Since the Scopes Trial of 1925 and the Darwin Centennial of 1959, neo-Darwinism has used intimidation and groupthink to maintain its status of "accepted truth" beyond need of further evidence. Critical papers have appeared, but usually outside the leading biology journals. Indeed, merely expressing doubts about Darwin has been a career-limiting move for many (see Free Science). Look at these recent papers, though, and see if it appears to be getting safer to question the explanatory omnipotence of random mutations and natural selection.

How Powerful Is Natural Selection, Really?

• Venkataram et al., "Evolutionary stalling and a limit on the power of natural selection to improve a cellular module," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 17, 2020.

How powerful is natural selection if it can stall out? This team ran mutation experiments on E. coli's translation machinery and found that "cellular modules may not be fully optimized by natural selection despite the availability of adaptive mutations." Darwin's mechanism is not omnipotent. Natural selection, being blind, can stop improving one module and skip to another, leaving the first module below optimum. The authors are not quitting their subscription to natural selection, but they are losing faith in its ability to explain molecular machines by a simple mechanism.

Overall, our results highlight the fact that it is impossible to fully understand the evolution of a cellular module in isolation from the genome where it is encoded and the population-level processes that govern evolution. The ability of natural selection to improve any one module depends on the population size, the rate of recombination, the supply, and the fitness effects of all beneficial mutations in the genome and on how these quantities change as populations adapt. Further theoretical work and empirical measurements integrated across multiple levels of biological organization are required for us to understand adaptive evolution of modular biological systems. [Emphasis added.]

Resembling a butterfly with its symmetrical structure, beautiful colors, and intricate patterns, this striking bubble of gas — known as NGC 2899 — appears to float and flutter across the sky in this new picture from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT). This object has never before been imaged in such striking detail, with even the faint outer edges of the planetary nebula glowing over the background stars.

NGC 2899's vast swathes of gas extend up to a maximum of two light-years from its center, glowing brightly in front of the stars of the Milky Way as the gas reaches temperatures upwards of ten thousand degrees. The high temperatures are due to the large amount of radiation from the nebula's parent star, which causes the hydrogen gas in the nebula to glow in a reddish halo around the oxygen gas, in blue.

This object, located between 3000 and 6500 light-years away in the Southern constellation of Vela (The Sails), has two central stars, which are believed to give it its nearly symmetric appearance. After one star reached the end of its life and cast off its outer layers, the other star now interferes with the flow of gas, forming the two-lobed shape seen here. Only about 10-20% of planetary nebulae display this type of bipolar shape.

In a breakthrough new study, scientists and engineers at the University of Minnesota have electrically transformed the abundant and low-cost non-magnetic material iron sulfide, also known as "fool's gold" or pyrite, into a magnetic material.

This is the first time scientists have ever electrically transformed an entirely non-magnetic material into a magnetic one, and it could be the first step in creating valuable new magnetic materials for more energy-efficient computer memory devices.

The research is published in Science Advances, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Airbus-France will build the huge satellite that brings the first Martian rock samples back to Earth.

This material will be drilled on the Red Planet by the US space agency's next rover, Perseverance, before being blasted into orbit by a rocket.

It'll be the Airbus satellite's job to grab the packaged samples and then ship them home.

The joint American-European project is expected to cost billions and take just over a decade to implement.

But scientists say it's probably the best way to confirm whether life has ever existed on the Red Planet.

As the world tries to see and photograph Comet NEOWISE (or check-out this week's extra-bright rings of Saturn), a comet similar to Halley's comet — last seen in 1954 — has been found by astronomers using a telescope in Arizona.

They've calculated that comet 12P/Pons-Brooks will return to the Solar System in April 2024 — which is when a total solar eclipse will next be observable from Mexico, the US and Canada.

The news comes just as Comet NEOWISE is glowing in the night skies for skywatchers in the northern hemisphere.

Aaron Lojewski, who leads aurora sightseeing tours in Alaska, was lucky enough to photograph a "eruption" of brilliant pink light in the night skies one night in February.

The same perturbations of the Earth's magnetic field that lit up the sky for Lojewski's camera were also captured by seismometers on the ground, a team of researchers reports in the journal Seismological Research Letters.

By comparing data collected by all-sky cameras, magnetometers, and seismometers during three aurora events in 2019, University of Alaska Fairbanks seismologist Carl Tape and colleagues show that it's possible to match the striking display of lights with seismic signals, to observe the same phenomenon in different ways.

Extensive power outages and satellite blackouts that affect air travel and the internet are some of the potential consequences of massive solar storms. These storms are believed to be caused by the release of enormous amounts of stored magnetic energy due to changes in the magnetic field of the sun's outer atmosphere - something that until now has eluded scientists' direct measurement. Researchers believe this recent discovery could lead to better "space weather" forecasts in the future.

"We are becoming increasingly dependent on space-based systems that are sensitive to space weather. Earth-based networks and the electrical grid can be severely damaged if there is a large eruption", says Tomas Brage, Professor of Mathematical Physics at Lund University in Sweden.

Solar flares are bursts of radiation and charged particles, and can cause geomagnetic storms on Earth if they are large enough. Currently, researchers focus on sunspots on the surface of the sun to predict possible eruptions. Another and more direct indication of increased solar activity would be changes in the much weaker magnetic field of the outer solar atmosphere - the so-called Corona.

However, no direct measurement of the actual magnetic fields of the Corona has been possible so far.

Grotesque side effects from unproven "stem cell" therapies are more common than we realized, reports a team of researchers led by UConn Health in Annals of Neurology on July 29. And despite the dangers, many neurologists feel ill-equipped to warn and educate their patients.

People who have suffered debilitating brain or spinal cord damage, or have been diagnosed with progressive neurological disease, are often frustrated by the lack of treatments available to help them. That frustration can make them easy targets for clinics that inject patients with "stem cells". But most of these clinics are operating outside of the Food and Drug Administration's jurisdiction, and the treatments they offer are unproven. And pricey.

"It's an unethical industry. They use fancy websites promising cures left and right, but which are nothing of the sort. They steal your money but give nothing in return," says Jaime Imitola, senior author of the paper and director of the comprehensive Multiple Sclerosis Center at UConn Health and the Laboratory of Neural Stem Cells and Functional Neurogenetics at UConn Health and a faculty member at the UConn School of Medicine.

Patients often pay $25,000 to $50,000 in cash for procedures that claim to cure everything from multiple sclerosis to paralysis, but have no evidence to back them up. The clinics, which can operate in the US but are more commonly found in Mexico, China, Russia and other countries with looser health regulations, entice patients to fly out for a week or two of spa-like treatment, physical therapy and injections of stem cells supposedly designed to cure multiple sclerosis, ALS, paralysis, or whatever other neurological impairment the person suffers from. The physical therapy often makes the patient feel better for a week or two. But sadly, there are no treatments that can reliably improve most of these diseases, and definitely none using stem cells. And anecdotal stories have begun popping up of patients who have had these stem cell procedures and then developed horrifying side effects, from hepatitis to nerve pain to bizarre spinal cord tumors.

In an effort to better understand the impact of this stem cell tourism, as the field calls it, a team of researchers lead by UConn Health conducted a nationwide survey of academic neurologists' experiences in stem cell tourism complications. The survey also investigated the level of physician preparation to counsel and educate patients.

A mysteriously long, thin cloud has again appeared over the 20-km high Arsia Mons volcano on Mars.

A recurrent feature, the cloud is made up of water ice, but despite appearances it is not a plume linked to volcanic activity. Instead, the curious stream forms as airflow is influenced by the volcano's 'leeward' slope − the side that does not face the wind.

These images of the cloud, which can reach up to 1800-km in length, were taken on 17 and 19 July by the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) on Mars Express, which has been studying the Red Planet from orbit for the past 16 years.

"We have been investigating this intriguing phenomenon and were expecting to see such a cloud form around now," explains Jorge Hernandez-Bernal, PhD candidate at the University of the Basque Country (Spain) and lead author of the ongoing study.

"This elongated cloud forms every martian year during this season around the southern solstice, and repeats for 80 days or even more, following a rapid daily cycle. However, we don't know yet if the clouds are always quite this impressive".

Scientists have successfully revived microbes that had lain dormant at the bottom of the sea since the age of the dinosaurs, allowing the organisms to eat and even multiply after eons in the deep.

Their research sheds light on the remarkable survival power of some of Earth's most primitive species, which can exist for tens of millions of years with barely any oxygen or food before springing back to life in the lab.

A team led by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology analysed ancient sediment samples deposited more than 100m years ago on the seabed of the South Pacific.

The region is renowned for having far fewer nutrients in its sediment than normal, making it a far-from-ideal site to maintain life over millennia.