Home Made Sperm

Ever want to make your own sperm? Well, most guys do this anyways... but ladies, any of you ever want to make your own sperm? Well a bunch of scientists are coming close to making human sperm out of bone marrow! So if you have bone marrow (which I hope you do), you can make your very own sperm!

It's not quite that simple... and it's not even all that necessary, but yeah... they're getting close to finding a way to do it.

Research led by Professor Karim Nayernia showed that if you extract "mesenchymal" stem cells from the bone marrow, stimulate it with a bit of vitamin A, these cells will actually develop into germ cells. Germ cells are the things that grow up to be sperm. They haven't found a way to make these cells go through meiosis (the process that makes them true blue sperm... well, not blue...) in a laboratory yet. However, one experiment that they did with mice (yeah yeah, poor mice... suck it Heather Mills) involved the same process of stimulating the bone marrow (from the mouse) with vitamin A, but then they implanted the germ cells into the testis of live mice. And voila. They grew into real live working sperm. They haven't tried this out of humans yet... for obviously reasons... very few guys will volunteer to have their nuts chopped open so some hairy old scientists can grow artificial sperm inside.

But either way, it's pretty interesting... and frightening. If this technology gets perfected, it would mean that men would become obsolete. More seriously though, it opens the doors to lesbian couples actually giving birth to a child that is biologically related to both of them by making sperm from the bone marrow of one women and then fertilizing the other woman with it. Neat-o.

Swimmin' on Mars

There's water on Mars. Lots of it, in fact. A bunch of old NASA guys used some infrared technology to track down a huge lump of ice at Mars' south pole. They're estimating there's enough water there to flood the entire Martian surface in 30 feet of water if the whole chuck were to ever melt.

Translation: humans shouldn't live on Mars. We have a tendency to pollute planets until they're broken and overheated. At least on Earth if we melt all the water, not all the land would be submerged. Despite what a bunch of panicky naive tabloid readers will tell you, the vast majority of Earth would stay dry. Yes, a lot of it would be wiped out, but life could still go on.

No so on Mars, however. Now I know that moving humans to Mars is still a long ways away, but if they want to do it, they're really going to have to get this whole "Global Warming" thing figured out first... or all that money NASA putting into this Mars jazz is all going to be flushed down the crapper.

On a somewhat related note, on December 18th, 2007, Mars will reach its closest points to Earth in years. Because Earth and Mars both orbit the sun in elliptical orbits (non-circular), they are at varying distances from each other. So, if you ever wanted to get a good look at Mars, break out your telescope on December 18th. They're saying that you should be able to see surface features and everything even with a normal department store telescope. Neat.