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Earth's average temperature remained at a record high Wednesday after two days in which the planet reached unofficial records. It's the latest marker in a series of climate-change-driven extremes.The average global temperature was 62.9 degrees, according to the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer, a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world's condition. That matched a record set Tuesday and came after a previous record of 62.6 degrees was set Monday.

Turbulence can be an uncomfortable and unpleasant experience. And climate change is about to make it an increasingly common one, according to a new study. Using supercomputer simulations of the atmosphere, researchers at the University of Reading, in England, looked at the future of severe turbulence. "Our new study paints the most detailed picture yet of how aircraft turbulence will respond to climate change," Paul Williams, who undertook the research, said in a statement. "For most passengers, light turbulence is nothing more than an annoying inconvenience that reduces their comfort levels, but for nervous fliers even light turbulence can be...

As part of their battle to understand and protect against the destructive force of earthquakes, seismologists have gone to extraordinary lengths. They have bored holes deep into the earth's crust, laid out arrays of sensors hundreds of miles across, and built supercomputers capable of running simulations at teraflop speeds. But the most exciting new effort in cutting-edge seismology involves a piece of instrumentation that's a good deal less exotic. It's called an iPhone. "Each smartphone has an accelerometer built into it," says Robert W. Clayton, a professor of geology at Caltech. "It's primary function is to determine the orientation of...

Overview To better understand the distribution of shaking and damage that accompanied the great 1906 earthquake, seismologists have constructed new computer models to recreate the ground motions. The simulations show how ground moved on the two sides of the San Andreas fault and how seismic waves radiated away from the fault to produce the shaking. The earthquake, which began 2 miles offshore from the City of San Francisco, ultimately grew to cause shaking and damage along more than 300 miles of the San Andreas Fault. The movies and snapshots available here portray the shaking over a 155 mile by 70...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

A major hurricane, a nuclear accident and a nuclear detonation -- all simulated, and all occurring in Texas -- are among the challenges facing U.S. Northern Command forces during exercise Unified Defense '04. Simulated events also include aircraft hijackings, threats from a fictitious country testing its strategic capabilities, and attacks on maritime and port security by domestic terrorists in Alaska. Though the attacks are all simulated, the responses are "real-world," said Army Lt. Col. Tim Croft, a NORTHCOM exercise planner. He said some 50 different local, state and federal agencies in Texas, Alaska, Virginia, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., are participating...

The Atlantic Monthly | April 2002   Seeing Around Corners The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail; but we might learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie ahead, and where to look for interventions that might work  by Jonathan Rauch  .....   n about A.D. 1300 the Anasazi people abandoned Long House Valley. To this day the valley, though beautiful in its way, seems touched by...