Each summer, like clockwork, millions of beech trees throughout Europe sync up, tuning their reproductive physiology to one another. Within a matter of days, the trees produce all the seeds they’ll make for the year, then release their fruit onto the forest floor to create a new generation and feed the surrounding ecosystem. It’s a reproductive spectacle known as masting that’s common to many tree...

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Out of all the cells in the body, oocytes are the most patient. The immature egg cells form inside a female’s body when she’s still a fetus in her mother’s womb, and then they wait in a quiescent state for years, if not decades. Cocooned inside ovaries, they pause, neither dividing nor replicating their DNA, so that one day they may pass along pristinely preserved genetic information to the next...

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