explains why i love battle tops

Sperms, you say?

shrimps

They must be knackered after wiggling for 350 years. No wonder my sis and her husband couldn’t get pregnant.

I had the best spin out of a billion others. Hah!

Well, at least there is a reason why the husband cannot get pregnant.

> Sperm was first discovered in 1677 – but it took roughly 200 years before scientists agreed on how humans are actually formed. The “preformationists” believed that each spermatozoa contained a tiny, miniaturised human – the homunculus. They believed that the egg simply provided a place for the sperm to grow.

So, when a kid looked exactly like their mom it was just a coincidence? I'm kind of amazed some of them thought that.

“I’ll try spinning, that’s a good trick!”

Yeah, I think it’s more a figure of speech than a scientific miracle.

TIL my penis has a rifled barrel

We're all the best spinners!

I thought it said sperm whale lmao

Please let us know if & when his miraculous conception occurs.

I've heard it described as a screw and it seems like a really fun way to swim regardless who or what you are. Maybe faster too.

All I need is a tail...

All bacteria and protists with flagella propel themselves by spinning the end, not wriggling. They use proton-powered rotary motors.

>preformationists” believed that each spermatozoa contained a tiny, miniaturised human – the homunculus.

I'm gonna inject my homunculus in you

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What say you sperms?

Well, your urine comes out like it's rifled

That’s why it is called screwing

r/sounding are just a bunch of muzzle loaders then

I did not realise sperm were big enough that you could see them with 17th century magnification.

Tumblers better than pumpers

Why do you persist in reminding me that sounding is a thing?

There is no peace of mind, only chaos and regret.

Gives a new meaning to 'drilling' your partner.

Cum dradle?

It's why men get less frequent UTIs. Spiral stream cleans the piping better

This makes sense to me. I always wondered how they would be strong enough to "swim" through such a thick medium for a long time, makes sense that they just corkscrew their way in.

My little torpedos instead of my little swimmers… feels weird

FYI sperm is the French for Cum.

How do you know how his urine comes out?

Wish I could see an animation of this or something.

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Why

Should it stay in?

Imagine every time you cum. Instead it's just one big sperm and you have to kill it or becomes ur clones.

Semen is made of both sperm and sperm food

That’s pretty amazing cause nature doesn’t like to evolve in rotary thingys. I think in macro world there’s only one insect specie that has a rotary mechanism? Our lives would be better if we as humans had segway wheels instead of legs.

Well, sometimes ON you.

Protista “motors” are constructed at the molecular level, with (in the case of human sperm) 16 proteins in a ring. One proton per protein rotates the ring by one protein, so 256 protons are required per rotation. Scaling that up to the macroscopic level, even just to the size of a small insect, would require a very complex design. I can’t see such a design evolving naturally — it would take deliberate “intelligent design”.

I thought they all just called for an Uber

Maybe he only identifies as male....

We must replicate this technology

I’m gonna start calling jacking off as Popping tops

.

Drilling depth achieved Captain.

Commence drilling soldier.

What the fuck

Drill baby, drill

The microscope was invented and sperm was one of the first things that was put under the microscope

The guy who discovered them was apparently a Dutch amateur who took an interest in lensmaking as a hobby. Possibly had lenses that could magnify 500x.

Eukaryotic flagella aren't helical, though. There are multiple types of flagella. Description:

>Bacterial flagella are helical filaments, each with a rotary motor at its base which can turn clockwise or counterclockwise. ... > >Archaeal flagella (archaella) are superficially similar to bacterial flagella in that it also has a rotary motor, but are different in many details and considered non-homologous. > >Eukaryotic flagella — those of animal, plant, and protist cells — are complex cellular projections that lash back and forth. Eukaryotic flagella and motile cilia are identical in structure, but have different lengths, waveforms, and functions.

...and diagram.

That's why the rotary motion is a surprise.

You taking the piss?

Wait, the first thought after inventing the microscope was....to jack off to it?

So “rollers” may be more appropriate than “swimmers” huh? 🤔

>It’s a bright day in 1677, in the city of Delft, and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is making love to his wife. But moments after he shudders with orgasm, he hurries out of bed to grab his microscope. After all, he’s not just spending time with his wife: he’s running an important scientific experiment at the request of the Royal Society in London.

>Leeuwenhoek has already gained quite a reputation at the Royal Society for his observations of microscopic things, and has—with the Society’s urging—looked at a lot of bodily fluids, including blood, milk, spit, and tears. This time, the plan is to see what’s inside semen.

>He quickly collects his sample from his wife, places some on a pin on the microscope, and lifts the device toward the sun “before six beats of the pulse [have] passed.” When he peers through the lens, he becomes the first person to see living sperm cells.

Another interesting thing about them, they don't actually "swim" like they are commonly depicted. It's not a race upstream to the egg. Sperm are mobile, but their movement is entirely random, they don't know what they are looking for. They just move around and eventually one of them finds the egg. It's actually tiny muscle contractions in the lining of the female reproductive system that move the sperm up to the egg. Kinda like a bunch of blindfolded sheep getting pushed through a field by a shepherd.

Men actually do have a small flesh nodule in the urethra that causes the urine to spiral. Women don’t. It makes the stream more even.

My speculation is you can pee quieter, and less messy.

Can't this be recorded via a powerful microscope? Since almost all sperm depictions make them move like eels.

Supercharged hyperspin cum rockets

So it’s like a beyblade lmao

It's so crazy that no one knew this, even tho we all have been sperm at some point

Gives a whole new meaning to “getting screwed”

No. We don't need a new religion.

can you remember being a sperm?

They're lil cum boats lol. Lil seamen

There's an urban legend about a morning biology lab in high school. The teacher had the students scrape their mouths and try to identify cells with a microscope, supposedly there's a few different types in the mouth.

One girl had blown her boyfriend before school and asked the teacher why her cell was different than everyone else's. The teacher looked and awkwardly said "That's a sperm cell."

And instantly thinks he's infested with parasites.

BEYBLADE LET IT RIP

Twirling, twirling towards freedom!

Careful, I wouldn't want to waste any of my Homunculi.

Homunculus wot

My wife was wondering why I hum the James Bond theme when we’re having sex. It all makes sense now

To each his own. I got plenty to spare

Originally, like thousands of years ago, childbirth was just some magical thing women did. There was no real connection to the role fathers made- this only came about really with farming. But once they realised that “hey, my black bull’s calves are all a little black, no matter what the cow looks like. I wonder if that’s the same for humans” they went all to the other extreme and declared males are the source of all life. So you had stories of gods ejaculating tk make the rivers, the rise of explicitly male gods who create life with women only being used as incubators (Zeus birthing a child out of his head, and in Christianity god impregnating the Virgin Mary only works theologically if Mary is only an incubator) So once they were able to see sperm it was easy to assume they were little people because you by this point had a few thousand years saying males were solely responsible for children being born

People still seem to perpetuate that belief today. The number of "I was the fastest sperm" memes I've seen blow my mind

It's so they can write their name in the snow.

The spin is key to life? Arigato, Gyro.

Go on…

Its like a bullet through a gun barrel.

I personally don't, but I've done what this article discovered

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Yeah no

Rotary motion is not a surprise. See paper from 1901 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2453750.pdf

More work building on this with self powered nanomachines https://journals.aps.org/rmp/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.88.045006

TIL that this fact is dubious - the research paper this fact is based on has been retracted since May 2021: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau9116

Can confirm- feels more likes spinning top than side to side

Intergalactic proton-powered electrical tentacled advertising droids!

To sperms you say

tsk tsk tsk

> they roll as they move forward like a spinning top

I don't think you know what "roll" means.

Makes sense. I tend to roll off the bed rather than wiggle my arse from side-to-side..

It's not the complexity that precludes certain things evolving - organisms are fucking complex enough. It's the fact that evolution needs to happen in tiny incremental steps, each of which are beneficial to the organism. For legs, that's easy: First they're just fins for swimming, then maybe they're used to drag ones body across a short stretch of very shallow water, then they gradually take more of the weight to make locomotion more efficient. For a wheel and axle... nah.

“Your drill is the drill that will pierce the ovum, semen.”

-Kuminya

Fuck no. Even primitive animals are aware of who their offspring are, it's critical to the basic evolutionary function of ensuring their survival.

Evolved from dandelion seeds.

Right, but assuming you are referring to page 370 of the first link, this is the reason they gave for this spiral motion:

"The Flagellata and Ciliata are as a rule asymmetrical in form. One of these organisms, as, for example, Loxodes (Fig. 2), or Paramecium (Fig. 3), when it leaves the bottom and starts to swim freely through the water, cannot go in a straight line, but owing to its lack of symmetry continually swerves toward one side, so that it tends to describe a circle."

This is not a disputation of how the cilia or flagella beat, but rather a description of the effect such beating has on an asymmetrical object. This does not apply to sperm cells since, in terms of their form, they *are* symmetric in shape, apart from the shape deformations caused by the flailing of their flagellum itself.

In contrast, the paper we're talking about purports to have found that sperm cells fundamentally do not even beat back and forth in the first place; they only beat in one direction, and then they continuously rotate the mass of the entire "head" of the sperm, in order to keep themselves moving forward.

That's different than what your paper shows.

Eh…that’s certainly a theory.

On the other hand, plenty of reptiles and fish and even small mammals will eat their children. Cuckoos literally have a breeding stategy which works only because the birds whose nests they drop their eggs in don’t recognise the children they raise aren’t theirs.

And there’s also some tribal cultures who for a long time believed that a child would have multiple fathers and would encourage a woman wanting a child to have sex with multiple men to get the best features of all of them.

We’re not naked individualists desperately seeking the survival of our own genes. Most species and for most of our existence (we’ve only had the idea of personal property/inheritance for around 4% of our existence as Homo sapiens) we’ve been tribal. Therefore the idea of “I have to know who my kids are so my genes survive” is a modern idea applied to most species when really most species are more cared about “I have to know who my tribe is so my tribe can survive”

Underrated comment

>Sperm was first discovered in 1677 – but it took roughly 200 years before scientists agreed on how humans are actually formed. The “preformationists” believed that each spermatozoa contained a tiny, miniaturized human – the homunculus.

TIL the origin of homunculus

A top is the wrong analogy - a top’s motion is perpendicular to its axis of rotation.

It makes sense, considering how relatively viscous fluids are on that scale. Even water is like honey to bacteria.

Besides, we humans ourselves have shown how effective propellers are.

forget about calves, it was extremely 'obvious' to see childbirth as being like planting a seed in the earth in order to bring about life.

Semen was the seed, the woman was the earth the seed grows in. It makes enough sense to believe even if it turns out to be wrong. People to this day colloquially refer to men 'planting their seed'.

I used to work in a lab and I thought it was so crazy looking at them on a slide, when they lose motility + moving the slide around using the microscope, they get a little bit of momentum and tend to just keep rolling. They have that oval looking look that you typically see, but as they roll you can see that they are pretty flat. I always thought they were like a 3d oval, round all around. But they are almost flat ovals

Its possible early people regarded jealousy as related to sexual access rather then to passing on one's 'blood'.

I guess what I meant is that a protein-proton motor that uses things like van del Waals forces and molecular mechanical mechanisms to create motion cannot work at the visible scale. I agree that complexity is no barrier for evolution—look at clotting factor chemistry—but I can’t imagine an incremental path to “wheels”. (I will admit it may be possible.)

I'm trying to understand this... the sperm rotating the tail around themself... like a spinning top while moving ?

Really, I can't picture it... "rotating around itself whilst its tilted axis rotates around the centre", so... is the tail spinning around it in a plane or a full 360 degree.. then how can you tell its axis ?

I think i'm just stupid..

Aliens do not exist until they do exist

Corkscrew

Just like a spinning top

Have you heard that drinking sperm makes you young?

When you apply the sperm all over your face, it will make your skin tight and removes your wrinkles

Ok sure it’s not a tiny human but sperm is still kinda weird. Doesn’t anyone else find it weird we shoot out little moving things that look for something to impregnate? It’s fucking weird… not gonna stop me from shooting it into a napkin but… it’s weird man… like describing sounds like describing an alien species.

So that's how they drill into the egg.

And why they are the drill that pierces the heavens

Unless you just ejaculated, then it's a full on sprinkler system.

TIL we've known about sperm swimming around for ~350 years.

Is this why I get so dizzy after sex?

You are probably wondering, why should I care about this?

Well, it makes a great target for male contraception. This spinny bit is the only spinny bit in humans. The problem with male contraception meds is that most of them really fuck with your desire to have sex in the first place -- it's a problem a lot of meds have, seeing as how nature re-uses bits over and over in the body, inadvertently hitting something else -- but this, this is a great target to hit.

Got me lookin at my dick now

IT'S BEYBLADE

Isn't that how most technology advances go?

It's just short hand..

Do you mean we as in every single human culture or maybe there are some who figured it out earlier than others?

D R I L L D E E P

Never let the arrogance of men amaze you

Do you have an article on this? Not doubting you, just amazed

Unfortunately no. I read it in a Scientific American article from…10 years ago? 20?

This looks good: https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/the-flagellum-motor.php

It's because she had a bracelet that said she was down with that.

No. Fewer UTI's is because your urethra is a foot long. A woman's is only a couple of inches. Way easier for contaminants to get in

I heard that 2/3 of children born are not those of the mother's husband 😆

Actually it's a pig reference. Ask me how I know!

Well, pull it or something idk

Smells a bit like pool chlorine. Why??

Well we definitely didn’t discover it prior to the spreading of Homo sapiens out of Africa. So that’s still about two thirds of our existence as a species spent as a collective.

The big shift from “our tribes survival” being the focus to “me and our family’s survival” being the focus really came about as farming, and domestication of animals lead to physical investment in possessions that provide long term value - this created a need to find someone to pass onto, and being closer to seeing how animals breed lead to awareness of our own ways of breeding. Some societies made this adjustment later than others, and some have barely made that adjustment at all

I think I’ve read the same thing, but if I recall correctly there’s a few clarifiers needed.

Two thirds of paternity tests show not the mothers husband. This is not a representative study of all parents- because most don’t seek paternity tests unless there were doubts already. And apparently two out of three times doubts were warranted

Gee wilikers HPmoni, how do you know?

I’ve been watching modern videos on molecular biology and it’s way better than when I was in HS, so I am really into this right now. And the rotary concept has been my primary thought. How hard would it be to make artificial molecular rotary motors I wonder…

Interestingly the tails only wiggle to one side, and the apparent back and forth motion is from seeing a 3d motion in a 2d plane.

Ah, sorry, didn't realize that second paper was paywalled. Fhe first paper focuses on form generating asmety in cilliated swimmers, the second paper extends that to asymmetry in either form or force and classifies swimmers as pushing (posterior flagellum) or pulling (anterior flagellum).

Both papers present the idea that any asymmetry in the swimmingof unicellular swimmers will produce circular or irregular patterns unless balanced by regular rotation linked to those forces. This is further explored in that more recent paper.

We expect EVERY eukaryotic, unicellular swimmer capable of helical / straight lines to follow this behavior, its just the way that the physics of swimming work at low reynolds numbers. Honestly, it would be way more surprising if we found a unicellular swimmer that did NOT spin while swimming.

So while sperm bodies may be somewhat symmetrical (im not sure if this is actually the case? There are a ton of weird fuckin sperm out there..google ostracod sperm for a trip..i dont know the range of human sperm morphology), the force they are producing is definitely not. To counter this asymmetry they rotate the entire cell, not just the head. This creates a helical procession that lets the sperm swim relatively straight.

We've known that euk. Flagellum don't beat in a single plane for a while, so im surprised we hadn't picked up on the asymmetrical beat pattern of human sperm until now. The imaging is pretty cool here though, I'd love to get my cells on that scope though they're tiny compared to sperm.

The title of this post is hot garbage tho, i was so happy to see you post about the prot/euk flagellar difference.

I think this is just a case of silo'd science. I only found those two papers because im working with weird non-animal cells and the modelers im collaborating with had some questions we couldnt answer so i did a very thorough literature search. They do bacterial motility modeling and hadn't seen the paper despite it being directly related to one of their theses. Human research, especially sperm research, is pretty isolated so it's likely the researchers who published the new paper didnt know it exists.

I tried to sing this to the Beastie Boys song, but could not make it work.

Peppy Hare: “Do a barrel roll!”

AUTOBOTS, ROLL OUT!

While I completely understand there is science at work here…

How the fuck are you going to say they ROLL like a SPINNING top????????????

TOPS FUCKING SPIN!!!! ITS IN THE GOD DAMN NAME!!! SPINNING TOP, NOT ROLLING TOP!

THOSE ARE TWO SEPARATE MOVEMENTS!!!

Try reading the article.

So I drill mom, and then the sperm drills her egg? Ok.

Like a bullet!

More like Si-moan

As long as you belive in the Kamina that believes in you

Beyblade! Let it cum!

When I was a sperm I had a lot to learn

So, Let it rip?

Your clarifications are correct, but also, the 2/3 is the other way around. 2/3 of paternity tests are "positive", confirming the paternity to the mother's husband/partner. 1/3 are "negative".

Imagine how dizzy they must get!

Could the direction they spin be linked to left/right handedness?

There's a joke here somewhere about Anakin's mother's miraculous pregnancy.

No wonder some of them swim in circles; they’re fucking dizzy!

[photon torpedo sound enters the chat]

Yeah man I'd freak the fuck out

Special beam cannon!

Have you read the book Climbing Mount Improbable?

Is it true the first notochord mutated from a sperm cell that did not drop its tail?

Love the sources, doing the lords work here thank you

My speculation is that the spiral cleans out the urethra, especially post-ejaculation. It's why it's a lot less common for men to have UTIs than women.

That’s not why lol, might be a small contributing factor but it’s primarily due to the length of the urethra (and thus the ease for pathogens to “climb-up” to the bladder

Also…. We can SEE them under a microscope.

Do you think a gay sperm can notice the difference between a vagina and a boy pussy and spin out again as fast as it can? 😊

Excuse me, brood parasitism only works because both bird parents go to great lengths to provide for their offspring, because they think they're theirs. Making this happen is the result of a stupidly complex evolutionary arms race.

Why do you think humans specifically would not have the ability to recognize this when all of our ape and primate relatives do? Yes, like many other apes we live communally and thus have an interest in ensuring our tribes survival, as a means to securing our offspring's survival.

Thanks, next time I have sex I'll make sure to yell LET IT RIP, when I'm about to climax.

Thanks, next time I have sex I'll make sure to yell LET IT RIP, when I'm about to climax.

I'm trying to figure out what you're trying to argue here.

Are you trying to say that all apes, many living in non-monogamous societies, have the ability to recognise which child is their's, and this is a skill human beings have as well, and we just have things like paternity tests for no reason?

And that in turn, apes are only tribal insomuch as it supports their own individualistic needs to preserve their own bloodline....despite male apes outside of human beings largely not having active roles in raising children beyond mating source

What makes you think animal societies are so individualistic?

This is why you always check comments first

Ah, thanks for that: that second one was paywalled, yeah, and ostensibly my institution doesn't have a subscription. I'd even written something saying so, but, I lost it 'cause of whatever bug it is leads comment text to go missing after copypaste, was too lazy to rewrite.

>I think this is just a case of silo'd science.

Yeah... I'm pretty sure a pretty core chunk of my thesis is essentially just a case of me speaking into the silence of missing knowledge, created by siloed science... a siloed science silence, if that ain't too pretentious.