Australia experienced its hottest year on record in 2013, the Bureau of Meteorology said Friday, enduring the longest heatwave ever recorded Down Under as well as destructive bushfires.

"2013 was Australia's warmest year since records began in 1910," the bureau said in its annual climate statement, released as inland areas of the country suffer scorching heatwave conditions.

Australian authorities expressed relief Friday after 52 passengers were safely rescued by helicopter from a Russian ship stranded in Antarctic ice, saying the dramatic mission had been difficult and complex.

Officials tasked with freeing the scientific expedition on the Akademik Shokalskiy, which has been stuck since December 24, succeeded in flying them out Thursday in an on-off rescue operation.

It is impossible to predict when the next big earthquake will hit, but researchers said Thursday they have a good idea of where in China such a temblor is likely.

The hot zone is a 60-kilometer (37-mile) segment of the Longmenshan fault which divides the Tibetan Plateau from the Sichuan Basin in southwestern China, said the study in the journal Seismological Research Letters.

The mystery illness that has killed 27 bald eagles in Utah this month appears to be West Nile Virus, state officials said Tuesday.

The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources said in a statement that laboratory tests done on some of the first birds found indicate they died from West Nile Virus.

NASA officials say the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster "should never be trivialized" in response to a new song from Beyonce that features an audio sample recorded just after the craft exploded on takeoff in 1986, killing all seven crewmembers.

The space agency issued the statement late Tuesday after the pop star began to receive criticism from Challenger families and others for using the short sample that includes the words "major malfunction" as an allusion to a failed relationship.

A long-awaited rescue of passengers on board a research ship that has been trapped in Antarctic ice for more than a week finally got underway on Thursday, with a helicopter scooping up the first group of passengers and flying them to a nearby vessel, expedition leaders said.

The helicopter was originally going to airlift the passengers to a Chinese icebreaker, the Snow Dragon, with a barge then ferrying them to an Australian vessel. But sea ice was preventing a barge from reaching the Snow Dragon, and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority's Rescue Coordination Centre, which is overseeing the rescue, said the operation would consequently be delayed.

Morocco has launched an operation to empty an oil tanker that ran aground during a storm near the southern port of Tan Tan with 5,000 tonnes of fuel on board, an official said.

The fuel was being pumped into trucks, with the operation to last between five and seven days depending on the weather, M'Hammed Atmani, police chief at the national ports agency, was quoted as saying by the official MAP news agency late on Tuesday.

Archaeologists announced Tuesday that excavations for a Mexico City subway extension have turned up what appears to be an unusual Aztec offering: a dog's skull with holes that indicate it was displayed on a ritual skull rack normally reserved for human sacrifice victims.

Excavators also found a woman's skull and two men's skulls with similar perforations around the temple, which allowed them to be mounted on a public display rack known as a tzompantli.

One third of Americans utterly reject the theory of evolution and believe instead that humans "have existed in their present form since the beginning of time," a new survey has found.

About a quarter of Americans believe that evolution was guided by God while only 32 percent of those surveyed believe that evolution is due to "natural processes such as natural selection," the Pew Research Center found.

Strong winds and rain Wednesday prevented the helicopter rescue of passengers on a Russian ship stuck in ice off Antarctica, Australian authorities said, as those onboard rang in the New Year with a sing-song from the deck.

The Akademik Shokalskiy, carrying 74 passengers and crew, has not moved since it became trapped about 100 nautical miles east of the French base Dumont d'Urville on December 24.