Word: sperm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...worked his way around the world (mining in Africa, canoeing in the Amazon, sheep farming in Australia) but really wanted to be a poet. To hear Anita tell it, she was concerned with more down-to-earth matters. "I wanted to have children and needed some sympathetic sperm," she says. "What I didn't anticipate was that I would fall in love with my sperm donor...
...more valuable than cows, because mature male cattle carry more beef to sell. Now researchers have announced a technique that may allow breeders to choose the sex of calves -- at conception. Since eggs carry the female X chromosome, an animal's sex is determined by whether the fertilizing sperm carries another X or a male...
Scientists sort out X and Y carriers by tagging sperm with a fluorescent dye; under ultraviolet light, the X sperm glow brighter. Then the sperm are electrically charged -- positive for male, negative for female -- and a laser beam separates the two. Egg and appropriate sperm are mated in a glass dish, and the resulting embryo is implanted in a cow. The technique is about 90% reliable, which is pretty good odds for farmers to get more beef for the buck. Theoretically, a similar process could be developed for selecting human sex, though that ethical quandary does not appear imminent...
Every biologist knows that females spend a lot of energy making a small number of eggs, while males churn out huge quantities of sperm almost effortlessly. Not so, says a scientist who has studied the sex life of a worm no bigger than an apostrophe. Male soil nematodes that copulate a lot -- and thus produce a lot of sperm -- live only two-thirds as long as fellow worms that copulate but don't make sperm, according to a report in Nature. University of Arizona researcher Wayne Van Voorhies warns that it may be a mistake to make the leap from...
...appeal is universal. Austrians have fondly nicknamed him "Oetzi" (after the Oetztaler Alps). Thousands of people worldwide have written to express their interest or profess kinship. Some claim to have communicated with him, while several women, unaware of the Iceman's castration, have volunteered to be impregnated with his sperm. In South Tyrol, a small tourist industry, replete with T shirts, pamphlets and escorted hikes to the recovery site, is already flourishing. And proud provincial officials are planning to build a museum around the Iceman and display him in some sort of refrigerated showcase...