A device which acts like a magnet to sort good sperm from bad could help slash infertility rates, ananova quoted the Sun as reporting.
The shoebox-sized unit, developed in Australia, screens for DNA damage.
Sperm it selected had half the damage of that it rejected.
Damaged sperm is less likely to fertilize an egg and has been linked to a greater risk of cancers.
One doctor said, "It could be a breakthrough."

Inspired by microbes such as the Haloferax mediteranei bacterium, which survive in briny lakes, scientists found new microbes in even saltier waters.

A community of microorganisms has been discovered in one of the saltiest environments on Earth, ultra-saturated salt basins deep in the Mediterranean Sea. The salt solution there is so concentrated, microbiologists are mystified as to how the organisms are able to survive, nature.com said.
About 6 million years ago, the Mediterranean had dried up, having been separated from the Atlantic Ocean. Over time, sediment covered the salty deposits in the desolate basin. Eventually the area was reconnected with the Atlantic and filled with water again.
Now, places where these underwater salty deposits are exposed are exceptionally briny, containing up to 476 grams of magnesium chloride per liter. It was assumed that life could not exist in such conditions. The dense, viscous brine, which is twice as salty as soy sauce, would inexorably suck water molecules out of any cell.
But Paul van der Wielen, a microbiologist now at the Kiwa Water Research institute in Nieuwegein in the Netherlands, wanted to make sure. He and his colleagues focused on four such locations in the Mediterranean: l'Atalante, Bannock, Discovery and Urania salt basins, which are up to 500 metres beneath the surface. The work was carried out as part of the BioDeep project, a collaboration of research groups across Europe.
The researchers sent a robotic submarine down to retrieve water samples from the basins. When they analyzed the samples, they were excited to find DNA, proving that microorganisms do exist there.
"So long as water is present in an environment, there appear to be few real limits to microbial life," comments Kevin Purdy, a microbiologist at the University of Reading, UK, who studies salt-loving organisms. He says that calcium chloride brines, such as Don Juan Pond in Antarctica, are now the only hypersaline environment in which life has yet to be found.

Russian surgeons claim a world first after repairing broken spinal cords using stem cells taken from the patient's nose, ananova.com said.
The Moscow team claims it is the first time anyone has been able to treat such severe spinal injuries by reconnecting spinal cord neural tissue.
The first six operations have been a "phenomenal success" they claim with all patients, who were thought paralyzed for life, now making their first steps.
They are expected to get back to normal life soon, the Moscow paper Trud reports.
Until now it was believed that nerve cells of the spinal cord could not regenerate or be replaced but Prof. Dr. Andrey Brjuchowezki claims to have proved the opposite.
He took the stem cells from the patients' nasal mucous membranes, which is particularly suitable because of the many neural endings it contains, the paper said.
The cells were than artificially bred into neural tissue stem cells, which were afterwards gradually injected with bio-gel into the damaged areas, regenerating vertebra by vertebra.
"No one in the world has done this before," said Dr Brjuchowezki of the Nikolaj Blochin Scientific Oncology Centre in Moscow.

Scientists say the way airflow around the nose is more complex than that in a jumbo jet's wing, BBC News website said.
Imperial College London researchers built a 3D model of the nose and used fluid to work out how air flows around it and how it senses different smells.
They say the study, in Science, could help surgeons plan operations and the development of a cure for runny noses.
The structure of the nose meant air eddied, whirled and re-circulated as it passed through the nose, the team said.
Principal researcher Dr Denis Doorly said: "People are used to the flows around an aeroplane being complicated but that is in some ways simpler than understanding the flows inside the nose.
"The geometry of the nose is highly complex, with no straight lines or simple curves like an aircraft wing and the regime of airflow is not simply laminar or turbulent."
The team, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, found the human sense of smell relies on a sample of air reaching the olfactory bulb at the top of the nose and that requires a sharp breathe and a high velocity shot of air to reach it.
The geometry of the nose causes the air to move around in the vicinity of the bulb allowing smell to be sensed.
The team mapped the air flow by using coloured beads which were put through the model noses and mapped by fast digital cameras.
They also concluded the air flow was more complex than how bloods travels around the heart.
The findings were welcomed by Grant Bates, honorary secretary of the Ears, Nose and Throat Association and a consultant ENT surgeon in Oxford.
He said: "Much is known about how the nose works but any refinement of that is good.
"In our work we judge a lot on the history of the patient but what we do need is more objective measurement of airflow around the nose and this research sounds like it is achieving that."

Physicists in the US and Sweden have shown that the electrical resistance of a carbon nanotube changes when it is hit by an atom or molecule. The new results will need to be taken into account in devices that rely on nanotubes as chemical sensors, PhysicsWeb.org.
Carbon nanotubes are rolled up sheets of graphite that display novel electronic properties as a result of their one-dimensional structure. Nanotubes also display mechanical strength along their length, but can be easily deformed in the radial direction.
Hugh Romero and Peter Eklund of Pennsylvania State University, and Kim Bolton and Arne Rosen of G?teborg University and Chalmers University of Technology have now shown that the tiny deformations or dents caused by collisions with various gas species can change the electronic properties of the nanotubes.
The team measured how the thermoelectric power and electrical resistance of thin films containing bundles of single-wall nanotubes (SWNT) changed when they were exposed to the various gases at a pressure of around one atmosphere. The nanotubes in the sample were between 1 and 1.6 nanometers in diameter and several microns long.
Romero and co-workers studied the effects of collisions of inert gas atoms (helium, neon, argon, krypton and xenon) and small molecules (methane and nitrogen), and found that changes in both the thermopower and the resistance increased with the cube root of the mass of the atom or molecule.
"Our work shows that carbon nanotubes can be used to detect gases that are very difficult to observe with current measurement techniques," says Bolton