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Sperm

Analysis and Comment (3)

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Chemical cues may act as matchmakers for sperm and ova. wellcome images

Ova here, mate: do sperm ‘smell’ their way to the best eggs?

On the face of it, a sperm’s work seems pretty straightforward: locate an egg and fertilise it. Job done. But in the world of a sessile broadcast-spawning marine invertebrate – immobile organisms in which…
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Lilting voice? No need to look on the dark side. Bisgrafic

Did Darth Vader have a low sperm count?

Few individuals in the Star Wars universe inspired more fear than the Sith Lord, Darth Vader. But beneath the dark exterior, the commander-formerly-known-as-Anakin-Skywalker might have been hiding a dark…
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Poor sperm quality is a characteristic common to all men, not just some. Aldo Risolvo/Flickr

Old faithful: is monogamy the root cause of male infertility?

Infertility plagues one in six Australian couples, and in approximately half of these cases the problem lies in poor semen quality. The discovery that a man has poor semen quality can be emotionally challenging…

Research Briefs (4)

SpermComet: new male infertility test

A new test for male infertility, measuring damaged DNA in individual sperm, has been developed at Queen’s University Belfast…