It’s been called “spermageddon.” We’re talking about the male infertility crisis. Some blame cell phones, especially when carried in a front pocket. A biohacker with over a million Instagram followers speculates that “infertility is massively being caused by electric vehicles.” But the truth is more complicated (current studies show no link between cell phones or electric vehicles and declining fertility).

While experts generally agree that male fertility is on the decline, urologists and epidemiologists don’t agree on why it’s declining. It’s also not clear, experts emphasize, that declining male fertility is reason for concern, let alone the crisis that’s depicted on social media.

Many believe that the strongest swimmer gets the egg. Scientifically speaking, though, that isn’t quite how it works. The fact is, sperm that looks perfect under a microscope (right shape, right speed) can still fail to fertilize an egg. Masahito Ikawa, a reproductive biologist at the University of Osaka, proved that in 2003 with mouse sperm any clinic would have waved through. GQ reports he’s now systematically deleting each of roughly 1,200 genes tied to sperm production, a project that took off once CRISPR arrived in 2012.

The math on why this took so long is brutal. The U.S. has 406 urologists focused on male infertility and no body routinely collecting male reproductive health data. And most men seeking fertility treatment are first seen by doctors trained to treat women. There is no U.S. body that routinely collects information about male reproductive health. The National Institutes of Health spent about $59 million on male reproductive research between 2016 and 2019, against $83 million for women. Roughly one in six people worldwide struggle to conceive, and half that equation has been running on a semen analysis and a shrug.

What’s unresolved is the part that matters most to you: whether a gene knocked out in a mouse maps cleanly onto a man in a fertility clinic, and how fast any of it reaches an exam room. For now, the takeaway is smaller and sharper—a clean test result isn’t the same as an answer.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has submitted his resignation, and the White House accepted it, officials announced Monday. According to NBC News, he’s expected to leave in the coming days. No successor has been named.

Driscoll, an Iraq war veteran and a longtime associate of Vice President JD Vance, has run the Army since the Senate confirmed him in February 2025. He was one of the rare Pentagon appointees with genuine bipartisan regard—which makes the exit all the more troubling. Apparently, the departure is tied to months of friction with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth ousted Army chief of staff Gen. Randy George (a Driscoll ally) and blocked promotions of senior Army officers.

He follows Navy Secretary John Phelan out the door, and that’s the part worth watching—senior civilian and uniformed leaders keep leaving the Pentagon under Hegseth, with no obvious bench behind them. “It’s not great,” one official told the Washington Post, “when you’re trying to project power in the middle of the Iran war.”

You’ve probably heard by now that a wall of mud and debris roughly 15 feet high tore through Bright Angel Canyon and the Phantom Ranch area at the bottom of the Grand Canyon this weekend. Two people are dead. More than a dozen are still missing or unaccounted for, according to the National Park Service. Flash floods are not uncommon in the region, but the water ripped out footbridges and shoved boulders downstream—at the one place in the park where you can’t simply drive away.

The damage runs deeper than the trails. Preliminary assessments indicate about 40% of the Transcanyon Waterline (the pipeline serving visitors and roughly 2,500 residents) was damaged or destroyed. South Rim overnight lodging is suspended until further notice. That’s not a weekend closure. That’s infrastructure at the bottom of a mile-deep hole.

As for what caused it, The Guardian points to overlapping factors: monsoon rains landing on drought-hardened ground that sheds water instead of absorbing it, a strong El Niño and the burn scar left by the July 2025 Dragon Bravo fire, which destroyed the Grand Canyon Lodge. Federal models had already flagged elevated debris-flow risk upstream of Phantom Creek.