She’s Battling a 50% Drop in Sperm Counts | Chatbots Get Emotional | Why Women Belong in the Press Box

Male fertility in the West is dropping, and no one knows why. OB-GYN Sarah Martins da Silva is one of the few researchers stepping in to help find a solution.

When a team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York paged through thousands of scientific studies on human fertility published from 1981-2013, they discovered something shocking: The average sperm count for men in Western countries had dropped by 50 to 60 percent, and so far, experts remain at a loss as to how to treat this potential male fertility crisis.

Part of the problem is that not many researchers study male fertility, owing to poor funding and the complexity of the issue. Sarah Martins da Silva, OB-GYN at Ninewells Hospital and a lecturer at the University of Dundee School of Medicine in Scotland, is one of the few who does.

Why do women have to work so hard to prove their expertise in sports journalism when most of their male counterparts didn’t play big-time ball either?

It started with a tweet — a simple, if sassy, missive sent from L.A. Memorial Coliseum before the Los Angeles Rams hosted the Houston Texans in a preseason game.

"I’d like to do an investigative piece on the percentage of male sportswriters who actually played the sports they cover, and at what level, and then share the link to it any time I see a man tell a female sportswriter she isn’t qualified to do her job," I tweeted.

The responses were scattered at first and then poured in furiously, draining both my battery pack and my phone in an afternoon. In all, 22,500 people engaged with the tweet by Tuesday — all feeling some type of way, but not the same way.

A growing number of firms are using a new wave of artificial intelligence apps to improve customer service.

You’re just settling in for a night of Netflix and chill, glass of wine in hand, when the Wi-Fi goes out. You reset the router. Still nothing. Before throwing your modem out the window, you look for the provider’s customer service number, anticipating a full-on shouting match. But on its website, a chat bubble pops up asking if you need help turning your internet back on. The automated message seems to know what you want before you ask for it. You follow the prompts, and your Wi-Fi is back on within minutes.

Just the thought of calling a customer service line makes most of us want to tear out our hair. The prerecorded menu — the type of artificial intelligence (AI) in customer service we’ve heard for years — seems to treat someone at their wits’ end with an intractable problem the exact same way it treats someone with a basic query. But now, a new wave of AI applications is changing that.