That is a lot of sperm

Just as age weakens your muscles and changes your eyesight, it can reduce both the strength and volume of your ejaculation. Every ejaculation releases semen from your body through your penis. The process happens in two stages:. A problem in the first stage of this process can reduce the amount of semen you ejaculate. A problem with the second stage can reduce the force with which semen is expelled.

The Micro mission, which made its way to space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket's Dragon resupply capsule , amounts to a bunch of containers of frozen human and bull sperm. Aboard the International Space Station ISS , scientists will thaw the sperm, according to a NASA statement , and then study it to see how weightlessness affects its ability to move and prepare to fuse with an egg. Delays or problems at this stage could prevent fertilization from happening in space. NASA is sending up bull sperm along with human sperm, agency officials wrote, because the bull cells are more consistent in activity and appearance than human sperm. By studying it alongside the human sperm, astronauts will be able to figure out whether any strange behavior they're seeing is a result of something unusual about a particular sperm sample or the effects of microgravity. Performing this experiment is about as close as NASA has ever come to acknowledging that, sooner or later, sex in space is almost certainly going to become a reality. While rumors have long abounded of Russian or American spacefarers hooking up in orbit, none have ever been officially confirmed.

When my wife Lina and I started trying to conceive I never even thought about the health of my sperm. Fast forward several years later — after a still birth and a miscarriage plus struggling to conceive — I had a lot of questions. I read books, met fertility experts , and explored various products that purported to help improve health from random herbs to lifestyle changes.

Every sperm is great. In fact, the average male will produce roughly billion sperm cells over a lifetime and shed at least one billion of them per month. A healthy adult male can release between 40 million and 1. In contrast, women are born with an average 2 million egg follicles, the reproductive structures that give rise to eggs.