Word: scrotum
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Soot filled every pore, inflamed the eyes, lodged in the scrotum and caused the horrid "sooty-wart" or "chimney sweeper's cancer." Many boys were made consumptive by the lack of food, the damp cellars where they slept on soot-bags, and the chill of early mornings when they tramped the streets crying, "Sweep for the soot O! Sweeeup!" at the top of their poor, frayed lungs...
Unlike Dominican Dictator Trujillo, Tacho kills a man only as a last resort. A spell in jail usually brings an enemy around. If jail fails, the Guardia has a little electric device known as la maquinita. A wire is wrapped around the prisoner's scrotum, and if he is stubborn, the current is turned on. There are Nicaraguan exiles in Guatemala who cry in their sleep about the Little Machine. "Oh, hell," snorts Tacho, "that damned thing isn't so bad. I've tried it myself-on my hand...
...Bird. The scrotum system does not work with birds, because it might cause supersonic disturbances during flight. Birds' testes must be "faired into" the neatly streamlined body. But many birds breed in warm weather, even though their blood may get hotter than 42° C (107.6° F). How do they do it? Have their spermatogenic cells learned to work at high temperatures...
Warm-blooded animals get around this difficulty in various ways. Some of the more primitive creatures become cooler at certain seasons, so that their testes can manufacture sperm. In higher animals the testes, contained in the scrotum, outside the body, are cooled by the air to a temperature lower than the body...
...reasons which biologists do not clearly understand, male sperm is extremely sensitive to heat, is quickly destroyed even at body temperature. In many animals (notably man), sperm is protected by a special cooling system in the scrotum which keeps it at 2 to 15° below normal body temperature. Experimenters have caused temporary sterility in dogs, rabbits, cats and bulls by artificially heating their testes; Australian sheep breeders recently reported that a sterile breed of rams became fertile when a thick growth of wool on their testicles was sheared...