Science

[:es]Darwin, Newton, Einstein. When scientists reach a certain level of fame, first names need not apply. That’s especially true if the scientist is a man, according to a new study. And it doesn’t just go for scientists: Politicians, athletes, and other high-profile figures are more likely to be referred to by their last names alone…

[:es]A recent marriage of three hot fields—ancient DNA, the genome editor CRISPR, and “organoids” built from stem cells—offers a provocative, if very preliminary, new option. At least two research teams are engineering stem cells to include Neanderthal genes and growing them into “minibrains” that reflect the influence of that ancient DNA.[:]

[:es]Africa’s baobab tree looks like something from a Dr. Seuss book. When young, the species (Adansonia digitata) is single-stemmed, branchless, and sports fruit that resembles giant sausages. Now, researchers report things get even weirder as the tree grows older. Over its lifetime, its roots send up several more stems in a ring, which eventually fuse…

[:es]Although we tend to think of evolution as happening over thousands, if not millions, of years, critical changes can take little more than a century. That’s what happened with a group of steelhead trout transplanted from the salty seas of California to the fresh waters of Lake Michigan for game fishermen in the 1890s. A…

[:es]Thirteen thousand years ago, as the last ice age ended, entire stretches of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef perished. Rising sea levels blanketed the world’s largest collection of corals with sediment coming off the newly inundated land, blocking the sunlight corals need to grow. The reef eventually recovered, but it took hundreds to thousands of years.…

[:es] What’s really behind ‘gluten sensitivity’?[:]

[:es]A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that…

[:es]One of biology’s great mysteries is how a single fertilized egg gives rise to the multitude of cell types, tissues, and organs that fit together to make a body. Now, a combination of single-cell sequencing technologies and computational tools is providing the most detailed picture yet of this process. In three papers online in Science…

[:es]The parasite that causes malaria can change the way you smell, making you more attractive to mosquitoes, according to a new study. The work may help explain why the disease is able to spread so effectively.[:]