Word: scrotum
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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...
Instead of planting the gland in the scrotum, Dr. Frumkin put it in a pocket in the colonel's thigh where its veins and arteries could be linked with the big vein and artery of the leg, thus insuring a good blood supply. The results were spectacular. The colonel's piping voice went down, his red beard sprouted anew, the fat around his hips disappeared, and he began to take an interest in women again...
Among the horrors of war in the South Pacific is filariasis (rhymes with diocese), a mosquito-borne, hitherto incurable disease. It sometimes develops into elephantiasis, particularly of the scrotum. The number of military cases runs into the hundreds, mostly jungle-fighting marines who have been evacuated to U.S. hospitals. The Navy has described filariasis as the "hardest single thing" facing its doctors. But last week the Journal of the American Medical Association announced a drug which attacks the parasites causing the disease...
...from the worm Wuchereria bancrofti, carried by certain species of mosquitoes. Injected into the blood stream, the baby worm (microfilaria) eventually may grow nearly four inches long. It lodges in the lymph glands, where it reproduces itself. First visible symptoms are painful swellings of an arm, leg or the scrotum. Doctors have been less alarmed than troops by the disease, because even with repeated infections, less than 10% of the cases develop elephantiasis, and symptoms usually disappear after return to a temperate climate. But the disease's monstrous effects on native sufferers, the fear of possible impotency...