UK | Nobel laureate resigns honorary post after sexist remarks

Dr. Tim Hunt, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine

A Nobel Prize-winning British scientist who said there was “trouble with girls” working in laboratories has resigned from his honorary post at University College London. Tim Hunt apologized for his remarks at the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea but had stood by his assertion that mixed-gender labs were disruptive. The university said Wednesday he had left his position after “comments he made about women in science.” UCL says it’s the “first university in England to admit women students on equal terms to men” and “this outcome is compatible with our commitment to gender equality.” The 72-year-old Hunt, a biochemist who jointly won the 2001 Nobel for physiology or medicine, said he was just trying to be funny.

Spain  | Madrid gives formal burial to Cervantes, 400 years later

Spain has given its greatest writer, Miguel de Cervantes, a formal burial some 400 hundred years after his death, unveiling a funeral monument holding bone remains believed to include those of the author of “Don Quixote.” Madrid Mayor Ana Botella placed a laurel wreath at the foot of the monument in a Madrid convent yesterday in a ceremony that included military honors because Cervantes had also been a soldier for Spain. The bones were unearthed this year by experts after a near-yearlong search at the convent where Cervantes was known to have been buried in 1616. Construction work over the centuries made it difficult to ascertain exactly where his bones lay and spurred the search so that the author could finally be given a properly signposted burial site.