In one of my lives, I work on an online database for managing cattle. The latest thing we're working on is a way to manage semen inventories for artificial insemination. We've been going back and forth on the system specs this week trying to iron things out, and one of the sidebar conversations involved ways in which semen is lost. I saw a documentary once that looked at semen collection, so I knew that sometimes it goes shooting off onto the collector's shirt, and I assumed that other times it gets spilled in other ways (been there, done that). However, I was not prepared for my client to say, "Sometimes it explodes."
Turns out, semen is saved in straws, which are kept frozen in liquid nitrogen tanks. Sometimes a bit of the nitrogen gets in the straws, and when the straw is removed from the tank the nitrogen rapids heats up and pop goes the semen.
Posted by Jason at May 2, 2008 12:55 PM