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Mining companies have been advised to temporarily suspend work in the river that originates at Mount Merapi, and tourism companies have been asked to temporarily stay away from "areas of potential danger and crater openings" up to 3 miles away.

The last major eruption of Mount Merapi, in 2010, killed over 300 people.

The Yale-led study investigated the timing of this outgassing by modeling the effects of carbon dioxide and sulfur emissions on global temperatures and comparing them with paleotemperature records spanning the extinction. They found that at least 50% or more of the major outgassing from the Deccan Traps occurred well before the asteroid impact, and only the impact coincided with the mass extinction event.The volcanoes did "cause a warming event," but its effect had gone by the time extinction happened, said Michael Henehan, a former researcher at Yale who is now based at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.

biology would have to be popping up all over the place.

Andrew Ellington, of the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology at the University of Texas, Austin, “I can’t tell you what the probability is. It’s a chapter of the story that’s pretty much blank.”

Given that rather bleak-sounding assessment, it may be surprising to learn that Ellington is actually pretty upbeat. But that’s how he and two colleagues come across in a paper in the latest Science. The crucial step from nonliving stuff to a live cell is still a mystery, they acknowledge, but the number of pathways a mix of inanimate chemicals could have taken to reach the threshold of the living turns out to be many and varied. “It’s difficult to say exactly how things did occur,” says Ellington. “But there are many ways it could have occurred.

The first stab at answering the question came all the way back in the 1950s, when chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey passed an electrical spark through a beaker containing methane, ammonia, water vapor and hydrogen, thought at the time to represent Earth’s primordial atmosphere.

Scientists have learned so much, in fact, that the number of places life might have begun has grown to include such disparate locations as the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean; beds of clay; the billowing clouds of gas emerging from volcanoes; and the spaces in between ice crystals.

The number of ideas about how the key step from organic chemicals to living organisms might have been taken has multiplied as well: there’s the “RNA world hypothesis” and the “lipid world hypothesis” and the “iron-sulfur world hypothesis” and more, all of them dependent on a particular set of chemical circumstances and a particular set of dynamics and all highly speculative.

“Maybe when they do,” says Ellington, “we’ll all do a face-plant because it turns out to be so obvious in retrospect.” But even if they succeed, it will only prove that a manufactured cell could represent the earliest life forms, not that it actually does. “It will be a story about what we think might have happened, but it will still be a story.”

The story Ellington and his colleagues have been able to tell already, however, is a reason for optimism. We still don’t know the odds that life will arise under the right conditions. But the underlying biochemistry is abundantly, ubiquitously available—and it would take an awfully perverse universe to take things so far only to shut them down at the last moment.

M.I.T. students can use OpenCourseWare courses to get a feel for a subject or an instructor, while students at other universities can use them to supplement their own courses. “If you’re taking a course on Pompeii, and you want to know more about volcanoes, we have a course for that,” Ms. Forward said. But while OpenCourseWare students attend the same lectures, and take the same tests as M.I.T. students do, they do not get M.I.T. credit, or an M.I.T. degree.

He said more than 200 people were receiving treatment at the Bhayangkara police hospital and several others in Mamuju alone. Another 630 were injured in Majene.

The quake set off landslides in three locations and blocked a main road connecting Mamuju to Majene. Power and phone lines were down in many areas.

A governor office building was almost flattened by the quake and a shopping mall was reduced to a crumpled hulk.

Two ships headed to the devastated areas from the nearby cities of Makassar and Balikpapan with rescuers and equipment, including excavators.

The pope was praying for “the repose of the deceased, the healing of the injured and the consolation of all who grieve.” Francis also offered encouragement to those continuing search and rescue effects, and he invoked “the divine blessings of strength and hope.”

Indonesia, home to more than 260 million people, is frequently hit by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.

The political and methodological stresses within the historical profession are intensified by economic troubles. For a long time, but especially since the economic crisis of 2008, university students have turned away from the humanities, preferring to major in fields that seem to offer more certain and lucrative employment. Consequently, academic jobs in the humanities and especially in history have become radically more precarious for younger faculty—even as universities have sought to meet diversity goals in their next-generation hiring by expanding offerings in history-adjacent specialties, such as gender and ethnic studies.

The result has produced a generational divide. Younger scholars feel oppressed and exploited by universities pressing them to do more labor for worse pay with less security than their elders; older scholars feel that overeager juniors are poised to pounce on the least infraction as an occasion to end an elder’s career and seize a job opening for themselves. Add racial difference as an accelerant, and what was intended as an interesting methodological discussion in a faculty newsletter can explode into a national culture war.

One of the greatest American Africanists was the late Philip Curtin. He wrote one of the first attempts to tally the exact number of persons trafficked by the transatlantic slave trade. Upon publication in 1972, his book was acclaimed as a truly pioneering work of history. By 1995, however, he was moved to protest against trends in the discipline at that time in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:I am troubled by increasing evidence of the use of racial criteria in filling faculty posts in the field of African history … This form of intellectual apartheid has been around for several decades, but it appears to have become much more serious in the past few years, to the extent that white scholars trained in African history now have a hard time finding jobs.

Much of academia is governed these days by a joke from the Soviet Union: “If you think it, don’t speak it. If you speak it, don’t write it. If you write it, don’t sign it. But if you do think it, speak it, write it, and sign it—don’t be surprised.”

Yet this silence has consequences, too. One of the most unsettling is the displacement of history by mythmaking

mythmaking is spreading from “just the movies” to more formal and institutional forms of public memory. If old heroes “must fall,” their disappearance opens voids for new heroes to be inserted in their place—and that insertion sometimes requires that new history be fabricated altogether, the “bad history” that Sweet tried to warn against.

If it is not the job of the president of the American Historical Association to confront those questions, then whose is it?

Sweet used a play on words—“Is History History?”—for the title of his complacency-shaking essay. But he was asking not whether history is finished, done with, but Is history still history? Is it continuing to do what history is supposed to do? Or is it being annexed for other purposes, ideological rather than historical ones?

Advocates of studying the more distant past to disturb and challenge our ideas about the present may accuse their academic rivals of “presentism.”

In real life, of course, almost everybody who cares about history believes in a little of each option. But how much of each? What’s the right balance? That’s the kind of thing that historians do argue about, and in the arguing, they have developed some dismissive labels for one another

Those who look to the more recent past to guide the future may accuse the other camp of “antiquarianism.”

The accusation of presentism hurts because it implies that the historian is sacrificing scholarly objectivity for ideological or political purposes. The accusation of antiquarianism stings because it implies that the historian is burrowing into the dust for no useful purpose at all.

In his mind, he was merely reopening one of the most familiar debates in professional history: the debate over why? What is the value of studying the past? To reduce the many available answers to a stark choice: Should we study the more distant past to explore its strangeness—and thereby jolt ourselves out of easy assumptions that the world we know is the only possible one?

Or should we study the more recent past to understand how our world came into being—and thereby learn some lessons for shaping the future?

The August edition of the association’s monthly magazine featured, as usual, a short essay by the association’s president, James H. Sweet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Within hours of its publication, an outrage volcano erupted on social media. A professor at Cornell vented about the author’s “white gaze.”