Five Things to Know Today, Nov. 16

Welcome to Wednesday. Here are some things to know today.

The weather: The chance of rain is 90 percent today, and we may be in for some severe thunderstorms and wind, the National Weather Service says. The high will be around 73 degrees and the low about 50.

Gas prices: A gallon of regular is, on average, $3.343 in Georgia, and in the U.S., it's $3.411, according to AAA. Prices reported to www.georgiagasprices.com for Lilburn in the past 24 hours ranged from $3.25 (at Phillips, 5044 Lawrenceville Hwy near Hood Road) to $3.36 (at Citgo, 4967 Lawrenceville Hwy at Holly Ridge Drive).

Adoption. We're in the middle of National Adoption Month, which is observed every November to highlight the value and importance of adoption. Tens of thousands of children are in need of adoptive parents just in the U.S. The White House proclaims the commemoration each year, and this year's proclamation by President Obama says, among other things, "The decision to adopt a child has brought profound joy and meaning into the lives of Americans across our country."

Trip. Albert Hofmann was a Swiss toolmaker's son who scraped together the money to go to university and study chemistry. He found a job at a large pharmaceutical firm in 1927 and 11 years later, while researching plants for possible new drugs, unintentionally created LSD on Nov. 16, 1938. He eventually dosed himself by accident and so became the first test subject for what came to be known as acid. Hofmann thought the drug had promise for psychotherapy and was disappointed at how it was adopted by the 1960s counterculture and ultimately banned. Hofmann went on to a long career in chemistry and died in 2008 at the ripe old age of 102.

Contact? Humanity's first deliberate message to the depths of interstellar space was broadcast on this day in 1974 by the Arecebo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Called the Arecebo message, it was a complex mathematical formula describing basic information about our planet and humans, broadcast in a series of binary ones and zeroes to a star cluster 25,000 light years from Earth. It's still on its way there.