A Bizarre Genetic Parasite

Another insect, a scale insect, has an even more bizarre genetic parasite. When its eggs are fertilized. sometimes more than one sperm penetrates the egg. If this happens, one of the sperm fuses with the egg's nucleus in the normal way; the spare sperm hang around and begin dividing as the egg divides. When the creature matures, the parasitic sperm cells eat out its gonads and replace them with themselves. So the insect produces sperm or eggs that are barely related to itself, an astonishing ...

 The Importance of Time-Stamping to Relevance

Time-stamping is of interest because the temporal element of context is essential for understanding a text (to take an obvious example, when reading a paper on global geopolitics in 2006 it is essential to know whether it was written before or after 11th September, 2001). Furthermore, some information has a 'sell-by date': after a certain point it may become unreliable. Often this point isn't predictable exactly, but broad indications can be given; naturally much depends on whether the inform...