Does Wi-Fi Nuke A Man's Sperm?

Anyway, let's take a look.

This study was a little different than previous studies using cell phones or laptops, in that they are particularly interested in what happened when you hooked the laptop up to wifi. The study states that most people use laptops on their laps (see my thoughts on that below) and that this exposes the nuts to high temperatures and electromagnetic frequencies. Sounds extremely scary, right?

In this case they are focusing on electromagnetic frequencies (their studies are designed to exclude heat, which is a nice tactic, and I'll get to that in a minute). The introduction to the paper spends some time detailing all the nasty things that can happen to you when you are exposed to lots of electromagnetic frequencies (including but not limited to miscarriage, higher rates of infant mortality, and childhood cancer), but what we are interested in here is infertility.

Electromagnetic frequences can cause oxidative damage and produce reactive oxygen species. These ROSs (not to be confused with ROUSs) are what do the damage. The authors are basing this study on some other studies showing that cell phones can cause ROSs and oxidative damage (more on that later, too).

There has been a decline in fertility in Western societies that has been documented. The possible causes for this... man, there are so many. We have new diets. We have new sedentary habits. We have higher weights. We reproduce at later ages. We are exposed to loads of environmental stuff. Some of us probably wear polyester. Many of these are being investigated, but it's the electromagnetic frequencies that gets the most press (well, now that the BPA press has died down a little).

So in this case they wanted to see if laptops, which emit electromagnetic frequencies, particularly when connected to the internet via Wi Fi, harmed male fertility. They took 29 dudes, and had them jack off into 29 cups (at least, I really hope they at least got their own cups and a nice private spot, unless, you know, you're into public spots). They took the resulting semen and tested it via swim-up method for the best and brightest sperm (the swim-up method is simple. Put sperm in the appropriate liquid, and the good ones will, obviously, swim up. Ratios of how many swim up vs how many don't are often used to assess fertility at first pass).

They then took the sperm, split each sample into two dishes, and set one dish (after covering it with parafilm because you probably don't want to accidentally spill that) under a laptop (Toshiba) which was actively downloading something via wireless. The sperm sample sat like that for 4 hours. The other sperm dish was placed on a table at room temperature. They then looked to see what the sperm were like. A good thing about this study is they DID control for heat, both sets of sperm were kept at a constant 25 degrees Celsius by air conditioning (which doesn't mimic a real life condition, but it DOES take away the variable of heat from the measure of electromagnetic frequency, which is often an issue in these studies).

They included an