What happened
The White House said yesterday that President Donald Trump was withholding $175 million in federal funds from the University of Pennsylvania over its decision to allow a transgender swimmer to compete at the school in 2021 and 2022. Separately, the Education Department — which Trump will seek to dismantle in an executive order today — told Maine it risked losing federal K-12 funds if it didn't ban transgender athletes from competing in women's sports.

Who said what
Penn said in a statement it had not "received any official notification or any details" about suspended funding, but it "has always followed NCAA and Ivy League policies regarding student participation on athletic teams." The university "no longer has any transgender athletes competing on women's teams," The Washington Post said, and the White House "did not explain the legal basis for the freeze."

A White House official said yesterday's announcement was "just a taste of what could be coming down the pike for Penn," according to Fox Business. The funding threat is Trump's "latest salvo" in his "growing fight with universities over campus culture and diversity initiatives," The Washington Post said. Earlier this month he suspended $400 million for Columbia over alleged antisemitism.

What next?
Penn, "like many other universities, has already been bracing for a financial storm" from Trump's efforts to squeeze higher education, The New York Times said. The school has warned that a "threatened change involving National Institutes of Health funding" could "cost it about $240 million a year." The Maine funding ultimatum stems from a quick Title IX investigation launched "just hours after Trump and the state's Democratic governor, Janet Mills, clashed" on transgender athletes on Feb. 21, The Associated Press said.

What happened
Scientists with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), an international research collaboration, presented new evidence yesterday that bolstered its recent finding that dark energy is not inexorably pushing the universe apart at a constant rate of acceleration but rather ebbs and flows and appears to be weakening. If borne out, that would upend the 27-year-old standard explanation of the mysterious force that appears to dominate the universe.

Who said what
Discovering the nature of dark energy may seem an academic exercise for cosmologists, but "nothing short of the fate of the universe hangs in the balance," The Associated Press said. If the standard model of constant acceleration is correct, the universe would eventually get "ripped apart across every scale, from galaxy clusters down to atomic nuclei," The New York Times said. But if DESI is right about dark energy evolving, the "expansion could wane, eventually leaving the universe stable," or the cosmos might "reverse course, eventually doomed to a collapse that astronomers refer to as the Big Crunch."

Is the "possibility that everything comes to an end" a "good or bad thing?" said DESI member Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki at the University of Texas at Dallas. "I don't know." The DESI observations "may be cosmically consequential," The Washington Post said, but for "planning purposes," the "timescale here is many billions or trillions of years."

What next?
DESI's original findings last year were based on mapping the movements of 6 million galaxies and quasars, and its new data ups that to nearly 15 million. The group "aims to map around 50 million galaxies and quasars by the end of its survey in 2026," the AP said, which could boost confidence in their results — or weaken it.