Sperm Waves

Some 40 years ago, researchers at the University of Missouri were searching for an alternative to the condom — a cheap, trustworthy and reversible form of male birth control.For their first study, published in 1975, they strapped anesthetized rats, face-down, to a plexiglass platform with a cut-out cup full of water for their dangling scrota. The scientists then exposed the animals’ testicles to a variety of things.Heat, for example, can kill sperm (which is thought to explain why the testes hang outside of the body). So some of the animals got a 140-degree Fahrenheit water bath for 15 minutes. Others received a dose of infrared radiation, or short blasts of microwaves or ultrasound. After treatment, the animals had constant access to females until they impregnated them.Rats given the hot water bath didn’t conceive for 35 days. Infrared radiation doubled that sterile window, to 75 days. Sometimes microwave treatment worked, sometimes it didn’t. The best protocol, by far, was ultrasound, which the researchers transmitted through the water cup. One 5-minute exposure to these high-frequency sound waves led to seven months of sterility. Histology studies of the tissue confirmed that the animals showed a big loss of developing sperm at two months post-ultrasound, but were back to normal by 10 months.Read more at...The Last Word on Nothing, February 2012.