In some spots Thursday morning, the snow looked like it was tinted chocolate-brown, prompting calls from concerned area residents.

"It's pretty much statewide," said Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. "We've had reports from the San Juans, Winter Park ... all over."

Greene said exceptionally dry conditions in Northern Arizona contributed to the dust event, with a wind plume carrying the dust across most of Colorado.

Greene said the Copper Mountain ski patrol reported possible impacts to snow stability from the dust layers, with some easy shears occurring in the snowpack where new snow accumulated atop the dust.

The Dust Bowl, which lasted from 1931-1939, was a severe drought that struck a wide swath of the Great Plains. It was a catastrophic blow to the U.S. economy, which was already staggering under the weight of the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl was the worst drought in U.S. history, eventually covering more than 75 percent of the country. Solar radiation heating the parched and blighted land caused temperatures in the region to rise to record-breaking levels.

"1936 was the hottest summer ever recorded across much of the Midwest and East," said Abrams. "Many of the single-day and monthly record-high temperatures across the eastern two-thirds of the country are from that year."

The Dust Bowl was also noted for the huge dust storms that billowed across the Great Plains and swallowed millions of acres of farmland at a time. While a Dust Bowl-level drought could occur again, it is highly unlikely that the nation will see a return of the dust storms.

The results from testing stations at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in Aldermaston and four other stations within a 10-mile radius were obtained by Chris Busby, of Liverpool University’s department of human anatomy and cell biology.

Each detector recorded a significant rise in uranium levels during the Gulf war bombing campaign in March 2003. The reading from a park in Reading was high enough for the Environment Agency to be alerted.

Busby, who has advised the government on radiation and is a founder of Green Audit, the environmental consultancy, believes "uranium aerosols" from Iraq were widely dispersed in the atmosphere and blown across Europe.

"This research shows that rather than remaining near the target as claimed by the military, depleted uranium weapons contaminate both locals and whole populations hundreds to thousands of miles away," he said.

The dives took place during the first two weeks of January, and involved a scientific team of 12 from Conservation International, the Netherlands Antilles government and the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History, as well as local fisherman. Scientists chose to explore the area because although it was predicted to have high concentrations of marine life, only a small number of species had been reported.

During the dives, the researchers counted a total of 200 species of fish, over 150 more than previously known.

Among their find were two new species of fish, both gobies, which have the distinctive feature of fused pelvic fins on the underside of their body which forms a sucker.

"Many [gobies] live in the canals inside sponges, so we take samples out of sponges, and open the canals up to search for the small fish that can be in there," explained Dr Smith, a scientist on the expedition from Conservation International.

The zoo has 10 male penguins of which six have shown strong signs of preferring male company and formed couples among themselves.

The initiative to "turn" the penguins and make them mate had prompted a furious response from gay rights groups.

In a statement posted on its Internet website, the zoo on Wednesday sought to defend itself from fresh criticism.

"We will be delighted if the penguins form even one heterosexual couple and manage to produce first an egg, and then a little one," it said.

"But of course we accept the male couples that have formed and we are not trying to enforce heterosexuality, as we were accused of doing last year."

This is not unusual. "There are a lot of animals that have same-sex relations, it's just that people don't know about it," Mitchell said. "I mean, Joe Schmoe on the street is not someone who's read all sorts of biology books."

One particular book is helpful in this case. Bruce Bagemihl's "Biological Exuberance," published in 1999, documents homosexual behavior in more than 450 animal species. The list includes grizzly bears, gorillas, flamingos, owls and even several species of salmon.

The virus has been found in wild swans in Sicily, and other cases are suspected elsewhere in Italy, the country's health minister says.

A specialist UK laboratory has identified the virus in dead swans found in northern Greece and Bulgaria.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed at least 80 people since early 2003, mostly in South-East Asia.

"Considering that Guanlong is a tyrannosaur, its crest is really amazing," Xu told New Scientist. "In this regard, Guanlong's exaggerated, complex crest is similar to the sexually selected ornaments widely present in extant and extinct vertebrates."

The near-complete fossils reveal an unusual combination of primitive features retained from ancestral dinosaurs and derived features that had been thought to evolve later. That means the similarities of later dinosaurs may show evolution converging on common traits rather than the common ancestry that palaeontologists often assume.

Tyrannosaurs grew to gianthood late in their history. "They put in the early part of their history as secondary predators," in the shadow of allosaurs and spinosaurs, says Tom Holtz of the University of Maryland in College Park, US. Nine-metre giant tyrannosaurs did not appear until about 80 million years ago, just 15 million years before an asteroid impact ended the reign of the dinosaurs.

The presence of a crest on the Guanlong adult's head was a complete surprise, Clark said, showing that there was "clearly still much more to be learned about early tyrannosaurs."

Researchers said the crest was about as thin as a pancake and only two and a half inches, or 6.4 centimeters, high. It appeared to be filled with air sacs and reminded the paleontologist of the ornamental features found on some living birds, like cassowaries and hornbills.

The newspaper advertisement - signed by mega-church pastors like Rick Warren, author of the bestseller The Purpose-Driven Life, heads of Christian colleges and missionary organisations - puts saving "God's green earth" on a par with traditional evangelical concerns like abortion and gay marriage.

"With God's help global warming can be stopped for our kids, our world and our Lord," the advert says.

And it calls on Congress to do more to encourage companies to reduce carbon emissions, advocating a market-based approach to curb emissions through a cap-and-trade bill.

The evangelists who have signed up for the campaign do not include all of those most closely associated with the White House.

The country's average temperature for the month was 39.5 degrees Fahrenheit, 8.5 degrees above average for January, the National Climatic Data Center said Tuesday. The old record for January warmth was 37.3 degrees set in 1953.

On the other hand, while much of the United States was basking in warm weather, parts of Europe and Asia were being battered by bitter cold. Climate details for the rest of the world for January are expected to be available next week.

During the month the jet stream, a strong high-altitude wind that guides weather fronts from west to east, stayed unusually far to the north, keeping the coldest air in Canada and Alaska, the agency said.

Keeping that cold air to the north allowed mild Pacific air to moderate temperatures across the contiguous states, leading to the warm conditions.

Among the new species of birds, frogs, butterflies and palms discovered in the expedition through this pristine environment, untouched by man, was the spectacular Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise. The scientists are the first outsiders to see it. They could only reach the remote mountainous area by helicopter, which they described it as akin to finding a "Garden of Eden".

The golden-mantled tree kangaroo is considered the most beautiful but also the rarest of the jungle-dwelling marsupials. There were also other marsupials, such as wallabies and mammals that have been hunted almost to extinction elsewhere. And a rare spiny anteater, the long beaked echidna, about which little is known, allowed itself to be picked up by hand.

Dr Beehler said: "What was amazing was the lack of wariness of all the animals. In the wild, all species tend to be shy of humans, but that is learnt behaviour because they have encountered mankind. In Foja they did not appear to mind our presence at all."

A new species of honeyeater, the first new bird species discovered on the island of New Guinea since 1939

The formerly unknown breeding grounds of a "lost" bird of paradise - the six-wired bird of paradise (Parotia berlepschi)

First photographs of the golden-fronted bowerbird displaying at its bower.

A new large mammal for Indonesia, the golden-mantled tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus pulcherrimus)

More than 20 new species of frogs, including a tiny microhylid frog less than 14mm long

A series of previously undescribed plant species, including five new species of palms

A remarkable white-flowered rhododendron with flower about 15cm across

Four new butterfly species.

"Don't ever ask the question, `What else could happen?'" said Marcia Paul Leone, a mortgage banker who was surveying the new damage to her Katrina-flooded home.

She would go no farther than the front porch of her house Thursday morning. Windows were blown out, and the building appeared to be leaning.

"I've been in the mortgage business for 20 years. I know when something's unsafe," she said.

Electricity was knocked out at Louis Armstrong International Airport, rounding passenger flights and leaving travelers to wait in a dimly lit terminal powered by generators. The storm also ripped off part of a concourse roof, slammed one jetway into another, and flipped motorized runway luggage carts.