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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."
...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.
...a tinfoil codpiece!
Trolling aside, this experiment doesn't sound like it had a control group, ie a laptop with no wi-fi being held over your balls. Heat in that area is known to decrease fertility. The experiment as described in the summary has nothing to do with wi-fi.
(no, I didn't RTFA).
which is totally what she said
You seem to have accomplished quite the feat: posting a comment that is less intelligent than the non-existent beings you describe. Bravo.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
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!
Nor, it seems, did you RTFS.
Quote, with relevant portion highlighted:
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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
"Non-thermal electromagnetic radiation" means that electromagnetic radiation caused the effect through a nonthermal mechanism. It's a common idea in EM fear circles (because the output from EM devices is too low to cause damage by a thermal mechanism). It doesn't say anything about heat, one way or another. You can have thermal damage from EM radiation without any application of heat. That's what your microwave oven does.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
The abstract specifically states that the control group was a set of identical samples, under the same incubation regime, without the laptop. So no, they didn't control for the idea that the laptop alone could've caused the effect
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
At 24 I'm absolutely fine with being less fertile. I really don't need a kid right now or soon :P
Thanks for explaining the difference. I hadn't thought through the subtleties.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The Atari 130XE and collection of sci-fi novels my dad gave me access to probably did long-term damage to my fertility.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
To quote:
compared to healthy sperms stored for the same time in the same temperature away from the computer
That looks like it says a lot about heat to me, of course, I understand that you are thinking about the amount of heat put off by a laptop but it seems like they controlled for this by putting the wifi close but not putting the laptop directly on top of the sperm.
Here's the kicker - they ran the laptop with the wifi switched off, but only measured the RF output of the laptop in that state. They didn't perform - or performed, but didn't publish - the obvious control experiment.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
May all the weak Wi-Fi afflicted sperm perish as their superior Wi-Fi resistant brethren overtake the womb!
What? It says right in the summary: compared to healthy sperms stored for the same time in the same temperature away from the computer
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 believe I've read of tribes in some locations (the Amazon?), in which it is common practice for men to immerse their testes in very hot water one (or more?) times a day as a contraceptive method. By itself, I imagine it's not tremendously effective, and I wonder what the failure rate is. Anybody want to dig through pubmed?
You should indeed RTFA: "A separate test also showed that merely placing sperm near a computer (without Wi-Fi) does not cause nearly the same damage."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Maybe I'm not as up to date with the fancy physics talk as I use to (or even should) be, but going back to my old college courses...
Isn't 'thermal' fancy physics talk for 'heat'?
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!
I'm not sure that the "same temperature" is really what they measured. All the abstract says is that they were incubated under the same conditions.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Yes, but it also has more nuanced meanings, and there's one that is very pertinent to this field.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
You could bedazzle your balls with aluminum sequins, that will maintain full sack flexibility while guarding your nuts from the wifi waves, and you'll have DISCO BALLS! XD
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
That news report is wrong. The seperate test in question evaluated the RF output of a laptop with its wifi switched off, but it did not measure sperm motility after exposure to that laptop:
"A separate test with a laptop that was on, but not wirelessly connected, found negligible EM radiation from the machine alone."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45469130/ns/health-mens_health/#.TtT0PlabUlT
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Most of them I see are raving frothing at the mouth android owners who cant afford iDevices.
God, just STFU about your fricking phone, nobody cares about it. I dont run around rubbing my iphone in your face whenever I see you talking on yours. Yet you haveto announce to the whole world, "Look there's another apple sheep" while I stand there making a business call.
Makes me think all Android owners are immature children.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Not sure about this article, but another article I read did say that they had a laptop with WiFi disabled and a second control with no laptop at all and didn't see the drops that they saw on the WiFi laptop.
My complaint would be that one does not usually store one's sperm directly under the laptop. There's usually some flesh between the laptop and the sperm. Would that flesh be enough to absorb the WiFi radiation? I'm thinking probably since WiFi's penetration is only millimeters. A few millimeters of skin/tissue should protect your sperm.
Then again, my wife and I are done with having kids (stopping at 2), so perhaps I should look at this as birth control. ;-)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
RTFA. Hell, read the fscking summary: "... compared to healthy sperms stored for the same time in the same temperature away from the computer."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
It may be tangentially effective. As in: they're in so much pain that they can't get it up...
And it's as accurate as the "hottubbing makes you infertile" fake stories from the 80's, 90's,00's and 10's...
At least in a hottub my nuts are kept at 108-110 degrees for 1-2 hours 3 times a week. far FAR more of a temperature rise for a far longer time than any heat from a laptop can generate.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Therefore did not test to see if any gasses released from the plastics in the laptop could be the effect. They are testing cells exposed to the environment not inside of it's intended sealed container.
Lots of variables they did not account for.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Temperature of what? Room? Container? Actual sperm?
A less than honest person could use room temperature to mask the obvious idea that heat from the laptop was the primary reason. Given they didn't publish the obvious control to prevent this (laptop with wifi turned), consider me suspicious.
That made me wonder who had to clean off the thermometers, or did they just measure air temp?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
They put the laptop 3CM above the sperm and tried to control the temperature from below and via air conditioning. If I got it right while skimming through it, they also measured sperm temp every 5min using an infrared thermometer.
However the control was NOT a laptop with the wifi turned off but a setting with no exposure to electrical equipment at all. Which is not a control for WiFi but a control for a "Laptop with Wifi on".
Which leads me to think that the reason they chose this setup was that they couldn't get a useful result when using a laptop without WiFi as a control. The effect could in theory be caused by any part or combination of parts inside the laptop.
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.
Yes, yes it does matter. You have just begged the question (by the real meaning).
Entirely possible. But he didn't say 'other variables', he said 'heat', which they did account for.
For lead lined pants ... Anyone in ?
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Oh, the scientists blamed the damage on non-thermal effects! Gosh, I guess that settles it, then!
Remember, budding young scientsts, if someone tries to refute your conclusion by pointing to confounding factor X, all you have to do is "blame non-X"! Problem solved! No need for that fancy shmancy "control group" business. Just BLAME something else!
(Never mind that they didn't test a non-wifi laptop to see if a non-wifi laptop aspect -- like heat -- could have been responsible for these effects...)
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
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."
So, wait one. What you seem to be saying is, if we want to stop nerds from reproducing, all we need to do is pop them in the microwave? Seems a bit of repetitive redundancy, doesn't it? I mean, how many nerds are going to breed, anyway?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Man, I don't want to see what happens when a pejazzler meets a vajazzler...
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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.
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.
No, it means you have damage from "non-thermal radiation" i.e. something other than infrared. Wifi is nicely in the microwave range that has peak absorption by water molecules so it will effectively heat up anything wet. Which sperm (not sperms, editors) are. The researchers didn't do anything to protect the sperm against microwave heating.
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.
For being who are paranoid like me, does anyone know of any kind of underwear that will protect my junk from wi-fi radiation?
"Most of them I see are raving frothing at the mouth android owners who cant afford iDevices."
That's a good way to illustrate OP's point. FWIW, best sold Androids cost as much or more than an iPhone. I't not about the money.
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.
Go for it, it's not like syphilis, gonorhea, chlamydia, genital warts, genital herpes and HIV/AIDS are something you should worry about.
As for your "no sensation" problem... perhaps you need to see a doctor anyways or stop using leather condoms.
'Hey hon...no, you won't get knocked up, I've been carrying a wifi in my pants!!!'
To bad Wifi doesn't seem to be an effective antibiotic or antiviral. Do you know what the test for chlamydia involves? The health care provider sticks a cotton tipped swap about a centimeter up your urethra. A moment you will remember for quite some time.
Wrap the rascal (or go whole hog, break into your local linear accelerator and fry everything to a crisp).
(This message brought to you by various governmental and non governmental agencies who are concerned for your health, well being and wallet).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Nerds not getting laid leads to them not reproducing.
Thank you, other guy on /. with some grasp of English....
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
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?"
Except that they method they used to maintain temperature didn't involve a laptop in the control area; they attempted to cool the sample kept near the laptop by an air conditioning system. This would introduce significant vibration, a temperature gradient, and potentially alter CO2 and O2 concentrations near the sperm.
It's not like running this control would be difficult, so one can only guess why they didn't bother to do it.
http://www.donarmstrong.com
A shot will clear up most of those...
Good luck getting a shot for HIV or Herpes.
And I'm in an older crowd now...hell, many of them have been married for years, and are just now back on the dating scene...so, best to try to stay with 'clean' chicks...
Sure, you have to use one the first times or so with her till you get to know her history, and 'check things out' below.....but once done with that...
Your life. Good luck seeing with your eyes that HIV carrier who does not know her husband left her a fun divorce gift, HIV that is still too early to be found on a blood test.
I have been using wi-fi for ~10 years. I have 2 kids under 2yo, they will probably disagree with the findings.
I guess its just my generation. but I kinda laugh when I think of someone referring to Apple as a "mega giant" or an "evil overlord dominating the market place" since that's how I always thought about microsoft in the microsoft vs apple wars.
Well if a scientist makes a statement it must be right. That's the basis for your argument? "He said so?"
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....
this whole article makes me wonder where some of our biology research dollars are going. I mean really, c'mon? I know there are people out there struggling with infertility and looking for any scapegoat as to why they can't get pregnant, but most of these ray gun type theories are complete crap. Don't live under power lines, don't sit too close to a tube tv, don't use your phone, don't use your laptop, watch that microwave. Sounds like instead of tin foil hats, they need tin foil underpants.
Also you are far more likely to get laid if you already have the girl in a hot tub than if you are still using your laptop to converse with her. so, in attempting to reproduce, the cycle goes, laptop, hot tub, bedroom (unless you are in a porn movie in which case you do her right there in the hot tub.) As some of the geeks here are having trouble processing, before reproduction can, they must have a female partner who is willing to copulate with them. (or semi-willing, or drugged in some way).
"Non-thermal electromagnetic radiation" means that electromagnetic radiation caused the effect through a nonthermal mechanism.
How exactly did they manage that? The frequencies used by WiFi are the same ones your microwave oven uses to cook food. The only way for the WiFi to not heat them up is to not switch it on.
No sig today...
Yes, that's what they blamed it on, but without a better control so that everything but the WiFi signal is exactly the same as the experimental group, it's hard to say. Somersault is questioning how well the experiment accomplished that.
In addition to the WiFi signal, laptops emit heat, sound, and various non-WiFi RF. They also off-gas.
I'm not sure I want to know all there is to know about their experimental setup.
Sounds like instead of tin foil hats, they need tin foil underpants.
Beautiful.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
And what would that be, pray tell?
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
I thought EEs understood electromagnetic induction.
...I rubbed them on the router for a while...
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?
Better yet, why not just separate the wifi from the laptop. Use a usb wifi adapter or an external wifi antenna. That seems a lot easier than how they did do it.
>>Here's the kicker - they ran the laptop with the wifi switched off, but only measured the RF output of the laptop in that state. They didn't perform - or performed, but didn't publish - the obvious control experiment.
Yeah, I noticed that, too.
Seems very suspicious how they conducted their control.
Without accounting for the tissue barrier, the study may not reflect real life situation.
That is only true IF you assume that radiation from the machine is the only possible cause of the sperm damage. However, that's what they are trying to prove, so assuming their desired conclusion when they designed their control is pretty bad experimental design, one that makes the whole thing almost worthless.
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.
and they STILL don't have a right click...
... 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
I mean, with most people and some point, even if you don't want to conceive, you DO want skin on skin don't you?
Otherwise, what's the point?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Possibly we should take positively - it seems that /.ers do not stay in their cellars no more but have infiltrated scientific community to make experiments with sperms and computer!