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On the evening of February 21, 1885, two Scottish meteorologists living atop Ben Nevis—the highest peak in the U.K. at some 4,400 feet—attempted to make their appointed hourly measurements. But the tempestuous elements had other ideas: The roaring winds ripped their notebook in two and blew it away. The lanterns wouldn’t stay lit long enough for the men to read the thermometers. And when the intrepid observers tried three times to venture out into the raging storm, they had to be hauled back in by rope....

The warming of the world’s climate has reached a fever pitch in recent years, causing records to fall like dominoes. In 2015, the planet saw a number of such records set, from the hottest global temperature measured to the largest annual increase in carbon dioxide. Those records — along with numerous other indicators of the considerable change wrought on land, in the oceans and air, and to ecosystems — are detailed in the annual State of the Climate Report released Tuesday by the U....

The articles mentioned in “Let the Games Continue” can all be found in the Scientific American Archives. Here are the links: Mathematical Games Columns: January 1957, The first column officially called “Mathematical Games” October 1970, Game of Life July 1973, Newcomb’s Paradox March 1974, Newcomb’s Paradox April 1975, April Fools’ Fun August 1975, Polyominoes December 1976, Fractals January 1977, Penrose Tiling August 1977, RSA Cryptography Other articles by Martin Gardner: “Logic Machines,” March 1952 “Flexagons,” December 1956 “A Quarter-Century of Recreational Mathematics,” August 1998 For more information on Martin Gardner and mathematical games, visit: Martin Gardner Centennial, 1914-2014 Celebration of Mind...

A town dating back more than 2,000 years has been discovered on the northwest coast of the Sea of Galilee, in Israel’s Ginosar valley. The ancient town may be Dalmanutha (also spelled Dalmanoutha), described in the Gospel of Mark as the place Jesus sailed to after miraculously feeding 4,000 people by multiplying a few fish and loaves of bread, said Ken Dark, of the University of Reading in the U.K., whose team discovered the town during a field survey....

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has uncovered nearly 20,000 disaster risks in its oil and gas sector during a nationwide safety probe following a pipeline blast that killed 62 people last year, the country’s safety watchdog said on Thursday.Checks on some 3,000 petrochemical firms and oil storage sites found nearly 20,000 potential hazards, Wang Haoshui, an inspector with the safety agency, told reporters.“Oil and gas pipelines are buried underground… It is hard to inspect (them) and find the hidden dangers,” said Wang, adding that the agency had already urged the parties involved to fix the problems....

Greta Thunberg, at age 16, has quickly become one of the most visible climate activists in the world. Her detractors increasingly rely on ad hominem attacks to blunt her influence. Thunberg gained prominence after she began skipping some days of school to protest climate inaction outside Swedish parliament. She spearheaded the school walkouts that saw more than a million children across the globe leaving their classrooms to demand action on global warming....

In the latest attempt to crack down on illegal drug use, scientists say they can determine the extent and pattern of illicit drug use—from marijuana to heroin to cocaine—by sampling sewage and extracting the telltale by-products. For example, cocaine is snorted, does its brain-altering business and then passes through the liver and the kidneys on its way out of the body. It emerges in urine as benzoylecgonine and, as that urine travels from toilet to treatment plant, it mixes with a host of other by-products of human activity....

On a clear night, away from city lights, you might see a beautiful structure arched across the sky: our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Since ancient times, humans have marveled at the dark dust clouds silhouetted against the milky background. Just four centuries ago Galileo pointed his telescope at the heavens and found that the “milk” seemingly splashed across the dark expanse was actually the blended light of countless stars. The architecture of the Milky Way has now been revised again....

This Sunday, millions of Americans will sit down in front of their television or computer, crack open a few beers, and watch the Super Bowl. But if those viewers live in a housing project for the homeless, that booze could get them booted back out to the street. Many homeless housing projects have strict abstinence policies, and require residents to be completely sober. Permitting alcohol, many community organizers reason, would enable addictions and promote a downward spiral into continued drinking and declining health....

For Tim McClanahan, a zoologist studying fisheries, what happened in Kenya during the spring of 1998 was a wake-up call. Between March and July of that year, a rare climatological double whammy sent ocean temperatures spiking 1 to 2 degrees Celsius above the normal range for spring and summer. An unusually intense El Niño weather pattern coincided with the warm phase of another cyclical area weather event. This turned out to be a slow-motion disaster....

Dear EarthTalk: What is “cogeneration” as a means of providing heat and power? – Jerry Schleup, Andover, MA Cogeneration—also known as combined heat and power, distributed generation, or recycled energy—is the simultaneous production of two or more forms of energy from a single fuel source. Cogeneration power plants often operate at 50 to 70 percent higher efficiency rates than single-generation facilities. In practical terms, what cogeneration usually entails is the use of what would otherwise be wasted heat (such as a manufacturing plant’s exhaust) to produce additional energy benefit, such as to provide heat or electricity for the building in which it is operating....

I’ve been squabbling about realism lately, with myself as well as with others. I don’t mean realism in the colloquial sense, meaning hardheadedness, or political realism, which assumes we’re all selfish jerks. (Hypothesis: political realists are jerks who project their jerkiness onto everyone else.) No, I mean realism in the hifalutin philosophical sense, which assumes that the world has an objective, physical existence, independent of us, that we can discover through science....

The May issue underscored the maxim that scientific research typically raises more questions than it answers. For instance, in the cover story “The First Few Microseconds,” Michael Riordan and William A. Zajc described collider experiments that slammed gold nuclei together at nearly light-speed to replicate the quark-gluon plasma that existed only in the microseconds-old universe. Pondering the mysteries of those microseconds, readers sent some mind-bending questions. The biggest mail magnet was “When Slide Rules Ruled,” by Cliff Stoll, which brought responses, silly and serious, as well as nostalgic recollections from those who lived and ciphered in the primitive times before electronic calculators....

RESPONSIBLE RELATIONSHIPS Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga. Ecco (HarperCollins Publishers), 2011 ($27.99) Most people are convinced that they possess a central “me,” a purposeful self who calls all the shots. In the past few decades, however, this view has come under attack, as scientists and philosophers increasingly adopt a mechanistic view of the universe, in which physical laws govern our every move and choice....

Neanderthals built one of the world’s oldest constructions—176,000-year-old semicircular walls of stalagmites in the bowels of a cave in southwest France. The walls are currently the best evidence that Neanderthals built substantial structures and ventured deep into caves, but researchers are wary of concluding much more. “The big question is why they made it,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin, a palaeoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany who was not involved in the study, which is published online in Nature on May 25....

By Edwin Cartlidge of Nature magazineAn international group of physicists has found a way of measuring both the position and the momentum of photons passing through the double-slit experiment, upending the idea that it is impossible to measure both properties in the lab at the same time.In the classic double-slit experiment, first done more than 200 years ago, light waves passing through two parallel slits create a characteristic pattern of light and dark patches on a screen positioned behind the slits....

Before I get to the serious stuff, a quick story about John Conway, a.k.a. the “mathematical magician.” I met him in 1993 in Princeton while working on “The Death of Proof.” When I poked my head into his office, Conway was sitting with his back to me staring at a computer. Hair tumbled down his back, his sagging pants exposed his ass-cleft. His office overflowed with books, journals, food wrappers and paper polyhedrons, many dangling from the ceiling....

Within the next three years, renewable power could surpass natural gas as the second most prevalent source of electricity generation globally, behind only coal, according to a new forecast by the International Energy Agency. Hydropower accounts for about four-fifths of renewable generation and will continue to dominate the world’s renewable portfolio into the foreseeable future, according to the IEA’s “Medium-Term Renewable Energy Market Report” for 2013. But the gains made by the sector as a whole come from other sources of clean energy, particularly onshore wind....

Hospitals shouldn’t make you sicker. But plenty of people acquire illnesses while hospitalized—in some countries, such so-called nosocomial infections afflict more than 10 percent of patients. To investigate transmission pathways, European researchers fitted 119 people in a pediatric ward with radio-frequency identification (RFID) badges. The tags registered face-to-face interactions—and the potential spreading of airborne pathogens. Nurses interacted with the widest variety of people across the ward—patients, doctors, other nurses, and so on....

The pipes, sewers and basements that lie beneath the coastal city of New Haven, Conn., could be flooded by rising groundwater by the end of the century, according to a preliminary study from Yale University and the U.S. Geological Survey. Much of the city’s downtown is less than 30 feet above sea level, and advancing waters in the Atlantic could raise groundwater levels as much as 3 feet near the shoreline, the report said....