US students 'race' sperm in reproductive health stunt
Asher Proeger of UCLA is covered in a slime tube after losing to Tristan Mykel of USC in the Sperm Racing competition championship in Los Angeles last weekend.
Image: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP
A commentator yells excitedly as hundreds of spectators stand glued to a video of a racecourse -- but the athletes they are rooting for are actually tiny sperm cells.
The unusual sport was invented by 17-year-old high schooler Eric Zhu, who raised over a million dollars to organize the event to call attention to male infertility.
Zhu said he was inspired by social media posts that claim average sperm counts had halved over the past 50 years.
Fearing that "there could be this dystopian future where no one will be able to make babies," Zhu said he wanted to use the competition to highlight the importance of reproductive health.
Tristan Mykel of USC holds a golden sperm trophy after winning the Sperm Racing competition championship in Los Angeles. A man in a lab coat used pipettes to place samples of semen - collected from contestants ahead of time - onto tiny two-millimeter-long "tracks." The race track is magnified 100 times by a microscope, then filmed by a camera.
Image: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP
Scientists have not reached a consensus on whether humanity has experienced a dramatic drop in sperm count, with studies showing conflicting results.
At the Los Angeles event on Friday night, a man in a lab coat used pipettes to place samples of semen - collected from contestants ahead of time - onto tiny two-millimeter-long "tracks."
The race track was magnified 100 times by a microscope, then filmed by a camera that transferred the image to a 3D animation software before the final video was broadcast to the audience.
Video Player is loading.
Play Video
Play
Unmute
Current Time
0:00
/
Duration
-:-
Loaded :
0%
Stream Type LIVE
Seek to live, currently behind live
LIVE
Remaining Time
-
0:00
This is a modal window.
Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window.
Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan
Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan
Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan
Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque
Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps
Reset
restore all settings to the default values Done
Close Modal Dialog
End of dialog window.
Advertisement
Next
Stay
Close ✕
"There's no way to really tell if this is real, but I want to believe it is," Felix Escobar, a 20-year-old spectator, said.
At the end of the brief race, the loser, 19-year-old University of California student Asher Proeger, was sprayed with a liquid resembling semen.
Zhu's fears about fertility echo the talking points of many in the burgeoning pro-natalist movement, which include conservative and far-right political figures.
But Zhu distanced himself from the movement.
"I have nothing to do with this, I'm not like an Elon Musk, who wants to repopulate the Earth," the young entrepreneur said.
Musk, a close ally of US President Donald Trump, has been vocal about his belief that population decline threatens the West and has fathered over a dozen children with multiple women.
Zhu insisted he simply wanted to raise awareness of how sperm quality goes hand in hand with overall health.
"It's your choice to sleep earlier. It's your choice to stop doing drugs. It's your choice to eat healthier, and all these different things have a significant kind of impact on your motility," Zhu said.
Shanna Swan, a reproductive epidemiologist at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine, co-authored a study that found the sperm count decline cited by Zhu.
She said the proliferation of "hormonally active chemicals" in recent years has had a negative impact on human fertility.
But beneath the scientific veneer, the sperm race may seem more like an opportunity for college students to display their adolescent humor and participate in a viral stunt.
Some attendees dressed in costumes, including one resembling male genitals, while the hosts made lewd jokes and roasted the competitors.
A YouTube livestream of the event attracted over 100 000 views.
"I can't say I learned stuff I didn't know before," 22-year-old student and audience member Alberto Avila-Baca said. | AFP
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
eNCA
16 hours ago
- eNCA
Man who let snakes bite him 200 times spurs new antivenom hope
PARIS - Tim Friede was feeling particularly down on the day after the September 11 attacks, so he went to his basement and let two of the world's deadliest snakes bite him. Four days later, he woke up from a coma. "I know what it feels like to die from snakebite," Friede told AFP via video call from his home in the small US town of Two Rivers, Wisconsin. This experience might put most people off snakes entirely, but Friede simply vowed to be more careful next time. From 2000 to 2018, he allowed himself to be bitten by snakes more than 200 times. He also injected himself with their venom over 650 times. Friede endured this pain because he wanted to achieve total immunity to venom, a practice called mithridatism which should not be tried at home. After a couple of years, Friede started to believe he could be the basis for a better kind of antivenom. The former truck mechanic, who does not have a university degree, long struggled to be taken seriously by scientists. But last month, a study published in the prestigious Cell journal showed that antibodies from his blood protect against a range of snake venom. The researchers now hope Friede's hyper-immunity could even lead to the development of a universal antivenom. AFP/File | Tony KARUMBA This would fill a major need, because currently, most antivenoms only cover one or a few of the world's 600 venomous snakes. Up to 138,000 people are killed by snakebites a year, while 400,000 suffer amputations or other disabilities, according to the World Health Organization. These figures are believed to be vastly underestimated because snakebite victims typically live in poorer, remote areas. - 'Pain every time' - Friede's first bite was from a harmless garter snake when he was five years old. "I was afraid, I cried, I ran away," said Friede, now 57. Then he started bringing snakes home and hiding them in pickle jars. His mother sought counselling, but his interest in snakes persisted. Things escalated after Friede attended a class that taught him how to "milk" snakes for their venom. How antivenom is made has changed little over the last 125 years. Small doses of snake venom are injected into animals such as horses, which produce antibodies that can be extracted and used as antivenom. However, this antivenom usually only works for bites from that particular species of snake -- and it includes other antibodies from a horse that can cause serious side-effects, including anaphylactic shock. "I thought, well, if they make antivenom in horses, why can't I just use myself as a primate?" Friede said. He started working through the venom from all the deadly species he could get his hands on, such as cobras, taipans, black mambas and rattlesnakes. "There is pain every time," he said. - 'Proud' - For years, the scientists he contacted to take advantage of his immunity refused to bite. Then in 2017, immunologist Jacob Glanville, who previously worked on universal vaccines, turned his attention towards antivenom. Glanville told AFP he had been looking for "a clumsy snake researcher who'd been bit accidentally a couple times," when he came across a video of Friede taking brutal back-to-back snake bites. When they first spoke, Glanville said he told Friede: "I know this is awkward, but I would love to get my hands on some of your blood." AFP/File | Tony KARUMBA "I've been waiting for this call for a long time," came the response, Glanville said. The antivenom described in the Cell paper includes two antibodies from Friede's blood, as well as a drug called varespladib. It offered mice full protection against 13 of the 19 snake species tested, and partial protection for the remaining six. The researchers hope a future cocktail will cover far more snakes -- particularly vipers -- with further trials planned on dogs in Australia. Timothy Jackson of the Australian Venom Research Unit praised the immunological research, but questioned whether a human needed to be involved, pointing to synthetically developed antibodies. Glanville said the ultimate goal of his US-based firm Centivax was to develop a universal antivenom administered by something like an EpiPen, potentially produced in India to keep the costs down. Friede said he was "proud" to have made a "small difference" in medical history. Now working for Centivax, Friede stopped self-inflicting himself with venom in 2018 to save the firm from liability issues. But he hopes to get bitten by snakes again in the future. "I do miss it," he said.
eNCA
2 days ago
- eNCA
Trump-Musk showdown threatens US space plans
WASHINGTON - SpaceX's rockets ferry US astronauts to the International Space Station. Its Starlink satellite constellation blankets the globe with broadband, and the company is embedded in some of the Pentagon's most sensitive projects, including tracking hypersonic missiles. So when President Donald Trump threatened on Thursday to cancel Elon Musk's federal contracts, space watchers snapped to attention. Musk, the world's richest person, shot back that he would mothball Dragon -- the capsule NASA relies on for crew flights -- before retracting the threat a few hours later. For now, experts say mutual dependence should keep a full-blown rupture at bay, but the episode exposes just how disruptive any break could be. Founded in 2002, SpaceX leapfrogged legacy contractors to become the world's dominant launch provider. Driven by Musk's ambition to make humanity multiplanetary, it is now NASA's sole means of sending astronauts to the ISS -- a symbol of post–Cold War cooperation and a testbed for deeper space missions. - Space monopoly? - The company has completed 10 regular crew rotations to the orbiting lab and is contracted for four more, under a deal worth nearly $5 billion. That's just part of a broader portfolio that includes $4 billion from NASA for developing Starship, the next-generation megarocket; nearly $6 billion from the Space Force for launch services; and a reported $1.8 billion for Starshield, a classified spy satellite network. Were Dragon grounded, the United States would again be forced to rely on Russian Soyuz rockets for ISS access -- as it did between 2011 and 2020, following the Space Shuttle's retirement and before Crew Dragon entered service. "Under the current geopolitical climate, that would not be optimal," space analyst Laura Forczyk told AFP. NASA had hoped Boeing's Starliner would provide redundancy, but persistent delays -- and a failed crewed test last year -- have kept it grounded. Even Northrop Grumman's cargo missions now rely on SpaceX's Falcon 9, the workhorse of its rocket fleet. The situation also casts a shadow over NASA's Artemis program. A lunar lander variant of Starship is slated for Artemis III and IV, the next US crewed Moon missions. If Starship were sidelined, rival Blue Origin could benefit -- but the timeline would almost certainly slip, giving China, which aims to land humans by 2030, a chance to get there first, Forczyk warned. "There are very few launch vehicles as capable as Falcon 9 -- it isn't feasible to walk away as easily as President Trump might assume," she said. NASA, meanwhile, appeared eager to show that it had options. "NASA is assessing the earliest potential for a Starliner flight to the International Space Station in early 2026, pending system certification and resolution of Starliner's technical issues," the agency said in a statement Friday to AFP. Still, the feud could sour Trump on space altogether, Forczyk cautioned, complicating NASA's long-term plans. SpaceX isn't entirely dependent on the US government. Starlink subscriptions and commercial launches account for a significant share of its revenue, and the company also flies private missions. The next, with partner Axiom Space, will carry astronauts from India, Poland, and Hungary, funded by their respective governments. - Private power, public risk - But losing US government contracts would still be a major blow. "It's such a doomsday scenario for both parties that it's hard to envision how US space efforts would fill the gap," Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told AFP. "Both sides have every reason to bridge the disagreement and get back to business." Signs of a rift emerged last weekend, when the White House abruptly withdrew its nomination of e-payments billionaire Jared Isaacman -- a close Musk ally who has twice flown to space with SpaceX -- as NASA administrator. On a recent podcast, Isaacman said he believed he was dropped because "some people had some axes to grind, and I was a good, visible target." The broader episode could also reignite debate over Washington's reliance on commercial partners, particularly when one company holds such a dominant position. Swope noted that while the US government has long favoured buying services from industry, military leaders tend to prefer owning the systems they depend on. "This is just another data point that might bolster the case for why it can be risky," he said. "I think that seed has been planted in a lot of people's minds -- that it might not be worth the trust."
The South African
3 days ago
- The South African
Dehorning of South Africa's rhinos helps slash poaching
The dehorning of rhinos resulted in a nearly 80-percent reduction in the poaching of the animals during a seven-year study in a major South African conservation area, researchers said. Sawing off the sought-after horns was also a fraction of the cost of other counter-poaching measures such as deploying rangers or tracking dogs, according to the study published in the journal Science. The study was carried out between 2017 and 2023 in 11 reserves around South Africa's famed Kruger National Park that protect the world's largest rhino population. During this period, some 1 985 rhinos were poached in the reserves in the Greater Kruger area despite $74 million spent mostly on reactive law enforcement measures that netted around 700 poachers, it said. By contrast, dehorning 2 284 rhinos cut poaching by 78 percent at just 1.2 percent of that budget, said the study published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 'Some poaching of dehorned rhinos continued because poachers targeted horn stumps and regrowth, signalling the need for regular dehorning alongside judicious use of law enforcement,' the study said. South Africa is home to most of the world's rhinos, including the critically endangered black rhino, and is a hotspot for poaching driven by demand in Asia where the horns are used in traditional medicine. Rhino horn is highly sought after on the black market, where the price by weight rivals that of gold and cocaine. Alongside ivory, the horns are coveted as status symbols or used in traditional medicine for their supposed aphrodisiac properties. 'Ongoing socioeconomic inequality incentivises a large pool of vulnerable and motivated people to join, or poach for, criminal syndicates even when the risks are high,' the researchers said. Corruption also played a role with gangs receiving insider tips to evade detection and arrest, they said. 'Although detecting and arresting poachers is essential, strategies that focus on reducing opportunities for and rewards from poaching may be more effective,' the study said. It added, however, that 'the effects of dehorning on rhino biology are still unclear, with present research suggesting that dehorning may alter rhino space use but not survival and reproduction.' A recent study in South Africa showed dehorning rhinos reduced poaching by up to 78 percent © GIANLUIGI GUERCIA / AFP/File The co-authors of the study are from South Africa's Nelson Mandela University and the University of Cape Town, and various conservation groups including the Wildlife Conservation Network and United Kingdom's Save the Rhino International. South Africa had more than 16 000 rhinos at the end of 2023, mostly white rhinos, according to government data. But at least 34 rhinos were killed each month, the environment minister said in May. In 2024 South African scientists injected radioactive material into live rhino horns to make them easier to detect at border posts in a pioneering project aimed at curbing poaching. The radioactive material would not impact the animal's health or the environment in any way but make it poisonous for human consumption, according to the University of the Witwatersrand's radiation and health physics unit which spearheaded the initiative. Black rhinos are listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as critically endangered. Let us know by leaving a comment below, or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 1 Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp, Facebook, X and Bluesky for the latest news. By Garrin Lambley © Agence France-Presse
