Washington Post today carried this article summarizing a remarkable discovery in plant genetics. It seems that plants can "fix" their genes with copies from ancestors long gone:

The newly discovered phenomenon, which resembles the caching of early versions of a computer document for viewing later, allows plants to archive copies of genes from generations ago, long assumed to be lost forever.

Great. I can't remember where I put my car keys this morning, but my house plant can call up the genetic code of its ancestors. Sometimes life just don't seem fair.