Comment on This week in science: fire and ice-land

During a Supreme Court hearing on Idaho abortion law, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and Justice Samuel Alito clashed over fetal protections under federal law EMTALA. Prelogar argues women deserve necessary medical care, challenging Alito's focus on "unborn child" protections.

CNN's John King talks to voters in Georgia, which President Joe Biden won in 2020, about who they will vote for in the 2024 presidential election.

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Arizona doctors could give their patients abortions in California under a proposal announced Wednesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom to circumvent a ban on nearly all abortions in that state. It would apply only to doctors licensed in good standing in Arizona and their patients, and last only through the end of November.

Defendants in Colorado sexual assault cases soon will be prohibited from using what a victim was wearing or a victim’s hairstyle as evidence of consent. Lt. Gov. Dianne Primavera, who is the acting governor this week, signed House Bill 1072 Wednesday afternoon. The bipartisan legislation is aimed at strengthening protections for sex assault victims in court by expanding the rape shield law.

John Cage, the influential composer and artist, is dead. So it’s technically impossible to know with absolute certainty how he would feel about the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University. But the question emerges after New York Times columnist John McWhorter, a music humanities and linguistics professor at Columbia, wrote that he was forced to stop students from playing Cage’s 4’33”—a seminal work that’s effectively four minutes and 33 seconds of silence (though Cage-heads might disagree with that description)—because of the demonstrations.

These demonstrators have a seemingly endless supply of a commodity that no one who takes college seriously should ever have.