In a petri dish, sperms become sluggish. Indeed, "poor sperm performance" is a common problem in IVF or in vitro fertilization.
Turns out, the polystyrene in the petri dish is toxic to the sperms - so what we do to help the sperms? Enter diamond:
Coat a quartz petri dish with a nanolayer of diamond, however, and you've created a cellular safe haven. A much higher percentage of sperm survived for 42 hours in diamond-coated petri dishes like the ones pictured above than in the polystyrene containers usually used for IVF, researchers will report in the Online Proceedings Library of the Materials Research Society.
Why is there polystyrene in a quartz petri dish in the first place? I think that's a mistake; they used to be glass, now they're plastic. If so, just go back to glass; it ain't rocket surgery.
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This is way too common. My father published a paper in the 70's describing how accidental and intentional coatings on lab glassware caused inconsistent and inaccurate results. Disposable equipment (like Petri dishs) are the worst because labs do not clean them before use and therefore have an unknown variable.
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One wonders how a simple quartz petri dish, no diamond, no plastic, would fare... it's not apparent whether diamond makes any difference at all.
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Remember the good old days, when people had sex with other people directly?
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