Australia experienced its hottest month on record in January, despite floods and storms that devastated parts of the country's east, officials said.

The Bureau of Meteorology said both the average mean temperature of 29.68 degrees Celsius (85.42 degrees Fahrenheit) and the average mean maximum temperature of 36.92 Celsius surpassed previous records set in January 1932.

U.S. medical specialists from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have figured out how owls can almost fully rotate their heads - by as much as 270 degrees in either direction.

The birds do so while hunting without damaging the delicate blood vessels in their necks and heads, and without cutting off blood supply to their brains.

Australia insisted Friday that protecting the Great Barrier Reef was a top priority, but conservationists WWF said not enough had been done to prevent UNESCO deeming it a world heritage site "in danger".

In June, UNESCO demanded decisive action from Australia to protect the world's largest coral reef from a gas and mining boom and increasing coastal development, or risk the embarrassment of seeing it put on the danger list.

Arnold Schwarzenegger called Thursday for an end to "doom and gloom" environmentalism as he hosted the first conference of his new green movement fostering action by local governments and individuals.

"If we want to inspire the world, it is time for us to forget about the old way of talking about climate change, where we crush people, where we overwhelm people with data," the former California governor, bodybuilder and film star said.

A team of international researchers has decoded the genome of the pigeon, 5,000 years after it was first domesticated, according to a study published Thursday.

Known as Columba livia, the rock pigeon is considered among the most common and varied species on the planet, consisting of 350 breeds with a slew of different features, and is among just a few bird genomes sequenced so far.

A Russian rocket carrying a U.S. telecommunications satellite plunged into the Pacific Ocean on Friday only moments after being launched from a mobile sea platform.

"There was an accident during the Zenit rocket launch," a source at the Energia corporation that makes the Zenit-3SL rocket used to launch the Intelsat satellite said by telephone.

The EU urged national governments on Thursday to ban pesticides deemed dangerous to bees by scientific experts in a bid to prevent a disastrous collapse in colony numbers for an insect considered vital to the integrity of the human food chain.

European Commission spokesman Frederic Vincent said the European Union executive had proposed a "two-year ban" on the use of three so-called neonicotinoid insecticides used in maize, rapeseed, sunflower and cotton cultivation.

Poachers have killed 57 rhinos from South Africa's national parks since the beginning of the month, a rate of almost two a day, officials said Thursday.

Despite stepped up anti-poaching operations, the Department of Environmental Affairs said 42 rhino alone had been poached in Kruger National Park, a vast wilderness that straddled the Mozambique border.

Australian researchers investigating the extinction of the country's Tasmanian Tiger put the fault solely with humans Thursday, saying they had debunked a long-held theory that disease was to blame.

The last known tiger, or thylacine, died in Hobart Zoo in September 1936 and though there have been numerous unconfirmed sightings in the wild over the years since, it was officially declared extinct in 1986.

Climate scientists said Wednesday they found evidence to back predictions for a future with lower average rainfall, even though Earth's past warming episodes had led to more precipitation, not less.

Writing in the journal Nature, researchers said they had found proof that global warming caused by Man's greenhouse-gas emissions has a different effect on rainfall than warming caused by increased solar radiation.