Wi-Fi Cooks Your Sperm, Scientists Say
Listen up fellas, this one applies to you. According to a report in the medical journal Fertility and Sterility, your laptop's wireless signal could be killing your sperm. That's right, downloading music or firing off an email might be wiping out millions of potential offspring every time you sit down with your notebook.
Reuters read the report and says the scientists tested their theory by placing semen samples from 29 healthy men under a laptop connected to the Internet. They then turned on Wi-Fi and proceeded to download files. After four hours of Internet activity, around 25 percent of the sperm samples were no longer swimming, compared to 14 percent of semen from samples that were stored away from the PC.
"Our data suggest that the use of a laptop computer wirelessly connected to the Internet and positioned near the male reproductive organs may decrease human sperm quality," the researchers wrote in their report, according to Reuters.
Researchers blamed the sperm-killing phenomenon on electromagnetic radiation. Be that as it may, don't go using this as a form of birth control. Not everyone believes the study has much merit, including Dr. Robert Oates, president of the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology. According to Dr. Oates, "this is not real-life biology, this is a completely artificial setting." He admits to being intrigued by the study, but says it "doesn't have any human biological relevance."
Reuters read the report and says the scientists tested their theory by placing semen samples from 29 healthy men under a laptop connected to the Internet. They then turned on Wi-Fi and proceeded to download files. After four hours of Internet activity, around 25 percent of the sperm samples were no longer swimming, compared to 14 percent of semen from samples that were stored away from the PC.
"Our data suggest that the use of a laptop computer wirelessly connected to the Internet and positioned near the male reproductive organs may decrease human sperm quality," the researchers wrote in their report, according to Reuters.
Researchers blamed the sperm-killing phenomenon on electromagnetic radiation. Be that as it may, don't go using this as a form of birth control. Not everyone believes the study has much merit, including Dr. Robert Oates, president of the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology. According to Dr. Oates, "this is not real-life biology, this is a completely artificial setting." He admits to being intrigued by the study, but says it "doesn't have any human biological relevance."
