If you are among the scant 33% of U.S. adults who believe that humans and other living things evolved solely by a process of natural selection, it might be time to put your money where your mouth is. No, this is not a political fundraising pitch. It's a notice of the impending sale, by auction, of a piece of scientific history -- a signed manuscript page from the concluding chapter of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species." Written in the compressed, right-slanting script of Darwin himself, the sheet is numbered "245" in the upper right-hand corner, and would go on to become page 514 of the latest, 3rd edition of his landmark tome. It was likely written in 1859, when the English biologist was about 50 years old.

There are lots of reasons why doctors encourage new mothers to breastfeed their babies. Compared with babies who get formula, babies who are breastfed are less likely to die as a result of infections, sudden infant death syndrome or any other reason. The longer a mother nurses -- and the longer she does so exclusively -- the bigger the benefits, studies show. Another perceived benefit of breastfeeding is the possibility that it boosts a baby's brain. A clinical trial involving more than 16,000 infants in Belarus who were randomly assigned to get either special support for breastfeeding (based on a program from the World Health Organization and UNICEF) or a hospital's usual care found that babies in the first group scored an average of 7.5 points higher on a verbal IQ test and 5.9 points higher on overall IQ.

Researchers have some bad news for moms who used DHA supplements while they were pregnant in hopes of boosting their baby's brains: At age 7, kids whose mothers took DHA scored no higher on an IQ test than kids whose moms swallowed capsules that were DHA-free. The results are the latest findings from a study assessing the benefits -- if any -- of giving DHA to babies in utero. They appear in Tuesday's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Assn. DHA, short for docosahexaenoic acid, is an omega-3 fatty acid that plays a key role in brain health. It's essential throughout our lives, and especially during infancy when the brain, eyes and nervous system are developing.

The making of a memory champion, it turns out, is not so different from the making of any other great athlete. To triumph in sport, athletes sculpt muscle and sinew and lash them together with head and heart to deliver optimum performance. To perform extraordinary feats of memorization, memory champions strengthen distinct groups of structures scattered throughout the brain. And then, they groove the connections that lash those groups together until the whole system works like a well-oiled machine. In short, memory champions are not born that way.

For the cognitively ambitious among us, there are always new debates to win, tests to ace, and feats of intellect to accomplish. And just as for the athletically gifted, the lure of performance-enhancing drugs is hard to resist. The question is, can drugs boost intellectual performance? New research shows that for tournament-level chess players, they can. In a series of experiments, researchers found that caffeine, the stimulant Ritalin and the stay-awake drug modafinil ever-so-slightly improved players' chances of winning a game against a computer program set to their skill level.

First they figured out how to play checkers and backgammon. Then they mastered chess, Go, "Jeopardy!" and even a few Atari video games. Now computers can challenge humans at the poker table -- and win. DeepStack, a software program developed at the University of Alberta's Computer Poker Research Group, took on 33 professional poker players in more than 44,000 hands of Texas hold'em. Overall, the program won by a significantly higher margin than if it had simply folded in each round, according to a new study in Science.

One day, gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers, but the whirr of robots, too. Scientists in Japan say they've managed to turn an unassuming drone into a remote-controlled pollinator by attaching horsehairs coated with a special, sticky gel to its underbelly. The system, described in the journal Chem, is nowhere near ready to be sent to agricultural fields, but it could help pave the way to developing automated pollination techniques at a time when bee colonies are suffering precipitous declines. In flowering plants, sex often involves a threesome. Flowers looking to get the pollen from their male parts into another bloom's female parts need an envoy to carry it from one to the other.