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Study Hints That Wi-Fi Near Testes Could Decrease Male Fertility
Pierre Bezukhov submits news of a report that "a laptop connected wirelessly to the internet on the lap near the testes may result in decreased male fertility," writing
"'[The scientists who conducted the research] placed healthy sperms under a laptop running a Wi-Fi connection. After four hours, the Wi-Fi exposed sperms showed 'a significant decrease in progressive sperm motility and an increase in sperm DNA fragmentation' compared to healthy sperms stored for the same time in the same temperature away from the computer. That is, the sperms exposed to Wi-Fi were less capable of moving towards an egg to fertilize it and less capable of passing on the male's DNA if it does fertilize an egg.' The scientists blamed the damage on non-thermal electromagnetic radiation generated by the Wi-Fi."
However, the experiment was based on sperm outside the body; the researchers (here's the abstract from their study) note that "Further in vitro and in vivo studies are needed to prove this contention."
Does this mean that all those douchebags out in the quad with their Macbooks won't be able to reproduce? You know, the pricks who seem to do nothing all day but tell everyone that they don't even *OWN* a TV and preach about how big corporations are destroying America while crying to videos of the Steve Jobs memorial service with absolutely no sense of the irony. So this is going to lessen the chances that they will ever produce another generation to take up every goddamn table in the coffee shop all day while actual paying customers can't get a fucking seat?
I say we leave this particular health threat alone.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...a nerd who agrees to have his balls for four hours under a laptop.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
and still people will use this as FUD for the next 3 decades.
They don't say what the compute was displaying. Porn has been known to effect the movement of sperms.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
It's the new contraception: one that even God can get on board with! Just fry yer nuts and you won't have to worry about making God quite irate.
...a tinfoil codpiece!
It's the: "Don't worry, baby. We don't need a condom. I know what I'm doing..." for the 21st century!
Awesome I'm going to connect my jewels to the web!
Maybe then my wife won't keep pestering me to get snipped.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Free contraception!
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yet every modern laptop has its wifi antennas carefully routed alongside the screen so that their polarization will match the WAP's polarization. Laptops get hot. Sperm want to live at 97F (definitely not at 98.6, which is average body temperature). What have they previously published? I smell an agenda.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
If you spend too much time on the computer, you're not having a full life.
Reproduction should belong to those who can balance their interests.
... wi-fi routers in a drugstore near you!
Non-AC'd cars, cell phones, now wi-fi...but I'm not worried. You only need to conceive a child a few times in your whole life anyways, worst-case scenario, you forgo the motorcycle and the big TV and lay down the cash for an artificial insemination procedure.
(Can feel mom's hopes for grandchildren fading...)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Most things placed near testes tend to decrease male fertility.
Briefs, jeans, angry women...
I am John Hurt.
There goes my business venture for wireless-enabled codpieces.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Skyrim or WOW on a PC has been known to lower male fertility as well.
At 24 I'm absolutely fine with being less fertile. I really don't need a kid right now or soon :P
As does a hot tub.
Use of laptops in the lap.
Anything that raises the temperature above 85-90 degrees Fahrenheit will reduce fertility - and passing 104 for an hour or two will reduce it to near zero for a couple of days.
those dongles do heat up a little bit
heh heh
No problem. Those with Wi-Fi resistant balls will survive, the rest will disappear.
Doesn't everybody show a decrease in motility after hanging out online for 4 hours?
May all the weak Wi-Fi afflicted sperm perish as their superior Wi-Fi resistant brethren overtake the womb!
How is a signal with a wavelength of 5" (wifi is around 2.4 GHz, 2.4E9/3E8*39.37in/m=4.9") supposed to interact with a human sperm, which, according to wikipedia, is comprised of a head 5 um long and a tail 41 um long, all of which total 0.002 inches. These arguments never ever make any sense to me.
Just my $0.55 (US inflation, 1774-2008, for $0.02)
I'm an admin and have been using a wireless laptop since wireless b came out. My wife and I couldn't have kids for the longest time so we went and got tested. I'm told normal sperm count is 50-60 million. Mine's 480 million. I would think the heat from an improperly vented laptop would be more of a negative that any radio waves. -m-
More Wi-Fi will make more less fertile men. Many people believe that we currently have overpopulation issues, so this could be an excellent way to fix it. Free laptops for every male!
hey!
Most EM radiation is inherently dangerous in long term exposures, including visible light.
Hell, Ultravoilet can destroy your skin surface in a few hours on a sunny day, more so if you are at the equator.
Certain frequencies could vibrate molecules or chains of them to pieces, even multiple frequencies working together could do it by creating interference with each other, if exposed over a long period of time in the right doses.
We know this works because it is essentially the implementation basis of microwave ovens.
Although they go further and actually use the dielectric effect to significantly increase the moving of energy in to the material.
Is it so hard to realize that a "lesser optimized" radiation source is capable of doing lesser damage, and is much rarer too?
I don't want to give anymore fuel to the idiots who use this to push some sort of agenda down everyone's throat, but let's be serious here, EM can and does do damage to things whether we want it to or not. Biology certainly ain't immune to those effects either.
I still don't understand why the wireless cards aren't built in to the monitors.
What's the deal with that? Huge plastic frame could have an antenna in it too, "nope, can't be doing that, too smart, we like our frames empty and useless."
The things are tiny, they could easily be made tall and thin rather that more or less square-ish.
All for 1 or 2 extra wires coming through the socket. Its not like laptop users for the most part care about the extremely tiny increase in latency of not being directly slotted in to the board.
From the abstract:
Donor sperm samples, mostly normozoospermic, exposed ex vivo during 4 hours to a wireless internet-connected laptop showed a significant decrease in progressive sperm motility
If your sperm are outside your body and exposed to a laptop, then... ummm... that was a nice web site... but umm... after 4 hours they are kind not viable sperm any longer. I question how much this study tells us.
In addition to the usual arguments about wave and particle energy density of light in the radio spectrum, there's another reason this result is extremely unlikely to be true: sperm are not built out of custom parts. Other parts of the body, for example the inside of the lungs, contain beating filaments which are almost identical (except for length and pattern of motion) to the tails of sperm.
If wifi caused serious problems with sperm motility, it would also cause very obvious respiratory problems or other issues throughout the body.
This is retarded. They could have aimed a corded wi-fi antenna at it, but instead they just put the whole computer next to it and "blamed" the wi-fi.
I think we need a whole lot more Wifi in the "red states"! Lots and lots of powerful, tissue-penetrating wifi for all! Maybe on belt-buckles or fanny packs. Maybe sell Wifi crotch warmers. I'm sure some marketing genius can make this happen.
Maybe you could literally make a rechargeable "Bible belt" product with Wifi. I'm not sure what the belt would do, apart from bathe the crotch with microwave radiation, but I'm sure some holy purpose could be served with networked belts.
Laptops are called such simply because you could hold them on your lap.
I suspect that the number of people who regularly work with them actually sitting in their lap is miniscule given the piss poor ergonomics involved.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
A microwave oven works by passing non-ionizing microwave radiation, usually at a frequency of 2.45 gigahertz (GHz)—a wavelength of 122 millimetres (4.80 in)—through the food. Microwave radiation is between common radio and infrared frequencies. Water, fat, and other substances in the food absorb energy from the microwaves in a process called dielectric heating. Many molecules (such as those of water) are electric dipoles, meaning that they have a partial positive charge at one end and a partial negative charge at the other, and therefore rotate as they try to align themselves with the alternating electric field of the microwaves. Rotating molecules hit other molecules and put them into motion, thus dispersing energy. This energy, when dispersed as molecular vibration in solids and liquids (i.e., as both potential energy and kinetic energy of atoms), is heat.
(emphasis mine)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Principles
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
why should i put my testes near wifi anyway?
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...I got a laptop.
Wow, who'd of thought all our shiny gadgets were so evil!
First, an English boffin gets a blistered pecker after getting too personal with his overheating laptop.
Next, cancer in the brain from using the cellphone too much.
Now, fry your nuts if you leave your WiFi tablet too close.
I tell you, there's an evil conspiracy by all the gadgets to get us!! :D
GOOD!
I take reports of damage to cells in a dish with a grain of salt. This isn't a natural environment for the cells, and it is incredibly easy to harm them accidentally in a variety of ways. When the phenomenon is unlikely to begin with (damage to cells from photons that individually don't carry enough energy to produce lasting changes in any biological molecule), place your bets on "artifact."
The plural of sperm is sperm.
What do you call couples that practice the testicular WiFi-proximity method of birth control?
parents!
The Admin and the Engineer
iPhone in your pocket. No chidrens for you.
Natural selection
If you spend too much time on the computer, you're not having a full life.
But surely you're at least having a half life, because the subject of your comment also happens to be the title of the Half-Life mod whence "How do I shot web?" originated.
Why did nobody bother to tell me about this before?!
Back in the 1970s tight underpants and tight jeans used to be the big threat to male fertility.
So I guess if a man wants to conceive, he should start wearing a kilt, a sarong, a thobe/dishdasha/caftan, or something else that gives more room down there. Yet too many men are too uncertain of their masculinity to wear anything but trousers.
very goodm thank for sharing
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I sit with my laptop on my lap WiFi'ing all the time. And I've got three children 4 and under.
Promises, promises...
What I'd give for a viable non-surgerical male birth control option.
All computers emit RF radiation when they're running, whether or not they even have WiFi installed. Regulations require manufacturers to limit this radiation, but it's still there; and with a computer in very close proximity to a test subject, (spermatozoon, human, or otherwise), it's probably a toss-up as to whether any effects attributable to RF radiation are a result of WiFi, or of the 1GHz+ processor, the switching power supplies, and any of several other possible sources of radio frequency energy.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I really want male birth control, but I'm not willing to duct tape a laptop around my crotch. Sigh, I'll have my wish in time.
Been using wifi enabled laptops on my lap since they were invented and have had 5 kids since then.
Sure, if you've got a laptop on your junk when you're actually doing the deed, it tends to get in the way.
Yes I keep my wireless router on my balls.
For being who are paranoid like me, does anyone know of any kind of underwear that will protect my junk from wi-fi radiation?
The researchers here are biased: They certainly are interested in finding such an effect because that would make them famous. So they not only need to prove there is an effect, but that effect must be larger than their bias.
Don't hang the wireless router from my n*t-sack...
Never mind the tinfoil hat, it's time to don my tinfoil briefs!
Nerds not getting laid leads to them not reproducing.
Non-AC'd cars, cell phones, now wireless keyboard...but I'm not worried. What is the next?
I think you are confusing this with the strong interaction of RF wavelengths with the dipole moment of the water molecule, which strongly increases at some frequencies (like in microwave ovens) and, above 30 Mhz, is the model for limits on RF exposure.
The RF simply generates an electric and magnetic field, with interacts (or not) equally with all matter regardless of size. Down to a point, and I'll let the physicists take over from there.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I have been using wi-fi for ~10 years. I have 2 kids under 2yo, they will probably disagree with the findings.
I love to be typing away on my computer with my router sitting in between my legs, it just gives me those funny fuzzy warm feelings down there....
It is well known that heat will cause a lack of fertility. Putting a laptop in the lap is usually quite warm. I doubt one has to look any farther to find a slight decrease in fertility.
I'm not sure I want to know all there is to know about their experimental setup.
I thought EEs understood electromagnetic induction.
...I rubbed them on the router for a while...
Sperms? Sperms? Don't you mean sperm? Next you will start talking about computer "codes". Perhaps you will see a wheats field when you go on your next roads trip. Get a hairs cut lately? Maybe before I start picking nits for real, you should study "count nouns" and "mass nouns" and then never say 'sperms' again.
Don't stick a laptop in your pants - the research is in, it might be bad for your spunk!
The summary states "the sperms exposed to Wi-Fi were less capable of moving towards an egg to fertilize it and less capable of passing on the male's DNA if it does fertilize an egg."
If an egg is fertilized, how can the male's DNA *not* be passed on? If I remember middle school biology, eggs only have one chromosome. Same with sperm. You need two chromosomes to make a person. So if the male's DNA isn't getting passed on, what exactly is going on? Is it going to be a miscarriage or something?
Heat is bad for sperm in the testicles that is why you have a scrotum -- to cool them. Could it be that the heat from the laptop sitting right atop your crotch could be the problem and not the WiFi?
Heat is bad for sperm in the testicles that is why you have a scrotum -- to cool them. Could it be that the heat from the laptop sitting right atop your crotch could be the problem and not the WiFi?
Yes, because that is how women get pregnant. Not by intercourse, but the sperm left on laptops...
Without accounting for the tissue barrier, the study may not reflect real life situation.
Of all the problems with this study. . . of all the guys that will worry about their fertility and still have millions of "just fine" sperm. . . of the population argument and the billions of people on earth. . .
All I can think about is that this study started with some guy rubbing one out in the name of science.
... as a rumor, at least.
I worked with high-power RF in the military for 5 years, and it was "common knowledge" that the SHF curse was alive and well. Men who worked with the radios had the "curse" of only having female children when they had kids at all. As such, I'm totally unsurprised at reading this.
Considering the cost of alimony/child support it may be welcomed by a lot of men.
Am I being thick or wouuldn't the sperm have lost their fertility after that long anyway?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
OK, well if it's true, then here are some ideas:
1.) Use your laptop case as a lap-desk.
2.) Find a place to keep your laptop around the house that doesn't require a "lap", and keep it there like a monitor.
3.) Don't try to have kids anymore, in case they come out deformed.
Nick