Why does Stephen study whale earwax?

A psychologist with wide-ranging interests, Stephen Trumble studies everything from rats to zebrafish, but these days whale earwax is taking over his Baylor University lab. There are already 30 pieces of it lined up, each requiring about a year’s worth of analysis — and he hopes to obtain five times as many. He’s doing this because hidden in all that wax is information that could tell us how life has been changing for whales and the Arctic in the past 100 years or more.

After three years of fund-raising and renovations, the founders of a contemporary art museum housed in a converted brewery in the Molenbeek district here were eagerly anticipating their grand opening on March 23. But those plans were upended on March 22, when suicide bombers struck the Brussels airport and a subway station, killing 32 people and paralyzing a city already reeling from revelations that some of the deadliest terror attacks in Europe had been carried out by homegrown extremists, many from Molenbeek.