If you frequently find yourself sitting home alone on Saturday night watching Netflix instead of having sex like all the cool people, researchers from the Dresden Institute of Integrative Nanosciences have found a way to make your lonely existence even less bearable. The team has created remote control sperm robots that can be guided in a specific direction, and even directly aimed toward an egg cell. Sex is finally fun now, because we can play with remote control sperm-cars after it’s over.
The RC sperm-cars are composed of live sperm cells living inside tiny tubes that can be driven using magnetic control. The microtubes are made of titanium and iron film, and conical in shape to better fit the sperm. Each individual sperm isn’t manually placed into its own tube, though. Instead, the tubes and sperm are dumped into the same petri dish, and after a while the sperm randomly swim into the tubes and are subsequently locked inside.
The tubes are light enough for the sperm to move while swimming from within them, but thanks to the magnetic components, can be manually guided with the help of a magnetic field. The spermbots’ speed is controlled by changing the temperature, and they can travel at 100 micrometers per second.
In order to free the trapped sperm, the researchers feel they can use the magnetic field to deconstruct the microtubes, releasing the sperm in a desired location. The team hasn’t yet perfected this technique, but is confident in its viability. The same manipulation of the magnetic field can be used to remove the deconstructed tubes from the body, so you don’t have abandoned sperm-ferries floating around inside of you for the rest of your life.For now, the scientists have to perfect the delivery method, and then begin clinical trials with assisted fertilization in animals before they can move on to human application. Hopefully once that is perfected, they can give us magnetic remote controls so we can race our enslaved spermbots that we purchased from RadioShack on the sidewalk for funsies after school lets out.
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