Sperm and egg, artwork. Photo: SCIEPRO (Getty).
If you haven’t noticed, the world seems like it’s in a serious nosedive. Every day, we hear about some other horrible thing that happened, and it just seems so apparent that we’re all going to be blown up sometime in the near future. Yup, kind of a bummer.
I hate to depress you with a you’re-all-fucked article, so I’ll save you some grief and explain that hope might be on the horizon. Hope, in this instance, comes from a bunch of Japanese scientists who’ve been playing with semen.
Scientists Want To Bury Your Sperm On The Moon
According to a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of dudes in white coats conducted experiments that suggested human sperm could be freeze-dried and buried beneath the moon’s surface. This can be a way to colonize the moon in the case we irreversibly mess up Earth.
The team made this extraordinary discovery by experimenting with mice, and I’m not at all interested in finding out how they got the mice to donate semen (semice?). Use your imagination.
Anyhow, the experiment was completed with the idea that this process will be useful once we start flying around space on the regular. Here’s a portion from the published study:
Radiation on the International Space Station (ISS) is more than 100 times stronger than at the Earth’s surface, and at levels that can cause DNA damage in somatic cell nuclei. The damage to offspring caused by this irradiation in germ cells has not been examined, however. Here we preserved mouse spermatozoa on the ISS for 9 mo. Although sperm DNA was slightly damaged during space preservation, it could be repaired by the oocyte cytoplasm and did not impair the birth rate or normality of the offspring. Our results demonstrate that generating human or domestic animal offspring from space-preserved spermatozoa is a possibility, which should be useful when the “space age” arrives.
Mice sperm in space is some shit I never thought I’d write about, but here we are.
So yeah, start saving all your sperm in case the zombie apocalypse hits us and we have to bounce off this rock. Hope you have enough room in your freezer.
h/t N.Y. Post
