When the biotechnology firm Colossal started in 2021, it set an eyebrow-raising goal: to genetically engineer elephants with hair and other traits found on extinct woolly mammoths.

Three years later, mammoth-like creatures do not roam the tundra. But on Wednesday, researchers with the company reported a noteworthy advance: They created elephant stem cells that could potentially be developed into any tissue in the body.

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Neanderthals may have vanished 40,000 years ago, but they are no strangers to us today. Their stocky skeletons dazzle in museums around the world. Their imagined personas star in television ads. When Kevin Bacon noted on Instagram that his morning habits are like those of a Neanderthal, he did not stop to explain that our ancient cousins interbred with modern humans expanding out of Africa.

But there’s no such familiarity with the Denisovans, a group of humans that split from the Neanderthal line and survived for hundreds of thousands of years before going extinct. That’s largely because we have so few of their bones. In a new review paper, anthropologists tally all of the fossils that have been clearly identified as Denisovan since the first discovery in 2010. The entire list consists of half a broken jaw, a finger bone, a skull fragment, three loose teeth and four other chips of bone.

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Last August, a team of paleontologists announced that they had discovered the fossilized bones of a gigantic ancient whale. Perucetus, as they named it, might have weighed over 200 tons, which would make it the heaviest animal that has ever lived.

But in a study published Thursday, a pair of scientists have challenged that bold claim. “The numbers don’t make any sense,” said Nicholas Pyenson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and one of the authors of the new study.

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Duke University has decided to close its herbarium, a collection of 825,000 specimens of plants, fungi and algae that was established more than a century ago. The collection, one of the largest and most diverse in the country, has helped scientists map the diversity of plant life and chronicle the impact of humans on the environment.

The university’s decision has left researchers reeling. “This is such a devastating blow for biodiversity science,” said Erika Edwards, the curator of the Yale Herbarium. “The entire community is simultaneously shocked and outraged.”

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Scientists have diagnosed Down syndrome from DNA in the ancient bones of seven infants, one as old as 5,500 years. Their method, published in the journal Nature Communications, may help researchers learn more about how prehistoric societies treated people with Down syndrome and other rare conditions.

Down syndrome, which occurs in 1 in 700 babies today, is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21. The extra chromosome makes extra proteins, which can cause a host of changes, including heart defects and learning disabilities.

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