When it comes to male fertility, length matters—the length between the scrotum and anus, that is. New research suggests that measuring a man’s “anogenital distance,” or AGD,  is a fast, low-tech, relatively accurate method of getting an idea of the quality of a man’s sperm.

In a new study, University of Rochester professor Shanna Swan and her colleagues broke out the measuring tape and assessed the anus-to-scrotum distance of 126 men born in 1988 or later. The men whose AGD’s were shorter than the average of two inches were 7.3 times more likely to have low sperm counts than their more well-endowed…er, well-distanced, brethren. These men with shorter AGD’s also had low sperm motility and poor sperm morphology.

So why on Earth, you’re wondering, would this be the case?

(more…)

Those people living in areas with higher numbers of mobile phone towers have more children, new research is showing (spreadsheet).  Matt Parker at The Guardian’s Notes & Theories blog did the analysis of publicly available data and found the correlation:

Could it be possible that mobile phone radiation somehow aids fertilisation, or maybe there’s just something romantic about a mobile phone transmitter mast [aka tower] protruding from the landscape?

The data show that there is a very strong correlation between the number of cell phone towers and the birth rate in communities. For every additional phone tower, there are 17.6 more babies than the national average, Parker writes in his blog post:

When a regression line is calculated it has a “correlation coefficient” (a measure of how good the match is) of 98.1 out of 100. To be “statistically significant” a pattern in a dataset needs to be less than 5% likely to be found in random data (known as a “p-value”), and the masts-births correlation only has a 0.00003% probability of occurring by chance.

With all that fancy math talk, this sounds pretty conclusive, huh? But read on.

(more…)

Dr. Michael Kamrava, the doctor who implanted “octomom” Nadya Suleman’s eight embryos (which, of course, became eight babies), has been kicked out of the Society of Reproductive Medicine for a “pattern of behavior” detrimental to the industry, according to a spokesman for the association. This sounds like a big deal, but it really doesn’t mean anything, since the Beverly Hills fertility doctor still has his license, so he’s free to continue stuffing women full of an unhealthy numbers of embryos.

From the Los Angeles Times:

The disciplinary action was approved by the association’s board in September and first reported over the weekend by USA Today. The move does not bar Dr. Michael Kamrava from continuing to practice, but sends a strong signal to prospective patients that the doctor’s standards and history are outside the group’s acceptable limits.

It’s a nice gesture, though whether it makes any difference remains to be seen. After all, it doesn’t seem like the patients that seek out Dr. Kamrava are not really all that concerned with what the Society of Reproductive Medicine has to say.

Related Content:
Discoblog: The Next Pregnancy Must-Have: A Three-Dimensional Model of Your Fetus
Discoblog: Congratulations! You’ve Given Birth to Your Grandchild
Discoblog: Woman Gets Pregnant…While Already Pregnant

Image: iStockphoto

A U.S. fertility doctor has claimed that he can clone human embryos—and plant them inside the wombs of women who want cloned babies.

So far, none of his implantations have led to successful pregnancies, but Panayiotis Zavos is certain that the first cloned baby is not far off. Britain’s The Independent, a less-than-the-most-reliable source for science news, reports that Zavos can be seen here creating human embryos before injecting them into the the womb.

Zavos says he has transferred 11 of a total of 14 cloned embryos to the wombs of female patients, and that this is only the “first chapter” in his research—which he is confident will eventually produce successful results.

“I may not be the one that does it, but the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen,” Zavos told The Independent. He isn’t sure whether the research can be expedited to produce a cloned baby within a year or two. But then again, rushing it would emphasize the wrong priority: “We’re not really under pressure to deliver a cloned baby to this world. What we are under pressure to do is to deliver a cloned baby that is a healthy one.”

(more…)