Sperm

An engineering team says that their sperm-injecting robot was the first robot ever to successfully fertilize a human egg. What's more, that robot is controlled in part by a piece of tech you might find in your very own home--Sony's DualSense, the controller that comes with the PS5.“I was calm. In that exact moment, I thought, ‘It’s just one more experiment,’” student engineer Eduard Alba told MIT Technology Review. Alba is part of a team of engineers based in Barcelona who designed the robot and then sent…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Sperm and egg donors who assumed they would remain anonymous have been tracked down by their children using DNA tests, new research says. The study also found that people who were unaware that they were conceived using a donor have discovered the truth through finding unexpected family links on…

Swimmers who wore Speedo’s controversial LZR Racer suit at the 2008 Beijing Olympics broke 23 out of the 25 world records broken, proving that being more streamlined has advantages. A new study out of Japan has shown that the same theory applies to sperm.Spermatozoa must travel through the female reproductive tract to fertilize an egg. With hundreds of millions of them vying for a single egg, having an advantage over the competition is essential. It’s a sperm’s streamlined design that allows for its rapid movement,…

Weill Cornell Medicine investigators have developed an experimental contraceptive drug candidate that can potentially serve as an on-demand male contraceptive. Recent research indicates that the drug effectively halts sperm movement, ultimately preventing pregnancy in preclinical models.An experimental contraceptive drug candidate developed by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators temporarily stops sperm in their tracks and prevents pregnancies in preclinical models. The study, published in the journal <span…

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Over time, they refined TDI-11861. In mice, the drug didn’t appear to interfere with sexual functioning or cause any side effects. And most importantly, the sperm were normal again a day later. Of course, there is a big caveat: Mice are not people. But humans also have the sAC enzyme, and in males, it’s also involved in sperm movement. Buck and Levin are reassured that the strategy might be safe in people by another team’s report from 2019, which described two infertile men with mutations in the gene that makes sAC. The…

Alarming study shows a significant decline in sperm counts around the world. Sperm count is not only an indicator of human fertility, but it is also an indicator of men’s health.Scientists have published the first meta-analysis to demonstrate declining sperm counts among men from South and Central America, Asia, and Africa. The international team was led by Professor Hagai Levine of Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Hadassah Braun School of Public Health, with Prof. Shanna Swan at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai,…

Sperm count among men worldwide is falling at an accelerated rate after halving over the last 40 years, a large new study said Tuesday, calling for action to stop the decline.The study, led by Israeli epidemiologist Hagai Levine, updates 2017 research which had come under scrutiny for only including North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.The new study includes data from more than 57,000 men collected over 223 studies across 53 countries, making it the largest meta-analysis ever conducted on the subject.With…

A new study that centered on the swimming behavior of sperm cells is the first to establish a direct effect of mutation on sperm behavior. It suggests that the development and application of screens based on sperm behavior can improve the quality of the genetics they carry.Research offers additional insights into the reproductive process.A team of scientists has discovered that the behavior of sperm cells is due, in part, to the individual <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt"…

As many couples trying to conceive will attest, much can go wrong during that fateful meeting of sperm and egg. Now, scientists have identified a new protein eggs use to draw in sperm, which could one day lead to new fertility treatments and contraceptives.Fertilization is a long chain of molecular events that need to happen in exactly the right way, in the right order, at the right time, and just one step not going to plan can mean the difference between conception and not. As such, for a large percentage of infertile…