Science, Sperm, and a Survey About Your Junk

If you don’t already read Scicurious’s Friday Weird Science (and why not, may I ask?), today is the day to start. Today’s post is titled, “Laptops and WIFI are coming for your SPERM. Again.

Sci loves her some science of sex, especially after a long week in the lab. She also loves pulling apart the methodology of a study. Sometimes it’s to point out where the authors made some hilariously strange decisions. Sometimes it’s to highlight clever mechanisms for getting at a research question, particularly where testing in vivo would be ethically problematic. Sometimes it’s just to caution against getting too excited about what are really preliminary results.

That’s the case with the study Sci highlights today:

So the conclusions of this study: Do not place your sperm cells in a dish under your laptop for four hours. It might stop some of them from swimming.

That’s it. No nuked sperm here. From the press releases I was expecting to see those poor little buggers dying by the millions. Heck there wasn’t an increased rate of death at all. I’m not sure I buy the increased DNA fragmentation. But it doesn’t show decreased fertility, it doesn’t show nuked sperm, and though they got much higher electromagnetic frequencies, it doesn’t necessarily show that the Wi Fi is coming for your balls.

Here’s why this doesn’t necessarily mean the Wi Fi hates your nuts:

Go find out why. While you’re there, take Sci’s survey about how likely you are to put your genitals in danger. I think we all want to know how much of a problem this may be and how much attention we need to pay to future studies like this. (Yes, they do just keep…er…coming.)

It’s for science.

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Science, Sperm, and a Survey About Your Junk
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