The Weirdest Stuff in Your Balls
We’re no ballologists, but most people have a pretty firm grasp on their own balls, at least at some point in the day. They might not be able to name every structure holding the system up, but they’ve got a reasonably good idea what’s in there, and if something surprising popped up, they’d like to think they’d know.
But it turns out, there’s a lot of weird stuff in your balls. And it’s only getting weirder.
Microplastics
We’ve known for a while that particles produced by the ridiculous amount of plastic supporting our society tend to work their way into stuff, but we’re only beginning to understand all the places within reach of their petrochemical fingers. One of them is your balls. Researchers at the University of New Mexico apparently had some preserved testicles lying around, so in 2024, they decided to test them for microplastics and found that every single one was contaminated. They think this might be linked to lower sperm counts, but due to the nature of the preservation, they can’t be sure, though they also tested dog balls and found lower sperm counts in samples with higher contamination. Weird stuff going on in that lab.
Not One But Two Appendices
Again, the only people with knowledge of the human body much deeper than what can be jammed into a song for preschoolers are nerds and doctors, so you’ll probably be surprised to find out you have more than one appendix at all. But it’s true. “Appendix” really just means a useless hangy bit, so in addition to the one attached to your large intestine, there’s one in the small intestine, the throat and a little fatty one near the colon. (That one seems most ripe for a nickname. Get creative.)
If you’ve got balls, you’ve also got two more of them in there, the appendix testis and the appendix of the epididymis. They’re both leftovers of ducts every fetus has before their body makes a genital decision, but they don’t leave anything behind when it lands on ovaries because the human body is a confusing nightmare.
Taste Buds
Remember in 2020, when dudes were dipping their balls in soy sauce and claiming they could taste it? First of all, that was before lockdown. Make it make sense. All that aside, it was probably because one guy read somewhere that testicles have taste buds, which isn’t untrue. They appear to play a role in sperm production, but they’re on the inside, so tea-bagging a bowl of ramen is “like trying to taste soy sauce by dabbing it on the outside of your cheek.”
You actually do have taste receptors all over your body, though notably not anywhere in or around the vagina. As if it doesn’t make life disappointing enough.
