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According to researchers from Ireland and the U.S., sharks don't need sex for reproduction. A lady shark in a zoo that provably had no sex produced a baby shark with "no paternal DNA" using a process known as "Parthenogenesis", the process that "occurs when an egg cell is triggered to develop as an embryo without the addition of any genetic material from a male sperm cell." The experiment publicized only today, was reportedly carried out in 2001, which raises the question of the academic reviewers didn't believe the findings for quite some time, or have secretly carried out their own experiments... If this story never gets published, it's because I tagged it "Communications" (in the absence of the notable absence of a "sex" category -- maybe geeks use Parthogenesis, too...?)

Since the popular Google Answers service was shut down, a host of similar services aiming at answering user questions - either automatically or using `crowd wisdom' techniques, i.e. human volunteers - have emerged.

Contenders include Answers.com (and their recent acquisition BrainBoost), AskAlexia, Amazon AskVille Lexxe, Lycos iQ, justanswer, MasterAnswer.com, Microsoft's Live QnA, Wondir, and Yahoo! Answers.

I wonder which sites are the favourites among ./ readers?