Happy Equinox. Plus, the warning of the Canary Islands volcano blast; sharing the world’s rarest texts; how the tides shaped us … and the 57,000-year-old wolf puppy
HOW COVID AFFECTS
MEN’S SEXUAL HEALTH | |
| Wednesday, September 22, 2021 | |
In today’s newsletter, a warning on the Canary Islands volcano; sharing the world’s rarest texts; happy equinox; how the tides shaped us … and the 57,000-year-old wolf puppy.
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY JULIAN STRATENSCHULTE, PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP | | By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE executive editor
There’s no shortage of misinformation out there about the coronavirus, and some of the most pernicious claims swirl around vaccines and fertility. With apologies to Nicki Minaj, there is no credible scientific evidence that any of the COVID-19 vaccines cause impotence. However, there is now a wealth of data that shows getting infected with this virus can cause erectile dysfunction and other reproductive health problems for men.
Crucially, getting a vaccine is not the same thing as contracting a disease. Vaccines are designed to provoke an antibody response, and the ones approved or authorized for use in the U.S. don’t even contain dead or weakened versions of the virus. They instead use pieces of its genetic material to train the body’s immune system. (Pictured above, a man getting a rapid COVID-19 test.)
By contrast, coming down with COVID-19 allows the virus to replicate in your cells, and as Sharon Guynup reports this week, several studies show that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can invade tissues in the penis and testicles. As it happens, the testicles are a perfect hideout for a variety of viruses because they are immunologically privileged body parts, meaning they are shielded from the immune system. Once COVID-19 invades this region, it can hang out there indefinitely. “This may explain why 11 percent of men hospitalized with COVID-19 suffered testicular pain,” Guynup writes.
Other studies have found that men seem to be six times more likely to develop brief or long-term erectile dysfunction after contracting the virus. That’s likely because the coronavirus is known to attack blood vessels all over the body, and the penis relies on blood vessels to maintain an erection. Cells also become oxygen-deprived when blood vessels narrow, which means the surrounding tissues become inflamed and the vessels lose elasticity. “No oxygen, no sex,” says Emmanuele A. Jannini, a professor at the Tor Vergata University of Rome.
These kinds of health repercussions can be difficult to track because patients may be embarrassed or self-conscious. And it can be tough to report on them and not invite readers to dissolve into giggles with an unintentional pun. But this is serious science that deserves to be taken seriously. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 10 percent to 30 percent of people infected with the virus—at least 42 million cases in the U.S. and 226 million worldwide—experience a range of ongoing symptoms collectively called long COVID. People can develop these debilitating symptoms even after a mild or asymptomatic infection. And the list includes several reproductive health problems for men, from sexual dysfunction and swollen testicles to mental health issues that decrease arousal.
Research is still in progress, and plenty of unknowns remain. But it’s clear enough by now that if you care about your reproductive health, you should be more worried about getting the virus than the vaccine. “The plausible relationship between COVID-19 and erectile dysfunction is one more reason for the unvaccinated to get their shots,” Jannini says. “If they want to have sex, better to get the vaccine.”
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY NOAA, THUNDER BAY NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARY | | Tides: A new study shows the role of tides in slowing down Earth’s rotational spin, which in turn affects the length of days and, indirectly, microbes’ ability to infuse the atmosphere with oxygen, Nat Geo reports.
Prescient: NIAID director Anthony Fauci seemed to anticipate this week’s statistics on COVID-19 vs. the Great Influenza of 1918-20. In an academic paper years ago, Fauci and two co-authors wrote: “Looking back across the last century, we can see that the ‘War to End All Wars’ did not, in fact, end wars, and that the deadliest pandemic did not end deadly pandemics." As of Monday, there's a new deadliest U.S. pandemic, and Amy McKeever explains how both deadly viruses developed.
Calculated risk: A new online tool can tell you your risk of contracting COVID-19 based on your geographic area, living situation, and vaccine status. The calculator, called the microCOVID project, uses a mathematical equation to determine a person’s risk of infection. Try it.
Up-and-coming: After a five-year break, Popular Science has brought back the Brilliant 10, an annual roster of early-career scientists and engineers developing ingenious approaches to problems across a range of disciplines. The magazine sought out innovators—from a chemist who removes PFAS from the waterways to an environmental microbiologist who studies to use of “smart sewers” as the world is being stressed by a pandemic, climate change, and inequity. See the list.
Recruiting Black men to medicine: Black players comprise more than half the football and basketball teams at the universities in the top athletic conferences, Smithsonian magazine reports. Some educators and advocates are looking to connect sports, an area in which African American men are overrepresented, and medicine, where the opposite is true. Decades of efforts to diversify the student population at medical schools has made progress with other demographics, including Black women — but barely any with Black men.
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| Making an artifact digital: The Cambridge University Library has a public database of 735,000 items, including rare manuscripts, fragments, and documents. Above, library photographer Scott Maloney prepares to photograph a 10th-century Masoretic Bible fragment. Maloney is one of five photographers building the digital library through multispectral imaging, 3D imaging, traditional studio work, video, and photogrammetry (3D modeling), photographer Paolo Verzone tells us. Verzone illustrated our 2018 National Geographic story about saving rare materials, which was titled: Inside the clock-and-dagger search for the world’s sacred texts.
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY ARTURO RODRÍGUEZ | | Early warning: The island of La Palma in the Canary Islands had a heads up that the Cumbre Vieja volcano was going to blow. The early warning was critical ahead of the volcano’s eruption, its first since 1971. Thousands of people in the path of its fiery lava streams (pictured above) have been evacuated, and more than 160 homes have been destroyed. In the days before the eruption, volcanologists sent rising alerts to the population, noting 25,000 quakes from September 10 to 19 rising closer to the surface, Robin George Andrews writes. One unanswerable question: How long will this eruption go on?
Related: How a pyramid arose from the ashes of a gigantic volcanic eruption
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 | | ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW FAZEKAS | | Equinox: Today’s moment at 3:21 p.m. ET kicks off the fall season in the Northern Hemisphere and spring in the global south. Equinox is Latin for “equal night”—when day and night split into 12-hour segments, and the sun rises due east and sets due west. In the night sky, the bright star Deneb will dominate as darkness falls in mid-northern latitudes. On Thursday, use binoculars to spot Mercury pairing with bright Spica in the low western sky. And Friday night, two hours after sunset, look for the waning gibbous moon and the planet Uranus rising in the east. — Andrew Fazekas
Related: Facts about the equinox
Subscriber exclusive: The chaotic birth of our solar system
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 | | When I was a kid looking up at the stars, I really always wondered ... how did we get here, and are we alone? | | | | Bethany Ehlmann | Planetary scientist, Nat Geo Explorer
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY GOVERNMENT OF YUKON | | The frozen wolf puppy: This story from December about a 57,000-year-old wolf pup found frozen in the Yukon permafrost has found a resurgence in popularity in recent days. Researchers found that the seven-week-old gray wolf (pictured above) represents a species that no longer exists in the region, Riley Black reports.
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This newsletter, on Nat Geo’s 133rd birthday (read more here), has been curated and edited by David Beard and Monica Williams, and Jen Tse and Heather Kim selected the photos. Have an idea or a link? We'd love to hear from you at david.beard@natgeo.com. Thanks for reading, and keep exploring. | |
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