https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/01/health/mobile-phone-sperm-count-wellness/index.html

“CNN— Male sperm count has fallen by more than 50% globally in the last 50 years, leaving researchers scrambling to understand why. Could it be pollution, PFAS and other potential toxins in our food and water, an increase in obesity and chronic disease, or even the ever-present mobile phone?

A man poses with an Apple iPhone 12 in a mobile phone store in Nantes, France, September 13, 2023. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe
Apple to issue iPhone 12 update in France after sales halted over radiation levels
A new study explored the role of cell phones and found men between the ages of 18 and 22 who said they used their phones more than 20 times a day had a 21% higher risk for a low overall sperm count. The men also had a 30% higher risk for a low sperm concentration, a less important measure of sperm count in a milliliter of semen. The study did not specify whether the men called or texted or used their phones to do both.”

"men between the ages of 18 and 22 who said they used their phones more than 20 times a day had a 21% higher risk for a low overall sperm count."

How are they using their phones? There may not be much left in the pipe.

Will the DN pick up this story?

Does the FP know (who will tell them?)?


related, 'Sort Of': (male) cops who rested radar guns in their laps had an epidemic of testicular cancer a while back, IDK what the present situation is...

In Idaho, the state police used VASCAR a while back, I think that technology has been updated lately.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/01/2023 03:44PM by GNPE.

Mine dropped 100% after I got clipped.

This makes reaching the "wrong number" scary!

The article also states:

" On the positive side, researchers found that as phone technology improved over the 13 years of the study, the impact on sperm count began to ease.

“I am intrigued by the observation that the biggest effect was apparently seen with older 2G and 3G phones compared to modern 4G and 5G versions. This is not something I am able to explain,” said Allan Pacey, deputy vice president and deputy dean of the faculty of biology, medicine and health at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, in a statement. He was not involved in the study."

“This is a fascinating and novel study which should not cause alarm or drastic changes in habits,” said Campbell, who was not involved in the study. “Men looking to conceive, or wanting to improve their sperm health should exercise (but not overheat in their groin area), eat a balanced diet, maintain a healthy weight, avoid smoking and limit alcohol and seek help if they are having problems conceiving."

" Researchers also evaluated the impact of cell phones over different periods of time. The greatest association between low sperm count and concentration and phone use were between 2005 and 2007. As companies moved from 2G up to 5G, the association weakened, in line with the “corresponding decrease in the phone’s output power,” the study said.

“It’s very, very difficult to draw a definitive conclusion from this type of study because it’s not controlled well enough to be able to do that,” Pastuszak said. “They can’t control for the day-to-day exposures of living in an urban environment, and those should not be understated. Even stress levels can impact spermatogenesis and hormone production.”

“Total sperm count may not reflect actual decreases in fertility potential,” he said. “I can’t look a patient in the eye and say, just because you have 100 million sperm per milliliter with 50% motility and a sperm count of 500 million, that you’re going to be fertile,” he said.

“It’s the quality of sperm that counts. If you have quality sperm there is a good, decent or even great chance that you can have a child, even if you have just a literal handful of sperm.”


And then there is this statement:

"If those cell phones are emitting at maximum power, the study said, surrounding tissue can be heated up to 0.5 degrees Celsius or about 33 degrees Fahrenheit."

That is true only if the surrounding tissue is starting out at 32F. An increase of 0.5C is 0.9F.

If sperm counts have decreased by 50% over 50 years, there has to be something else going on as well because smart phones haven't existed for 50 years.

The future is female.
The Y chromosome is going extinct.
https://geneticsunzipped.com/transcripts/2023/03/23/bye-bye-y

You really should read the articles you cite.

Third paragraph, first sentence "question[s] whether this is a) true and b) something to worry about." That's hardly the same thing as your unqualified assertion that "the Y chromosome is going extinct."

The article goes on to note that there are species in which the Y chromosome has gone extinct. Guess what happens? Very little. There are still male and females in a roughly 50/50 distribution, and the physical and reproductive functions continue as usual. The answer for the instant species is that the important parts of the Y chromosome are duplicated on other chromosomes and simply become more active, thereby rendering the Y chromosome unnecessary.

The future is NOT female. It's basically the same as it is now.

The prediction that the Y chromosome will disappear seems to be based on the assumption that loss of genetic material will continue at the same rate in the future as it has in the past.

Here are studies suggesting otherwise (they are technical)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4120474/

"The process of Y chromosome degeneration has prompted the suggestion that continuing gene loss will lead to the eventual disappearance of the human Y80-83. These predictions are based on a naive model of a constant rate of gene loss from the Y chromosome. However, recent theoretical and experimental studies have clearly demonstrated that Y degeneration does not proceed in this simple linear fashion21,84, and refute these sensational claims of human Y extinction (Figure 3)."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3292678/

"We discovered that, during the last 25 million years, MSY gene loss in the human lineage was limited to the youngest stratum (stratum 5), which comprises three percent of the human MSY. Within the older strata, which collectively comprise the bulk of the human MSY, gene loss evidently ceased more than 25 mya."

"In our reconstruction, strata 1–4 had already reached a stable level before the human lineage diverged from rhesus; after divergence from rhesus, gene loss in the human lineage was limited to stratum 5, the youngest stratum, which stabilized before the human lineage diverged from chimpanzee."

"Our empirical reconstruction of MSY evolution is at odds with a linear model7,9,10 and with a simple random decay (exponential) model25, both of which project a continual decline of MSY gene content and cannot account for the stability of gene content that we observe over the past 25 million years (Fig. 3). Our data are better explained by more complex models for MSY gene loss that incorporate a combination of evolutionary forces."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2475751/

"Further, while degeneration can proceed very rapidly on newly formed Y chromosomes (or whenever new strata are added to the Y), the rate of degeneration by both positive and negative selection models eventually diminishes and becomes exceedingly slow on ancient gene-poor Y chromosomes. For example, at the rate of degeneration inferred for the mammalian Y, the human Y would still have ∼20 genes left in another 300 MY (Figure 9). Of course, the continued accumulation of new genes via additional autosomal fusions or transposition (Graves 2006) will also contribute to maintaining active genes on the Y chromosome. Moreover, if some of these genes are essential for males (i.e., sd = 1), the probability of losing such a gene would be extremely small (Crow and Kimura 1970). These considerations imply that predictions of the future loss of all functional genes on the human Y chromosome within 10 MY (Aitken and Marshall Graves 2002; Graves 2004, 2006) are not supported by theoretical models of Y chromosome degeneration. Instead, evolutionary theory suggests that the Y chromosome of humans is likely to survive for the foreseeable future."

Absolutely.

My point is simply that in those few species where the Y-chromosome disappears, the species doesn't change much if at all. There is no "female future."

>You really should read the articles you cite.

The goal in an El Gato post is not accuracy in reporting. It is provocation.

schrodingerscat Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The future is female.
> The Y chromosome is going extinct.
> https://geneticsunzipped.com/transcripts/2023/03/2
> 3/bye-bye-y

More soyence! In natural breeding, the Y chromosome is STILL required for all mammals. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar and has an agenda.

Some people will claim it is a victory when children are bred in tanks and schooled by robots. Sex without reproduction and reproduction without sex seems to be one of this society's endgoals.

> More soyence! In natural breeding, the Y
> chromosome is STILL required for all mammals.
> Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar and has
> an agenda.

Thank you for exposing the political agenda of scientists, those seemingly empathetic authority figures in white gowns who really want nothing more than to rob us of our bodily fluids.

Scientists lie when they tell us the two species of rats in the Ryukyu islands have no Y-chromosomes.* They dissemble when they claim the Ebollius vole has lost its Y-chromosome.** They pile falsehood upon falsehood when they explain how those species manage to produce males through the replacement of Y-chromosomes with greater activation of Y-identical regions in other chromosomes.***

Without your moral fervor, your 1960s dystopian rhetoric, we'd be left in the hands of Deep State geneticists and their invidious manipulation of our fragile minds.


----------------
> Some people will claim it is a victory when
> children are bred in tanks and schooled by robots.
> Sex without reproduction and reproduction without
> sex seems to be one of this society's endgoals.

Yes! That's what those evil scientists are doing. They're trying to put us in Orwell's Soviet rat cage--wait, scratch that.

Uhm. They're trying to put us in Huxley's Brave New World of asexual reproduction. Yeah, that's the ticket!


-----------------
All I can say is that without your superior science, your comprehension of monetary economics and information technology, and especially your expertise in pop culture and the Kardashians, the world would be a much more dangerous place.



*Cytogenetics and Cell Genetics (2002) 99 (1-4): 303–309.

**https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1095-117

***https://phys.org/news/2016-09-male-chromosome.html



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/03/2023 05:24PM by Lot's Wife.

> They're trying to put us in Huxley's Brave New World of asexual reproduction.

I'm afraid we're already in Huxley's Brave New World for real. The plot twist is that we're in JULIAN Huxley's world, not his brother's.

Julian sincerely believed in a number of the ideas put forward in Aldous' novel. His thinking is extremely influential today in the United Nations (which he played a part in setting up, alongside UNESCO and other NGOs), environmentalism, and eugenics. He was a big believer in the centralized control of population numbers, and Plato's notion of a "philosopher king" class, i.e. a group trained and raised to rule. (In the real world this has done through Rhodes Scholarships and the YGL program, neither of which JH founded.) He supported technocracy to control populations — "no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ plasm of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?" and also talked of "the virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". Another quote from Julian: "The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them." It was Julian who also coined the word "transhumanism". Go figure.

So yes, we are in Huxley's world now. Just not the Huxley you think.

I'm confused here, genius. Just above you wrote:

> . . . the Y
> chromosome is STILL required for all mammals.
> Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar and has
> an agenda.

I proved that wrong. Yet rather than acknowledge your error, you ignored the issue and switched to a different talk radio rant. Did you think no one will notice?

Nor do you defend your juvenile claims about "the War on Cash," which is almost as atavistic as your 1950s John Birch politics. That "war" was lost 30 years ago: you just didn't notice. You are an angry little gadfly flitting from one false narrative to another.

And Malthus has nothing to do with it.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Nor do you defend your juvenile claims about "the
> War on Cash," which is almost as atavistic as your
> 1950s John Birch politics. That "war" was lost 30
> years ago: you just didn't notice. You are an
> angry little gadfly flitting from one false
> narrative to another.
>
> And Malthus has nothing to do with it.

Malthusianism is about population control, whether the population wants it or not. You support such totalitarian measures.

A cashless society is also about control, but of a different variety. People who support it should go off and live in such a society without dragging the rest of us into their frog-boiling sessions.

If you think maturity is about having no control over your own life, then you couldn't be more wrong. In fact, it reflects the mindset of someone who has merely replaced parental control with bureaucratic control and abrogated their own responsibilities in life... juvenile indeed.

Add Malthus to the list of thinkers whom, like Orwell, you fail to comprehend.


------------------
> Malthusianism is about population control, whether
> the population wants it or not.

Wrong. What Malthus said was that population growth will always outpace the growth of food and other resources and hence that living standards for people must inevitably fall. He didn't think that could be affected by government policy, nor did he advocate such.

You're just misrepresenting him so you have someone to attack.


--------------
> You support such
> totalitarian measures.

Care to show where I have supported any "population control" measures other than raising girls' educational levels in the developing world?


---------------
> A cashless society is also about control, but of a
> different variety. People who support it should go
> off and live in such a society without dragging
> the rest of us into their frog-boiling sessions.

Fascinating. But off the mark.

I repeat: the War on Cash that keeps you awake at night was lost decades ago. You have warned us that we'll all get new names that will circumscribe our ability to engage in unfettered financial exchanges--much, your perspicacious reader will note, like social security numbers, drivers licenses, credit scores, and criminal records. You warn that we will be tracked financially without realizing that credit card companies mastered that in the early 1990s and that you're being manipulated right now.

Ironically, while you were feverishly wondering if Trotsky was under your bed and in your closet, trends moved towards greater financial freedom. That's what crypto-currencies do: make it impossible for governments to track you. Haven't you been paying attention to what Hamas has done? Somewhere near 50% of the money the terrorists used to finance the attack on Israel was raised via crypto and hence is untraceable.

Progress, apparently, by your standards.


---------------
> If you think maturity is about having no control
> over your own life, then you couldn't be more
> wrong. In fact, it reflects the mindset of someone
> who has merely replaced parental control with
> bureaucratic control and abrogated their own
> responsibilities in life... juvenile indeed.

You outdo Don Quixote. At least his windmill wasn't itself an illusion.

Now go read Malthus. Your local library will have him.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/06/2023 02:58PM by Lot's Wife.

> If sperm counts have decreased by 50% over 50
> years, there has to be something else going on as
> well because smart phones haven't existed for 50
> years.

That's the issue I had with the underlying article which, incidentally does NOT say what The Cat claims in his title. He says "smart phones are killing sperm" whereas the article says smart phones MAY be killing sperm. An important difference.

Fifty years ago was 1973. At that time the market-leading cell phone weighed 2.0 kg, or 4.4 pounds. I'd be surprised if a hundred of those monsters were ever sold. In 1996 the best smart phone was the Nokia 9110 Communicator, which had a folding keypad and an antenna that would not have been comfortable in one's pocket. In the middle 2000s the highest selling smart devices were BlackBerrys. The first iPhone came in 2007.

If smart phones have made a difference in sperm quality and quantity in entire populations, that contribution must have come in the last 20 or so years. There's no way they affected overall sperm counts in the first half of the "fifty years."

Considering how rude and obnxious so may of these phone types are it is Gods way of stopping them from passing on their genes.

Are you counting ?

Having a transmitter by your head is not healthy for your brain. I would say obesity and a poor diet has more to die with poor sperm counts.

My serious bout of the mumps when I was 10 in 1958 took me out of the procreation game waaaay before cell phones.

If you wear your tin foil hat then your sperm will not be affected by phones.

My guess is that 90% or more on RFM is beyond the age of wanting to reproduce and or have the met their limit on having kids.

In other words this topic is meaningless.

Will this affect doughnuts?

Asking for Elder Ballard who is afraid that he can't get any.

I think they completely overlooked the effects of phthalates on male reproduction.

“To conclude, phthalates are man-made chemicals used in the plastic industry. There are several ways to be exposed to phthalates, mainly via inhalation, ingestion, and transplacental transition. Phthalates belong to the chemicals known as EDs. They modulate the hormonal balance of the matured organism as well as the developing organism. This modulation of hormonal balance has a significant impact on the reproductive health of males.
”In conclusion, the data have shown that phthalates affect testicle function. It leads to a broad spectrum of disorders of male reproduction. One of these disorders is testicular dysgenesis syndrome (TDS),”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7559247/

So, phones made with phthalates would be double dangerous?

Is the topic open now for anything that lowers human male sperm output?

How about lead?  If I got shot in the balls with a lead bullet, is that for my sperm count?  Would it be worse if I took a phthalate bullet to the gonads?

I think size 5 Manolo Blahnik leather high-heeled shoes should be on the list of things that lower sperm count when applied lustily to the crotch!

What else can we add to this list you've started of human ball buggers?

ED... you seem to have an interesting sexual experiences.

My SE were earned by reading smut...didn't have muck luck with actual people, lived a very sheltered life.

He once told me that his high-rise cowboy boots were the secret to his amorous adventures.

Hope the HRC boots didn't chafe his inner thighs.

Haha.

Fortunately there are many things about our friend that I do not know!

#################

https://www.howtogeek.com/114037/researchers-prove-tin-foil-hats-boost-receptivity-to-government-signals/

You know the old bit about putting tin-foil on your head to keep the government signals out of your brain? It turns out cladding your head in tin-foil has the opposite effect.

Researchers at MIT, using a network analyzer, tested the impact of tin foil helmets on receptivity of radio-frequency signals. They highlight the method and results in the study abstract:

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

While their conclusion is a bit tongue-in-cheek, the irony of foil helmets increasing reception of government-reserved radio frequencies is certainly not lost on us.


###################

That is why you have to make a thought screen helmet like this
instead:
https://www.stopabductions.com/

If they put a little spike atop those things people could pretend to be World War One Germans on Halloween.