Men who drink alcohol regularly are more likely to have better semen quality while men in certain occupations are more likely to have poor semen quality, according to research carried out by scientists from the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester. The research, published in the journalOccupational Environmental Medicine, shows that men who work with solvents […]
It’s common knowledge that males take the obvious sexual selection route, using bright plumage, energetic mating dances or fancy sports cars to lure mates. But it seems as though females may have adopted a much more sneaky strategy for choosing who they want to breed with. In the Journal of Proteome Research, scientists report possible […]
The autoimmune disorder known as immune infertility affects both men and women, causing their immune systems to “wage war” on sperm. Now, researchers think they may be closer to understanding what causes the body to react in this way. University of Virginia (UVa) researchers have reported finding a new human protein – radical radial spoke […]
A man’s low sperm count often means that fertility treatment involves locating a single viable sperm and injecting it into the egg. But that technique may become redundant now that researchers have succeeded in cloning the male genome from a single sperm. Professor Takumi Takeuchi, of Weill Medical College, injected a single healthy mouse sperm […]
Diabetic men have greater levels of DNA damage to their sperm, which may affect their fertility and their offspring’s future health, say researchers at Queen’s University, Belfast. Comparing the quality of DNA in sperm from diabetic and non-diabetic men, the study found that DNA fragmentation was greater in diabetic men (52 percent, versus 32 percent […]
Valentine’s Day isn’t about flowers and chocolates for researchers from the Florida Atlantic University (FAU), instead, they’ve been doing some hard thinking about the business-end of the courtship process – evolution and its effects on human sexual reproduction. In sexual reproduction, natural selection is generally thought of as something that happens prior to the, er, […]
Competition for successful fertilization is believed to strongly influence the design of sperm and the incredible variation of sperm appearance across species has long fascinated scientists. The functional significance of many sperm traits, however, is still poorly understood. But now, a new study by researchers from the UK and Australia has revealed a fascinating cooperative […]
Adam Bjork and Scott Pitnick of Syracuse University have been getting down and dirty with sexual selection again. Following on from theirbig bat testicle research, the two say that they have discovered a major conundrum in the area of evolutionary biology. In their article in Nature, Bjork and Pitnick discuss the paradox they discovered within […]
Men tend to be especially sensitive about their testes, so they might understandably wince at new research from Europe that aims to extract sperm-producing stem cells found in the testicles and grow them into mature sperm in the laboratory. The research is primarily intended to restore fertility in young men undergoing cancer treatment, but it […]
Scientists in the UK now claim it is entirely possible that eggs and sperm can be created from human embryonic stem cells (HESCs), and experiments conducted in at least two other countries appear to either complement or support this claim. Representatives from the UK, Belgium and Australia presented their research on HESCs at the 21st […]
