History: Ancient and Very, Very Ancient and Not Nearly Ancient Enough

These cases are difficult.  There are a number of things that I dislike about Lawrence Krauss, and I don’t find it at all difficult to believe that he thinks himself entitled and that he’s guilty of some or all of the offenses that have been laid at his feet.  On the other hand, academic investigations of sexual harassment and misconduct are notoriously prone to ignore due process, elementary rules of evidence, the presumption of innocence, and the rights of the accused — precisely the things that worried me most in the matter of Brett Kavanaugh.

“Lawrence Krauss and the Legacy of Harassment in Science: The theoretical physicist isn’t the first celebrity scientist to be accused of sexual misconduct, but he is the first to face consequences.”

For what it’s worth, Senator Jeff Flake, for whom I have several times expressed my admiration, comes down somewhere near where I do on the Kavanaugh matter, though I probably lean a bit more toward Kavanaugh than he does:

“Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake tells ‘The View’ he’s not sure he believed Brett Kavanaugh”

In the end, I simply felt that Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser — I counted only Christine Blasey Ford as credible; the other two could not, in the end, be taken seriously — had not met the minimum burden of proof and that the presumption of Judge Kavanaugh’s innocence had therefore not been overcome.

What is the truth about Lawrence Krauss?  I cannot say.

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But now for some interesting news about actual science:

“There’s a Strange Cloud on Mars Right Now, and It’s Just Hanging Around”

Could there possibly be microbial life on Mars?

“Mars scientists edge closer to solving methane mystery: The warming power of the Sun could help to explain why the level of gas in the atmosphere changes with the seasons.”

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Meanwhile, back on Earth, a glimpse into archaeology as it’s actually done (very unlike what’s often shown in the movies) and a glance at a curious archaeobotanical mystery:

“What Ancient Maize Can Tell Us About Thousands of Years of Civilization in America: It took millennia, but America’s founding farmers developed the grain that would fuel civilizations—and still does”

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But here’s something from roughly 310 million years ago in Arizona — which is almost as foreign to us as Mars:

“Oldest known footprints in the Grand Canyon found: Exposed by a rockfall, the oddly angled tracks offer a rare glimpse into early animal behavior.”

And now we go back into even more distant times:

“Vertebrate evolution kicked off in lagoons: Researchers trace first animals with backbones to shallow “evolutionary hot-spots”.”