Sitting with a laptop will fry your sperm

Your laptop may be burning your chances at conception. A study of 29 men at State University of New York found that sitting with a laptop computer for as little as 10-15 minutes exposes a man’s scrotum to unsafe amounts of heat.

Researchers used thermometers to measure the scrotal temperatures of the men as they sat with on a chair with a laptop directly on their legs for an hour, then for another hour with a lap pad below the computer, and then a third hour with a lap pad and their legs spread apart at a 70 degree angle.

They found that the lap pad doesn’t protect from scrotal temperature elevation, but it does slow it down. Using a pad prevented the heat from rising significantly for about a half an hour. The brand and type of lap pad was not revealed. Spreading legs out a bit did help, however, but it did not help enough for the researchers to deem it ‘safe.’ They recommend using the laptop on a table, not your lap.

There is no evidence that laptops can damage male fertility, but warming of the scrotum even one degree Celsius can damage sperm.

“I wouldn’t say that if someone starts to use laptops they will become infertile,” Yelim Sheynkin, a urologist at State University of NY told Reuters Health, though frequent laptop use could cause reproduction problems if “the scrotum doesn’t have time to cool down.”