Sixty seconds on . . . sperm

Now you see them, now you don’tMale fertility is falling. Average sperm concentrations have more than halved over the past 45 years, a paper in Human Reproduction Update has reported, falling from around 101.2 million sperm per mL of semen in 1973 to around 49 million per mL in 2018.1Still plenty around thenFor the moment, yes, but the paper’s authors warned that their findings should be seen “as a canary in a coal mine,” because if the decline continues it “could threaten mankind’s survival.” Their meta-analysis showed that the downturn in sperm production is not only long standing but also accelerating. While sperm concentrations fell by an average of 1.16% a year from 1972 to 2000, since the millennium they have fallen by 2.64% a year.Are we talking tight briefs?It’s a bit more complicated than that. Pollution, plastics, smoking, drugs, medicines, and chemicals, as well as lifestyle traits such as…
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