NEW YORK – It’s blistering. Scorching. Steamy. Brutal. Baking. Torrid. Ovenlike. It’s run-out-of-adjectives hot.

“A volcano — that’s what it feels like to me,” said Wayne Reid, mopping his brow and swigging bottled water after walking three blocks to a New York subway station Wednesday morning. He was dressed for the heat — already a sticky 90 degrees and headed into triple digits — in shorts and a tank top, but it didn’t matter.

“You could run butt-naked out there, and it would still be hot,” he said.

Heat waves are more oppressive in big cities, because concrete, asphalt and steel absorb more solar energy during the day and are slow to release it after the sun goes down, offering people little relief at night.

In the nation’s biggest city of them all, Wall Streeters are sweltering in business suits on subway platforms, senior citizens are schlepping to the grocery store on streets that seem like frying pans, and New Yorkers overall are handling it by doing what they do best: coping, with a little complaining thrown in.

Not that New Yorkers, on the fourth day of a record-breaking heat wave stifling much of the Eastern Seaboard, were suffering alone.

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Here are some questions and answers about how airborne ash affects jet airliners:

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Q: Why did a plume of high-altitude volcanic ash blowing in from Iceland on Thursday disrupt flights across much of northwestern Europe?

A: Civil aviation has become increasingly aware of the dangers of flying through the microscopic fragments of rock and pumice that make up ash clouds. Jet engines are highly complex machines designed to function in environments free of debris and corrosive gases, and the effects of volcanic ash have severely endangered safety on some flights.

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Q: Why do national air traffic control bodies close down their airspace when ash is around?

A: The volcanic plume normally travels at altitudes of between 20,000 feet and 55,000 feet. This coincides with the flight levels of almost all commercial jet flights. But flights by smaller propeller planes using visual flight rules are usually permitted because these take place at much lower altitudes.

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LONDON – Scientists may have a new ally in the struggle to predict deadly earthquakes — bufo bufo, the common toad.

British researchers said Wednesday that they observed a mass exodus of toads from a breeding site in Italy five days before a major tremor struck, suggesting the amphibians may be able to sense environmental changes, imperceptible to humans, that foretell a coming quake.

Researchers from the Open University were studying toads in central Italy when they noticed a sharp decline in the number of animals at the site. Days later, a 6.3-magnitude earthquake hit, killing hundreds of people and badly damaging the town of L’Aquila.

Researcher Rachel Grant said the findings suggested “that toads are able to detect pre-seismic cues such as the release of gases and charged particles, and use these as a form of earthquake early warning system.”

Initially puzzled by the toads’ disappearance in the middle of the breeding season, the scientists tracked the population in the days that followed. They found that 96 percent of males — who vastly outnumber females at breeding spots — abandoned the site, 46 miles (74 kilometers) from the quake’s epicenter, five days before it struck on April 6, 2009.

The number of toads at the site fell to zero three days before the quake, according to the study, published in the Zoological Society of London’s Journal of Zoology.

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