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The oldest solid material on Earth has just been identified, and it predates the Solar System itself by at least a few hundred million years. The teensy tiny microscopic grains of dust were forged in a distant star somewhere between 5 and 7 billion years ago, according to new research. By comparison, our Sun is just 4.6 billion years old. Eventually, these grains were carried to Earth in a meteorite. "This is one of the most exciting studies I've worked on," said cosmochemist Philipp Heck of the Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago. "These are the...

A New York Times opinion column acquaints humanity with the injustice of forbidding the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds -- who, nevertheless, would gain the franchise once a budding movement to that end came to fruition and then would impose the superior wisdom of the young by handing the presidency, so we are entitled to infer, to Sen. Bernie Sanders. The well-ripened alliance between various young folks and snowy-haired Sanders -- a 78-year-old heart attack victim going on age 5, to judge by his simplistic politics -- is hard to sort out. The truth seems to be that old-time political...

The "progressive," so to speak, vision of politics and public life envisions tighter and tighter government control over economic life, along with looser and looser controls over human behavior. I think you'd refer to the overall design as a paradox: a clash of methods and objectives. Elizabeth Warren wants corporations subjected to unprecedented government oversight. Austin's and San Francisco's ruling classes favor, for the homeless, just about all the freedom you could imagine to use the public streets as a bedroom or restroom, in the name of, I don't know ... liberty? Liberty for those who avail themselves of these...

President Donald Trump and the first lady's graceful tribute to the late George H.W. Bush underscored, a little awkwardly, one reason for the tone and fragrance of all the obituary tributes we're reading. The Trumps praised -- with unimpeachable dignity -- Bush's "essential authenticity, disarming wit, and unwavering commitment to faith, family, and country," together with his "sound judgment and unflappable leadership." This string of attributes strikes many, I'm sure, as precisely the stuff some future president won't be saying about Trump. As if Trump -- who knows exactly who he is and isn't -- really cared! The late George...

One telling detail keeps escaping the men and women of words who would end school shootings by one expedient or another: gun control, better security, the arming of teachers, more careful vetting of potential gunmen and so forth. The detail of which I speak: We didn't use to endure this horror. It didn't happen. The urgent question that flows from this detail: Why not? Well, to start with, because things were different, prior to the shooting fests, which break so many hearts and generate so much despair. Right, yes -- but different in what way? I will take a crack...

On now to Chapter MLXII in our Chronicles of National Disarray: "Congress Solves Immigration Perplexity." Or, far likelier, "Congress Kicks Can Down Road." With the federal government coming back to listlessness -- if not exactly life -- Republicans and Democrats are set for corrosive conversation in February regarding the topic of what to do about newcomers. We don't know what to do, which is why the conversation will likely end in kicked-can mode. Still, one considerable virtue of the Trump mode of doing business has been bringing us to this point: infuriating people, kicking up a ruckus we'd hoped to...

The sullen self-righteousness of the progressive left (i.e., "We're right, and the rest of you can go to the hot place!") glows on college campuses everywhere but also in big cities -- such as my beloved New Orleans, come to think of it: a locality embroiled in useless controversy over the removal of four Confederate-themed statues. City government wants to consign the public images of Jefferson Davis, P. G. T. Beauregard and even Robert E. Lee to a sanitized existence far from daily sight. (An obelisk marking local resistance to Louisiana's Reconstruction government is likewise targeted.) To what end? On...

What you end up with when the moral barriers topple is, not least, the end of due process at American colleges and universities. It's a dreadful prospect you likely wouldn't imagine without having scanned some of the stories on the rape crisis said to be spreading across American campuses. Supposedly, college women are at immense and growing risk of assault by males who take advantage of opportunity and superior strength to "have their way," as the old euphemism had it. Naturally, the claims have invited federal attention. (Everything seems, these days, to invite federal attention.) The respected investigative reporter Stuart...

Like him or not -- and I can argue it both ways -- established constitutional processes have hoisted Donald J. Trump atop the presidential plinth, where he stands now, getting ready to run things, insofar as anybody runs anything anymore. The latter point -- the semi-chaotic nature of 21st century social and political life -- is one we might fix on as we figure out what we're in for these next four years. Here is my guess: We are "in for" market-driven reforms led by an entrepreneur who will show us, as all entrepreneurs must in due course, whether...

In the political game -- humanity's reward for forbidden fruit chomping in the Garden of Eden -- all disagreements concern power: Who's No. 1 around here; who gets the final say-so. The ludicrous, and disheartening, dust-up over Indiana's new law on religious freedom shows where growing numbers of Americans think power has shifted with respect to society's fundamental and most important institution, marriage. Critics of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, signed into law only last week by Gov. Mike Pence, accuse Indiana of providing citizens legal cover to discriminate against gays -- to deny them jobs or services on "religious"...

Church-state separation never seems more a reality in America than when the media begin to appraise both the qualifications for a new pope and the challenges he -- whoever "he" turns out to be -- must face. The idea arises quickly on these occasions that the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church are choosing a chief executive like the president of General Mills or, for that matter, the president of the United States. Thus what we need (it seems) is a genial man with obvious people skills. A spiritual Bill Clinton? We may or may not need a European....

The Boy Scouts of America got front-page ink, as we say in the newspaper trade, for their currently postponed meditations on the topic of admitting avowed gays to membership. Word had leaked out that the Scouts were considering a local option solution to the vexed question of their supposed right to determine who can become a member and who can't. At a top-drawer meeting in Irving, Tex., the topic proved too vast and complex for immediate resolution. Consultation and deliberation will take place prior to May meeting of Scouts' national council. I spoke of the Scouts' "supposed" right to...

"Barack Obama won because he recognized a new America." Or maybe an America more fluid, more insubstantial than post-election wisdom is ready to grant. You can't always tell about "new" -- a truth the human race rarely acknowledges. We'll see whether James Carville's and Stan Greenberg's words from a Democracy Corps survey stand up better than the consensus of November 1965, following the Lyndon Johnson-led slaughter of almost every Republican downwind from Barry Goldwater. Johnson, father of the Great Society, was all but run out of Washington on a rail after mucking up the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, as everyone these...

Our national weeping and wailing over education spending cuts, public employee unions, and such like cause minds of a certain vintage to stop still and wonder. When were the divorce proceedings between home and classroom filed anyway? And who filed them, and why? It can be argued that the current traumas of education proceed from that divorce: further testimony to the general understanding that it's the kids who get hurt worst in divorce. The divorce between home and public school classroom -- accomplished by the end of the '70s -- was a national calamity. To put it another way, once...

First, the Obamacrat coup leaders passed a bill they know good and well (unless they're thoroughly unhinged) to be pie in the sky: unaffordable without future tax increases and service cuts. Nor, as is generally agreed, does the bill do anything to restrain medical costs, which will grow inexorably as more clamor to receive more and more. How are we going to be able even to fund Medicare without substantial cutbacks and tax hikes, given general health care's new demand on resources? The coup leaders' second offense -- committed with the encouragement of their president -- has been all along,...

It's moments like this one -- our Health Care Moment, we could call it -- that make numerous friends of democracy and good government want to pull the covers over their heads and leave a wake-up call for next month. The health care charade has gone on for a year. Polls suggest most Americans don't want the measures now on offer. Republican leaders want to start the whole thing over again. The president says no, because he's got his own plan and a date with the TV audience Thursday to explain why nothing his Republican guests will propose, unless it's...

A meteorite that hit the town of Murchison, Australia, hasn't quit giving up its secrets. The Murchison meteorite is one of the most studied space rocks because many pieces were recovered after it was seen breaking up as it fell through the atmosphere in 1969. Approximately 100 kg of the carbonaceous chondrite was recovered. Carbonaceous chondrites are extremely important to scientists as they were formed from material that existed in the solar system's planet-forming disk of gas and dust. They are, quite literally, time capsules holding onto a 4 billion year old record of the birth of our solar system....

Here's what we can look for as the federal government implements new rules meant to thwart the likes of Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalib, the would-be pants bomber: -- Sharp drop-offs in beverage sales as passengers find themselves barred from restrooms during the last 60 minutes of international flights. -- Airport check-in times longer than airplane flight times. -- An upsurge in employment for people turned on by the prospect of "patting down" strangers. -- A decrease in human dignity, across the board. Here 's what we likely can't look for: -- Federal acknowledgement that young Arabic or African men deserve more...

If the left wing of the left wing of the left wing in American life doesn't control most of the Obama farmstead's best and richest acreage, it could be time for new spectacles -- since things surely look that way. Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to go after the CIA has all the earmarks of policy designed to make left-wing hearts palpitate. What other purpose could it possibly serve? Not that of national security or common sense. I have written deliberately "go after the CIA," notwithstanding the demurral of newly appointed special prosecutor John Durham, which concerns the supposedly "preliminary"...

You really can't have "gay marriage," you know, irrespective of what a court or a legislature may say. You can have something some people call gay marriage, because to them the idea sounds worthy and necessary, but to say a thing is other than it is, is to stand reality on its head, hoping to shake out its pockets. Such is the supposed effect of the Iowa Supreme Court's declaration this month that gays and heterosexuals enjoy equal rights to marital bliss. Nope. They don't and won't, even if liberal Vermont follows Iowa's lead. The human race -- sorry ladies,...