As partial fulfillment of court-ordered community service hours we got stuck with following an unfortunate incident involving a Dell mall kiosk last March (yes, it was us holding the flamethrower, but we swear we thought the safety was on), we close this episode with a public service announcement to all the virile young men out there: keep those PowerBooks off your laps, fellas, because the latest medical research implies a connection between laptop use and infertility in males. Faithful viewer Jonathan Baldwin tipped us off to a Guardian Unlimited article which cites a recent study titled "Increase in scrotal temperature in laptop computer users." So you know this is going to be fun.

The theory is that since higher scrotal temps can damage sperm, prolonged laptop exposure to the heat coming off of today's blast furnace notebook computers "may cause irreversible or partially reversible changes in male reproductive function." The researchers in question measured the scrotal temperatures of 29 volunteers-- kudos, by the way, to whoever managed to scrounge up 29 guys willing to check the box that said "please measure the temperature of my scrotum"-- with and without laptops, and apparently scrotal temperatures had "risen by 1° C in 15 minutes of computer use." By extrapolation, we take that to mean that if you use a laptop for, say, two days straight, your pants might burst into flame. So watch it.

If you're wondering what kind of laptops were used in the study, WebMD reports that "the researchers used two brands of Pentium 4 laptop computers" in the test. So if we wanted to, we suppose we could play up the whole "Intel chips are sterilizing the population" angle, but we'll give it a miss, because as anyone who uses one can attest, Apple's late-model PowerBooks aren't exactly paragons of iciness themselves; they may be cool, but they sure aren't cool, and we wouldn't be surprised if the heat coming off of Apple's products is already responsible for lowering sperm counts in thousands-- if not millions-- of men worldwide.

In other words, it's not an Intel thing, but rather an industry-wide problem. Or is it an industry-wide conspiracy instead? Everyone knows that once you have kids, your available disposable income-- say, the income you'd ordinarily use to buy a new computer every year or two-- all vanishes in a swirling cloud of diapers 'n' formula. Consider the AtAT staff's own Mac-buying history: new desktops and laptops at least once a year from 1994 through 2001... and nothing since the coming of Anya except for a single 2003 12-inch PowerBook that only exists because Katie (AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae) won a chunk of change on Jeopardy!

So we can only assume that laptop heat output has soared in recent years because the personal computer industry has conspired to lower sperm counts in an effort to keep its customers child-free and buying. Shocked? You shouldn't be, because it works both ways: the big diaper conglomerates all work to lower scrotal temperatures by secretly funding boxer shorts manufacturers and supposedly "independent" militant kilt advocacy groups. Such is the way of the world.

By the way, guys, if you laugh and shrug off the warnings about possible infertility due to laptop use, you should still think twice about allowing modern notebook computers near Junior, there; the Guardian reminds us of a far more... immediate hazard of reckless laptop use when it refers to "an anecdotal report of genital burns" that were caused by an overly-toasty Dell notebook. Man, wouldja believe we'd actually managed to forget about that?