Well, this one has been doing the rounds lately, so I’m going to be topical for a change! I came across it about 10pm last night, but was too tired to type coherently.
So, they say now that daily sex improve sperm quality! How interesting is that?! Apparently the longer the swimmers spend in the pool, the more chance of oxidative DNA damage. This makes sense, I suppose – apparently your body can’t make an environment that’s super-perfect for sperm even though I’m sure it tries it’s best. Maybe it’s also an example of Darwinian selection, ensuring that men that are the most biologically appealing and therefore have more sex are also more fertile – compared to an oaf who shouldn’t be kept in the gene pool, but just got lucky with a drunk girl. Personally I think the selection gods should do a little MORE to discourage oaf reproduction, but oh well…
This new research (which has been discussed in the news here and here) represents quite a paradigm shift, for years the party-line has been to hold back on sex for three days prior to ovulation so the man has a full supply of swimmers. This research implies you should have sex daily for about a week prior. They still need to do some further research into whether it’s better to go for quantity (hold back charlie) or quality (full steam ahead). MAKE UP YOUR MINDS!!!
I also found this very interesting article on a new test to detect genetic abnormalities in embryos. They can detect inheritable diseases, as well as aneuploidy (when you have too many copies of a chromosome, such as having three copies of chromosome 21 which causes Downs Syndrome) by doing a microarray on a single cell isolated from the embryo (yes, they can do that without it growing minus an arm or leg). Very interesting stuff…