91–100 of 148 posts
My theory goes like this; > In the recently released research, no significant decline in sperm quality was seen in men from non-Western countries, but this segment made up only about a quarter of the results. There is something in developed countries that the male do not experience during his lifetime. It can be lack of fear, adrenalin, less activity, or something else. I think statistics hold up with the historic wa…
Quote from article (meant as response to AndrewKemendo): "Phthalates are a group of chemicals used to make plastics more flexible and harder to break. In several studies over the last two decades, they have been shown to disrupt the operation of male hormones like testosterone and have been linked to genital birth defects in male infants. Dr. Swan, who conducted a 2008 study about phthalate exposure, said that scient…
I was surprised to see Brazil, Chile and Mexico categorized as 'Non-Western countries'.
Yeah I saw that too... I don’t understand. Is Western a political definition?
Is this result beyond dispute? No chance it's just a problem with the measurements/methodology?
It'll be interesting to see more research in the field, probably spurred on by this study. Questions that need to be answered include, why only Western countries? Does that imply a correlation between technological development and fertility? What are the trends in Korea and Japan looking like considering they modernised a while before many of their neighbours? Halving counts sounds like a lot, but it isn't really and teasing out the ultimate causes is probably going to be incredibly difficult.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this sort of pseudoscientific anecdata what passes for discourse on HN now? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - where's yours?
This is only the most egregious comment in here, not the only one in general. Someone above is talking about gut microbiome (which we know vanishingly little about) as being a primary causer, diet is apparently 100% the issue (colinear effects in other populations throw water on this theory pretty hard), plastics are a real problem (no evidence supports this, though there is a significant lag), etc. Basically no one…
Can anyone summarize the various theories developed to explain this decline?
The ones I have read while scrolling to this comment: 1. Jet fuel 2. Sugar 3. Plastics 4. Space Rockets 5. The gays
Water contamination is my favorite, animals share water with us and it is treated with obsolete technologies (and people fantasize about springs and pure aquiferes when it is mostly about recycling used water or polluted water from rivers and swamps)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this sort of pseudoscientific anecdata what passes for discourse on HN now? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - where's yours?
This is only the most egregious comment in here, not the only one in general. Someone above is talking about gut microbiome (which we know vanishingly little about) as being a primary causer, diet is apparently 100% the issue (colinear effects in other populations throw water on this theory pretty hard), plastics are a real problem (no evidence supports this, though there is a significant lag), etc. Basically no one…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the common theory but it doesn't really hold up. The weight of lab animals is also increasing. Even though we have records showing they haven't changed their diets or routines significantly. Chimpanzees in particular, the animal most closely related to humans, have increased in weight drastically each decade. EDIT: Source https://aeon.co/essays/blaming-individuals-for-obesity-may-b... >As were laboratory maca…
What's funny is the guy who discovered BPA was an estrogen mimicking chemical[1] kept having his estrogen sensitive cells triggered whenever he would put them in plastic test tubes. He called up Corning to ask them what the test tubes were made of and they told him they don't give that info out. So all this lab equipment and stuff that they use to feed animals and all up and down the food supply chain is probably ful…
BPA, birth control/estrogen in water, and increased obesity rates would be my guess.
>birth control/estrogen in water Is that actually a thing? I didn't find any sources definitively showing it was enough to warrant a concern.
they pee and flush
this water gets processed and re injected back into the pipes
if you make the mistake to drink the tap water where they re purpose it from the canalisations, you just drink birth control water.