Imagine if you only had one shot at passing on your genes before you died. It happens more often in the natural world than you might expect: suicidal reproduction – where one or both sexes of a species die after a single ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 7, 2013
2
0
Studies of human populations and animal models suggest that a father's experiences such as diet or environmental stress can influence the health and development of his descendants. How these effects are transmitted across ...
Cell & Microbiology
Oct 17, 2018
2
10642
The two-meter skull of a newly discovered species of giant ichthyosaur, the earliest known, is shedding new light on the marine reptiles' rapid growth into behemoths of the Dinosaurian oceans, and helping us better understand ...
Evolution
Dec 23, 2021
0
2592
Long before whales, the oceans of Earth were roamed by a very different kind of air-breathing leviathan. Snaggle-toothed ichthyosaurs larger than school buses swam at the top of the Triassic Period ocean food chain, or so ...
Earth Sciences
Oct 10, 2011
66
2
A team of researchers from the University of Aveiro and the University of Porto, both in Portugal, and the University of Birmingham in the U.K. has found that for humans, the brain and testis have the highest number of common ...
(PhysOrg.com) -- Recently an eastern diamond-backed rattlesnake gave birth to 19 offspring; not exactly headline news, except for the fact that the female had been separated from any male snakes for five years. What’s ...
Sperm are influenced by diet, and the effects arise rapidly. This is the conclusion of a study by researchers at Linköping University, in which healthy young men were fed a diet rich in sugar. The study, which has been published ...
Evolution
Dec 27, 2019
5
1050
Human eggs use chemical signals to attract sperm. New research from Stockholm University and Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust shows that eggs use these chemical signals to choose sperm. Different women's eggs attract ...
Evolution
Jun 9, 2020
10
9885
New research provides insight about the bedrock scientific principle that mitochondrial DNA—the distinct genetic code embedded in the organelle that serves as the powerplant of every cell in the body—is exclusively passed ...
Cell & Microbiology
Sep 18, 2023
0
356
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the Institute for Integrative Nanosciences in Germany has tested the possibility of using sperm cells to deliver drugs to cancerous tumors in female patients. In their paper uploaded ...
The term sperm is derived from the Greek word (σπέρμα) sperma (meaning "seed") and refers to the male reproductive cells. In the types of sexual reproduction known as anisogamy and oogamy, there is a marked difference in the size of the gametes with the smaller one being termed the "male" or sperm cell. The human sperm cell is haploid, so that its 23 chromosomes can join the 23 chromosomes of the female egg to form a diploid cell. A uniflagellar sperm cell that is motile is referred to as a spermatozoon, whereas a non-motile sperm cell is referred to as a spermatium. Sperm cells cannot divide and have a limited life span, but after fusion with egg cells during fertilization, a totipotent zygote is formed with the potential to develop into a new organism.
The spermatozoa of animals are produced through spermatogenesis inside the male gonads (testicles) via meiotic division. They are carried out of the male body in a fluid known as semen. Mammalian sperm cells can live for up to 3 days inside the female reproductive system.[citation needed]
Sperm cells in algal and many plant gametophytes are produced in male gametangia (antheridia) via mitotic division. In flowering plants, sperm nuclei are produced inside pollen.
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