Short answers, pulled from the story.
Oscar Hertwig discovered meiosis in 1876 while studying sea urchin eggs. He observed that two fused cells underwent a reduction before dividing again. This discovery marked the first glimpse of the process that would later be described as the engine of sexual reproduction.
The term meiosis was coined in 1905 by J.B. Farmer and J.E.S. Moore. They initially used the spelling maiosis before Koernicke and Pantel corrected it to follow standard transliteration conventions. The word is derived from the Greek word meaning lessening.
Meiotic prophase lasts 13 out of 14 days in mice. This phase is the longest stage of the entire meiotic process. During this time, homologous chromosomes pair with each other in a process called synapsis.
Down syndrome and Turner syndrome result from nondisjunction errors during meiosis. Down syndrome is trisomy of chromosome 21, while Turner syndrome involves lacking one X chromosome in females. The probability of these errors increases with maternal age due to the loss of cohesin over time.
Meiosis appears to be an ancient adaptation for repairing genomic DNA rather than merely producing gametes. Experimental findings indicate that a substantial benefit of meiosis is recombinational repair of DNA damage in the germline. Evidence suggests that facultative sex was likely present in the common ancestor of eukaryotes.