Leelee Ray and her husband, Austin, have been trying to have a baby for six years, through insemination procedures, two egg retrievals, four embryo transfers, an ectopic pregnancy that could have been deadly and eight miscarriages. With four frozen embryos remaining in storage at a fertility clinic, the Rays, who live in Huntsville, Ala., decided […]
Read MoreTag: Reproduction (Biological)
Seeing Stars, Sperm and Millions of Spawn After a Valentine’s Day Rendezvous
On Valentine’s Day, Melissa Torres strung up red tinsel hearts around a shallow pool at her workplace, the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. She and her colleagues were arranging a romantic encounter of sorts, and the stakes were high. The happy couple, a pair of sunflower sea stars, belonged […]
Read MoreAbortion Laws, Accidents and Lax Rules Now Imperil Fertility Industry
To the fertility patients whose embryos were destroyed at an Alabama clinic, the circumstances must have been shocking. Somehow, a patient in the hospital housing the clinic had wandered into a storage room, pulled the embryos from a tank of liquid nitrogen, and then dropped them on the floor — probably because the tank was […]
Read MorePope Francis Calls For Global Ban on Surrogacy
Pope Francis on Monday called surrogate motherhood a “despicable” practice that should be universally banned for its “commercialization” of pregnancy, including the practice among wars, terrorism and other threats to peace and humanity in an annual speech to ambassadors. An unborn child must not be “turned into an object of trafficking,” Francis said, adding. “I […]
Read MoreFlowers Are Evolving to Have Less Sex
Every spring, trillions of flowers mate with the help of bees and other animals. They lure the pollinators to their flowers with flashy colors and nectar. As the animals travel from flower to flower, they take pollen with them, which can fertilize the seeds of other plants. A new study suggests that humans are quickly […]
Read MoreWhy Anonymous Sperm Donation Is Over, and Why That Matters
In many states, if you are part of a couple raising a child, and you never marry or you get a divorce, and your partner wants to sever the connection, you can be deemed a legal stranger to a child you helped raise but with whom you don’t share a genetic tie. “I worry that […]
Read MoreBats Discovered to Have Sex in a Way That’s Similar to Birds
A few years ago, Nicolas Fasel, a biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and his colleagues developed a fascination with the penises of serotine bats, a species found in woodlands and the attics of old buildings across Europe and Asia. Serotine bats sport abnormally long penises with wide, heart-shaped heads. When erect, the […]
Read MoreSame-Sex Behavior Evolved in Many Mammals to Reduce Conflict, Study Suggests
In more than 1,500 animal species, from crickets and sea urchins to bottlenose dolphins and bonobos, scientists have observed sexual encounters between members of the same sex. Some researchers have proposed that this behavior has existed since the dawn of the animal kingdom. But the authors of a new study of thousands of mammalian species […]
Read MoreThis Tiny Parasitic Wasp Can Drill Through Plastic
By the time Matvey Nikelshparg was 13, he was obsessed with parasitoid wasps, tiny insects that lay their eggs on or inside other bugs. Under a microscope in a lab he had assembled at home, he discovered that one species had a startling superpower: It could use an organ that protrudes from its abdomen to […]
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