores

Together with previous animal studies, the fluctuations indicate that salt might be stored away from the kidneys, which might otherwise sustain damage through salt overload. Subsequent MRI scans performed by Titze suggest that muscle and skin may also store salt. These results will be published in March, but more work will be needed to identify how such storage might affect health.

In another study published this week from the Mars 500 experiment, researchers report that the "cosmonauts" slept for longer periods, and became less physically active, the longer the mission went on. In the first quarter of the 520-day mission, the six crew members averaged 7.12 hours of sleep a day, which increased to 7.7 hours during the final quarter (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1212646110).

More sophisticated lighting could improve acclimatisation to the required daily sleep cycle in future experiments or indeed aboard long-haul space modules. Blue light intensity is particularly important, says Mathias Basner of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, for setting day-night cycles, so lighting could be more carefully attuned to this intensity in future.

Journal reference: Cell Metabolism, DOI: 10.1016/j.cemet.2012.11.013

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India says two soldiers killed in clash with Pakistan troops

SRINAGAR, India: Pakistani troops killed two Indian soldiers on Tuesday near the tense disputed border between the nuclear-armed neighbours in Kashmir and one of the bodies was badly mutilated, the Indian army said.

The firefight broke out at about noon on Tuesday (0630 GMT) after an Indian patrol discovered Pakistani troops about half a kilometre (1,600 feet) inside Indian territory, an army spokesman told AFP.

A ceasefire has been in place along the Line of Control that divides the countries since 2003, but it is periodically violated by both sides and Pakistan said Indian troops killed a Pakistani soldier on Sunday.

Relations had been slowly improving over the last few years following a rupture in their slow-moving peace process after the 2008 attacks on Mumbai, which were blamed by India on Pakistan-based militants.

"There was a firefight with Pakistani troops," army spokesman Rajesh Kalia told AFP from the mountainous Himalayan region.

"We lost two soldiers and one of them has been badly mutilated," he added, declining to give more details on the injuries.

"The intruders were regular (Pakistani) soldiers and they were 400-500 metres (1,300-1,600 feet) inside our territory," he said of the clash in Mendhar sector, 173 kilometres (107 miles) west by road from the city of Jammu.

In Islamabad, a Pakistan military spokesman denied what he called an "Indian allegation of unprovoked firing". He declined to elaborate.

On Sunday, Pakistan said Indian troops had crossed the Line of Control and stormed a military post. It said one Pakistani soldier was killed and another injured.

It lodged a formal protest with India on Monday over what it called an unprovoked attack.

India denied crossing the line, saying it had retaliated with small arms fire after Pakistani mortars hit a village home.

A foreign ministry spokesman said Indian troops had undertaken "controlled retaliation" on Sunday after "unprovoked firing" which damaged a civilian home.

The deaths are set to undermine recent efforts to improve relations, such as opening up trade and offering more lenient visa regimes which have been a feature of talks between senior political leaders from both sides.

Muslim-majority Kashmir is a Himalayan region which India and Pakistan both claim in full but rule in part. It was the cause of two of three wars between the neighbours since independence from Britain in 1947.

- AFP/fa

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Amazon Prime lands in Canada

Amazon Prime has expanded its coverage to Canada, but not all benefits will be part of the package.

Starting today, Prime will be offered to Canadian consumers for the usual yearly fee of $79.

The service's unlimited two-day shipping will be available in most of the country, according to Canada's Times Colonist. People in rural areas can grab the unlimited shipping but with no two-day guarantee. Those in certain locations will be able to upgrade to one-day shipping starting at $3.99 per item.

Steve Oliver, the country manager for Amazon.ca, told the Times Colonist that the shipping guarantee is good for millions of products sold by the store.

Amazon Prime also provides free Kindle e-book lending and the Instant Video streaming service to its U.S. members. But Canadian subscribers are out of luck here. Oliver told the Times Colonist that at this point the company has no plans to offer those options in Canada.

Amazon Prime is also available in the U.K, Japan, France, and Germany.

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Jodi Arias: Who Is the Admitted Killer?

Jodi Arias is a woman that many can't keep their eyes off of--a soft-spoken, small-framed 32-year-old who last year won a jailhouse Christmas caroling contest. But she is also an admitted killer who is now on trial in Arizona for the 2008 murder of her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander.

Sitting in a Maricopa County court, Arias, whose trial resumes today, cries every time prosecutors describe what she admits she did -- stab her one-time boyfriend Travis Alexander 27 times, slit his throat and shoot him in the head.

Arias grew up in the small city of Yreka, Calif. She dropped out of high school, but received her GED while in jail a few years ago. She was an aspiring photographer; her MySpace page includes several albums of pictures, one of which was called "In loving memory of Travis Alexander."

FULL COVERAGE: Jodi Arias Murder Trial

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Ariz. Woman Faces Death Penalty in Boyfriend's Slaying Watch Video

"Jodi wanted nothing but to please Travis," defense attorney Jennifer Wilmot said in her opening statements, but added that there was another reality – that Arias was Alexander's "dirty little secret."

Arias' attorneys want the jury to believe she killed Alexander in June of 2008 in self defense, that he abused her, and she feared for her life when she attacked him in the shower of his Mesa, Ariz., home.

Alexander's family and friends say Arias was a stalker who killed him in cold blood. They say the 30-year-old was a successful businessman who overcame all the odds. His parents were drug addicts, and he grew up occasionally homeless until he converted to Mormonism and turned his life around.

Jodi Arias Trial: A Timeline of Events in the Arizona Murder Case

"He actually had everything going for him," said Dave Hall, one of Alexander's friends. "A beautiful home, a beautiful car, a great income."

Alexander kept a blog, and in a haunting last entry, just two weeks before his murder, he wrote about trying to find a wife.

"This type of dating to me is like a very long job interview," he wrote. "Desperately trying to find out if my date has an axe murderer penned up inside of her."

Alexander did date a killer. It's now up to the jury to decide if she killed in self defense.

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Sea level rise could lead to a cooler, stormier world

A catastrophic rise in sea level before the end of the century could have a hitherto-unforeseen side effect. Melting icebergs might cool the seas around Greenland and Antarctica so much that the average surface temperature of the entire planet falls by a few degrees, according to unpublished work by climate scientist James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.

While it might sound welcome, the temperature differences produced by the "iceberg cooling effect" could lead to even more climate chaos in a world already devastated by extreme weather. Winter storms, for instance, are powered by the temperature differences between the poles and the equator, so there might be storms of unprecedented ferocity.

And the temporary cooling would be deceptive. Due to the greenhouse effect, the planet as a whole would still be accumulating heat - it's just that vast amounts of heat would be going into melting ice and warming water. "It's a redistribution of heat energy," says Daniel Sigman of Princeton University, who studies the end of the last age and was not involved in Hansen's work.

Freezer door

To visualise the cooling effect, imagine being shut in a stiflingly hot kitchen. You could cool the air by flinging open the freezer and letting the food defrost. The kitchen as a whole will not lose heat as there is nowhere for it to escape to, but some of heat energy will go into defrosting the freezer rather than warming the air.

Most climate scientists think the "freezer door" will remain firmly shut this century, but not Hansen. He has longed warned that there could be a huge rise in sea level this century and, with colleagues Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy, he recently simulated the possible effects. Hansen included a brief summary of some of the results in an analysis of Greenland ice loss released in December. He told New Scientist a full paper is being prepared for publication, but would not discuss the details.

Assuming a disastrous 0.6-metre sea level rise by 2065, Hansen's model suggests the average global surface temperature would be just 1.5 °C warmer than in preindustrial times, compared to 1.9 °C without the iceberg cooling effect. With a massive 1.4-metre rise by 2080, the surface temperature would fall by 0.9 °C, instead of rising by 2.2 °C. Although most of the world would remain much warmer than now, northern Europe might cool to preindustrial levels and the UK might actually be chillier.

Other climate scientists are reluctant to comment before seeing the full details, but Sigman points out that climate modellers have long done experiments looking at the complex effects of melting ice sheets. These experiments also typically show regional cooling, but in Hansen's simulation the effect is much greater. The likely reason for the difference is because his simulation assumes a much more rapid acceleration of ice loss, doubling every 10 years.

Most other climate scientists think the ice sheets will only melt slowly, largely because this is what happened at the end of past ice ages. Hansen, however, thinks this logic is flawed. The reason that sea level only rose slowly in the past, he writes, is because the planet only warmed slowly. After the last ice age, for instance, it took 10,000 years for the average global temperature to rise around 4 °C. Now the world is on course to warm this much in less than 200 years.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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Indonesia police investigate baby-for-sale online ad

JAKARTA: Indonesian police on Monday said they are investigating an advertisement offering two babies for sale at US$1,000 each after it was spotted on the popular auction and shopping website Tokobagus.com.

"We are still investigating the existence of the online advertisement," Jakarta police spokesman Rikwanto told reporters.

"We have asked Tokobagus how the advertisement came to be posted, for how long, and whether any transaction was made," he added.

The National Commission for Child Protection lodged a police report last week after spotting the posting, its chairman Arist Merdeka Sirait told AFP.

"There was a photo of a baby and a telephone number. We called the advertiser and he said he wanted to sell two 18-month-olds, a boy and a girl, for Rp 10 million (US$1,000) each," Sirait said.

"We were negotiating, talking about birth certificates when he suddenly hung up. We tried contacting him again but failed," he added.

"This seems to be a new modus operandi by baby-selling syndicates. We are very concerned and must stop this crime against humanity," Sirait said, adding that human-traffickers could be jailed from 15 to 20 years.

Tokobagus posted an apology on Twitter, saying the advertisement was a result of "pure human error and was unintentional" and had been removed.

Indonesians have been using local auction and shopping sites to sell anything from cars and jewellery to body organs such as kidneys, exploiting a loophole in local laws.

Hundreds of advertisements have appeared on Indonesian personal advertising websites offering kidneys for as little as 50 million rupiah each.

- AFP/xq

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Cisco adds three more routers to its 802.11ac portfolio

The new Linksys EA6700 Smart Wi-Fi router from Cisco.

(Credit:
Cisco)

LAS VEGAS--If you're not so happy with Cisco's first 802.11ac router, the Linksys EA6500, there are now more options.

The networking vendors announced today at
CES 2013 three more routers that all support 802.11ac. All of them belong to the same Linksys Smart Wi-Fi router series and share similar features as well as physical design as the Linksys EA6500. These new routers include:

Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Router AC 1750 HD Video Pro, EA6700: This is now the new top-notch Smart Wi-Fi Router in the Linksys portfolio. The AC1750 is designed for homes with 10 or more connected devices with HD content streaming needs. The true dual-band AC1750 delivers Wi-Fi speeds up to 1,300Mbps on the 5GHz band and up to 450Mbps on the 2.4GHz band.

Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Router AC 1600 Video Enthusiast, EA6400: Very similar to the EA6700 but the EA6400 belongs to the lower tier and is designed for home with five or seven connected devices for HD streaming. This router offer Wi-Fi speeds up to 1,300Mbps on the 5GHz band and up to 300Mbps on the 2.4GHz band.

Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Router AC 1200 Advanced Multimedia, EA6300: This is the lowest-tier router among the three. Support on the the dual-stream setup of the Wi-Fi standards, the EA6300 offers up to 867Mbps on the 5GHz band and up to 300Mbps on the 2.4GHz band. Cisco says it makes a good fit for homes with five or fewer HD streaming Wi-Fi connected devices.

All three of the new routers support Gigabit Ethernet and one USB 3.0 port -- the EA6700 also has another USB 2.0 port -- that can be used to host an external storage device to create a network attached storage (NAS) solution.

The EA6700 comes with two USB ports, one of which is USB 3.0.

(Credit:
Cisco)

Cisco says the new Smart Wi-Fi Routers provide great Wi-Fi coverage thanks to the support for Beamforming technology, which is designed to precisely adjust, steer, and monitor the direction and shape of the Wi-Fi signals to send data back and forth over the optimal path.

Similar to the rest in the EA family, they are easy to set up and offer new tools for home network management, both locally and on the go via a mobile app. They can also run third-party apps developed for the Cisco Connect Cloud platform. And finally these routers also support SimpleTab, a near-field communication (NFC) technology that allows for supported clients to connect to the routers' Wi-Fi network via a quick tab.

In addition to these routers, Cisco also announced its first USB 802.11ac adapter, the Linksys AC 580 USB Wi-Fi, that allows consumers to easily upgrade any existing computer to support the latest 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard.

Cisco's new Smart Wi-Fi Routers and the Linksys AC 580 USB Wi-Fi are set to be available during the first quarter of the year with pricing being available then.

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Best Pictures: 2012 Nat Geo Photo Contest Winners

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: Places

  Photograph by Nenad Saljic

  A full moon illuminates the Matterhorn peak near Zermatt, Switzerland, in the winning image in the contest's Places category.

  Full moons occur every 29.5 days or so as the moon moves to the side of Earth directly opposite the sun, reflecting the sun's rays off its full face and appearing as a brilliant, perfectly circular disk.

  (Read more about full moons.)

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: People

  Photograph by Micah Albert

  A picture of women scavenging refuse from a landfill in Dandora, Kenya, is the winning image in the People category of the National Geographic Photo Contest.

  The Dandora landfill, located in eastern Nairobi, is one of the largest in Africa.

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Photograph by Jason Ching

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  

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