Et Cetera

Every biologist knows that females spend a lot of energy making a small number of eggs, while males churn out huge quantities of sperm almost effortlessly. Not so, says a scientist who has studied the sex life of a worm no bigger than an apostrophe. Male soil nematodes that copulate a lot -- and thus produce a lot of sperm -- live only two-thirds as long as fellow worms that copulate but don't make sperm, according to a report in Nature. University of Arizona researcher Wayne Van Voorhies warns that it may be a mistake to make the leap from worms to humans, but women live, on average, six years longer than men.