Word: sperm
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...PROCESS OF HUMAN CONCEPTION is almost absurdly inefficient. During copulation, a man expels tens of millions of sperm, with considerable force, into his partner's vaginal canal. Despite the head start, most of the tiny, tadpole-shape, self-propelled cells never come within shouting distance of the woman's egg, floating deep inside the Fallopian tube. And if one does finally complete the journey, it may or may not have the energy left for fertilization...
...would have become entrenched. Now Maydianne Andrade, a University of Toronto graduate student, reports in the current Science that she has discovered what it is. A female who is chewing on her boyfriend is distracted and allows him to copulate longer. That lets him deposit the maximum amount of sperm, giving him a better chance of passing along his genes. Beyond that, a sperm-filled female tends to spurn new suitors, ensuring that the suicidal male, not a rival, has the offspring...
...that it's easy to feel sorry for Di, since she's paid infinitely better than anyone else in the same line of work. A surrogate mother in the U.S. gets about $10,000 for the nine-month-long job of transforming some fellow's sperm into a viable infant--an amount Di could easily blow on cashmeres and facials in an afternoon. And while the surrogate mom gets shown to the door as soon as the baby's delivered, Di lingers on, posing for photographers and visiting hospices, at an allowance of up to $4,000 a week...
...time for the British to realize that successful breeding isn't always consistent with "family values." After all, the only humane solution would have been to let Charles run off with Camilla long ago, leaving a test tube of sperm behind in Buckingham Palace. His mom could then have distributed it among hundreds of female volunteers in a kind of genetic Bake-Off--with the throne then being awarded to the most boring and phlegmatic child that resulted. The next step would be to take away the royals' allowances, which amount to $15 million a year for the lot. Princess...
Meselson is studying a species of microscopic all-female pond dwellers called the bdellois rotifers. The rotifers live without sex and have no males, sperm or fertilization among their species...