The first rainmaking experiments in the U.S. were conducted near Midland, Texas, paid for by a grant from the U.S. government. Patent attorney Gen. Robert Dyrenforth set off explosive balloons and artillery to try to make rainclouds develop. At a time of extreme drought, any effort with a hope of success may have been thought worthwhile to try, but there were no results. The method chosen was to test a theory that rainstorms seemed often to occur where major battles had taken place during the Civil War, and they may have been because of the effect of smoke, dust and disturbances in the air from artillery.

seventy-two Nobel Prize-winning scientists filed a legal brief with the U.S. Supreme Court challenging as unconstitutional a Louisiana law requiring schools that teach evolution to also teach reation-science. A news release described the scientists as the largest group of Nobel laureates ever to support a single statement on any subject. At a news conference in Washington D.C. the same day, they warned that the Louisiana law threatened scientific education by disparaging proven scientific facts to promote fundamentalist Christian beliefs. Dr. Murray Gell-Mann (1969 Nobel Prize in Physics), led the effort. A Federal District Court had struck down the Louisiana law in Jan 1985, as promotion of religious belief. A U.S. Court of Appeals agreed. The Supreme Court ruled against the law on 19 Jun 1987.