After 2,000 years of dozing in the dry heat of the Judean desert, the seed of a date palm has been coaxed back to life. The seed germinated, sprouted, and grew flourishing palm fronds. Now researchers are waiting for the young tree to mature and are hoping fervently that it’s a female, which could bear fruit that would allow botanists to propagate its line.
Back in the ancient era known as the 1960s, archaeologists discovered a handful of wizened seeds in the ruins of King Herod’s fortress in Masada, near the Dead Sea. The seeds were kept on a shelf for 40 years before the Israeli archaeobotanist Mordechai Kislev decided to see if some life remained in the brown husks.
In 2005, Kislev gave the seeds to botanists who soaked them in hot water and nutrients and planted three in enriched soil. Three months later, the dirt cracked and a single shoot appeared. The researchers nicknamed the tiny sapling “Methuselah” after the oldest person whose age is mentioned in the Old Testament [Science News]. (Methusaleh was a whopping 969 years old, per Genesis 5:27.)
Who knew that a white spruce in northern Canada, a red maple in Pennsylvania, and a mahogany tree in Puerto Rico have so much in common? Their environments are certainly very different, with icy winds buffeting the spruce tree’s needles and hot, humid air bathing the mahogany tree’s leaves. But despite these external variations, a new study shows that inside each 
