Like clockwork, every Sunday morning at 10:45 a.m. in a parking lot on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, the chaos begins.

Elbows are thrown. Guttural yelps ring out. It’s not unheard of to see a fist fight. The whole spectrum of the human experience — joy, panic, anger, fear — is on vibrant display. It’s here that a few dozen people blindly grab armfuls of clothes and rush them back to bins or spaces designated as theirs along a stretch of sidewalk before returning time and again to the frenzied fray. Tattered prom dresses, stained T-shirts, perfectly faded jeans, Western-style button-ups, you name it. And then, poof, nothing is left. An eerie hush falls over the black asphalt as these scavengers begin to survey and sort their treasures.

Bertha Rivera, Hannah Young and Dorothy Brooks judging entrants in the annual Arthur’s costume contest in Harlem. Oct. 29, 1971.

As a curious crowd gathered in Times Square on Monday, a power saw cut through the base of a pay phone on the southwest corner of Seventh Avenue and 50th Street. According to the city’s news release, this was “the final New York City public pay telephone.”

BATASAN, Philippines — When the floods invade her home at night — and they always do, a little higher each year — Pelagia Villarmia curls up on her bed and waits.

Someday soon, she knows, the water will creep past the bamboo slats of her bed. It will keep rising, salty and dark and surprisingly cold.

The seawater has covered the walls of Ms. Villarmia’s home with murals of mildew. It has gnawed at the legs of furniture and frozen a DVD player with its tray ajar. A corroded picture of Ms. Villarmia and her husband, now dead, hangs on the wall, from back when they were young, hopeful and unaware of the sea’s hunger.

What is happening to Ms. Villarmia and her neighbors on Batasan, an island in the Philippines, is a harbinger of what residents of low-lying islands and coastal regions around the world will face as the seas rise higher.

In 2013, Batasan was convulsed by a 7.2-magnitude earthquake. Thousands of aftershocks followed, and the local topography was thrown off-kilter. Batasan and three neighboring islands collapsed downward, making them more vulnerable to the surrounding water.

Now climate change, with its rising sea levels, appears to be dooming a place that has no elevation to spare. The highest point on the islands is less than 6.5 feet above sea level.

ON LAKE BAIKAL, Russia — A glass orb, the size of a beach ball, plops into a hole in the ice and descends on a metal cable toward the bottom of the world’s deepest lake.

Then another, and another.

These light-detecting orbs come to rest suspended in the pitch-dark depths down as far as 4,000 feet below the surface. The cable carrying them holds 36 such orbs, spaced 50 feet apart. There are 64 such cables, held in place by anchors and buoys, two miles off the jagged southern coast of this lake in Siberia with a bottom that is more than a mile down.

This is a telescope, the largest of its kind in the Northern Hemisphere, built to explore black holes, distant galaxies and the remnants of exploded stars. It does so by searching for neutrinos, cosmic particles so tiny that many trillions pass through each of us every second. If only we could learn to read the messages they bear, scientists believe, we could chart the universe, and its history, in ways we cannot yet fully fathom.

“You should never miss the chance to ask nature any question,” said Grigori V. Domogatski, 80, a Russian physicist who has led the quest to build this underwater telescope for 40 years.

After a pause, he added: “You never know what answer you will get.”

It is still under construction, but the telescope that Dr. Domogatski and other scientists have long dreamed of is closer than ever to delivering results. And this hunt for neutrinos from the far reaches of the cosmos, spanning eras in geopolitics and in astrophysics, sheds light on how Russia has managed to preserve some of the scientific prowess that characterized the Soviet Union — as well as the limitations of that legacy.

The Lake Baikal venture is not the only effort to hunt for neutrinos in the world’s most remote places. Dozens of instruments seek the particles in specialized laboratories all over the planet. But the new Russian project will be an important complement to the work of IceCube, the world’s largest neutrino telescope, an American-led, $279 million project that encompasses about a quarter of a cubic mile of ice in Antarctica.

A reindeer on a tram? What’s so strange about that? One New Yorker thought nothing of it as she traveled, undisturbed and unimpressed, to Roosevelt Island on the Manhattan tramway. Her fellow passenger was going to the island to be the star attraction at a Christmas party for children.