Science is making its way through the five stages of grief as President Trump reshapes the science landscape. We've had anger, and denial. How could Trump do this to United States? There are signs that science is entering into bargaining, if two editorials in this week's Science magazine are to be believed.
Did turmoil in the Earth's magnetic field drive the Neanderthals to extinction, opening up Eurasia to Homo sapiens moving in from Africa? A group of astrophysicists look at a tumultuous magnetic event 41,000 years ago, and say "maybe!". Some archaeologists say, "not so fast." Science is never settled.
Some sea slugs have pulled off a clever symbiotic trick. When they eat plant food, they steal the chloroplasts and keep them alive in their gut cells. They're not quite photosynthetic slugs, but if the going gets tough, the hoarded chloroplasts provide a nice pasture to graze on for about a month. Symbiosis is not always sweetness and light. Cancer cells can steal mitochondria from nerve cells, which they can use to power their own growth, and colonization of other tissues, fueling deadly metastasis.
2025 is the centenary of the famous Scopes "monkey trial" in Dayton Tennessee, and I will be there covering the event. Here are links to four articles I wrote for Minding the Campus outlining my own perspective on the Scopes trial.
- A review of Inherit the Wind
- The case for the defense
- The case for the prosecution
- Evolution and culture in 1920s America
Photo by J. Scott Turner
