Yeah you read that right. NASA Has sent sperm into space to the space station to be unfrozen and combined with an egg to track the sperms movement.
Do Sperm Squirm the Same in Space?
Remember when you first learned about reproduction in health class at school? Well, scientists are reconsidering some of those basics to understand how fertilization would work if sperm and egg were to unite in space.
A mission is launching to the International Space Station in April 2018 to study how weightlessness affects sperm. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley manages the investigation, called Micro-11. Little is currently known about the biology of reproduction in space, and this experiment will begin to address that gap by measuring, for the first time, how well bull and human sperm functions in space. Studying reproductive biology in space is useful because the unique environment of microgravity can reveal processes and connections not visible in gravity on Earth.
In mammals, including humans, fertilization occurs when a sperm cell swims toward an egg and fuses with it. Before this can happen, the sperm cell must be activated to start moving. Next, to prepare it for fusing with the egg, the sperm needs to move faster, and its cell membrane must become more fluid. Previous experiments with sea urchin and bull sperm suggest that activating movement happens more quickly in microgravity, while the steps leading up to fusion happen more slowly, or not at all. Delays or problems at this stage could prevent fertilization from happening in space.
For this experiment, two types of…
I dont know about you but pummeling sperm with radiation from outer space may not be a good idea. What do you think?