All posts tagged: worms

Worms’ Work | Jenny Uglow

Worms’ Work | Jenny Uglow

Published by skeptic

Aarathi Prasad’s Silk encompasses millennia. Silkworm caterpillars 125 million years old have been found sealed in amber from Lebanon, and in amber from northern Myanmar a spider, “flanked by fifteen strands of silk threads, stood frozen at the moment it attacked a wasp, before both were drowned in resin.” One fascinating string of the book follows the evolution of different silk-spinning creatures and their “highly specialized system of genes, proteins, and glands.” Another charts the human exploitation of these spinners, from Neolithic China to the laboratories of today. Describing the repeated efforts to produce the fine, shimmering threads of silk—at times more valuable than gold—Prasad ranges beyond the familiar mulberry silkworm to the wild moths of India and South America, to the hairlike threads of the huge mollusk Pinna nobilis, and to an array of spiders, from the common European garden variety to the mammoth species of South America, whose webs are strong enough to knock off a man’s hat. Over thousands of years, Prasad notes, wherever delicate and beautiful threads were seen emerging from …

Trump, Whose Own Brain Appears to Have Been Eaten by Worms, Claims RFK Jr. Is a “Fake” Anti-Vaxxer Whose Family Is Plotting to Take Over the Country

Trump, Whose Own Brain Appears to Have Been Eaten by Worms, Claims RFK Jr. Is a “Fake” Anti-Vaxxer Whose Family Is Plotting to Take Over the Country

Published by skeptic

Donald Trump claimed Thursday that Robert F. Kennedy, perhaps the most famous anti-vaxxer in the world, is pretending to be against vaccines for political gain, and that if elected, his “radical left” family will take over the country and cause it to collapse. Yes, in arguably one of his most absurd videos to date, Trump laid out the reasons Republicans should vote for him and not the third-party candidate, chief among them being that Kennedy’s position on vaccines is apparently a yearslong con. “RFK Jr. is a Democrat plant, a radical-left liberal who’s been put in place in order to help crooked Joe Biden, the worst president in the history of the United States, get reelected,” Trump says in the video. Appealing to conservatives who are attracted to Kennedy’s dangerous views on vaccines, Trump declares: “For those of you that want to vote [for him] because you think he’s an anti-vaxxer, he’s not really an anti-vaxxer, that’s only his political moment.… RFK’s views on vaccines are fake, as is everything else about his candidacy. Don’t …

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Claims He Could “Eat 5 More Brain Worms” and “Still” Beat Biden and Trump in a Debate

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Claims He Could “Eat 5 More Brain Worms” and “Still” Beat Biden and Trump in a Debate

Published by skeptic

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded on Wednesday to the reveal that a worm previously crawled into his brain, ate part of it, and died by claiming that he could “eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.” He added: “I feel confident of the result even with a six-worm handicap.” The declaration was clearly an attempt to suggest that even though the worm left him with “cognitive problems,” including “short-term memory loss” and “longer-term memory loss,” he is still mentally stronger than his competition for the White House. (Kennedy told The New York Times that he had recovered from the cognitive issues caused by the parasite that got into his brain. A spokesperson for the candidate scoffed at the idea that he might be unfit to serve as president—even though, again, Kennedy himself said the worm had significantly impacted his cognitive abilities.) Kennedy had already challenged Donald Trump to a debate before the worm story came out, telling the ex-president in an open letter that he was …

RFK Junior Threatens to Eat “Five More Brain Worms”

RFK Junior Threatens to Eat “Five More Brain Worms”

Published by skeptic

Image by Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty / Futurism After news of his alleged brain worm went viral, third-party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is back with a startling rejoiner: that he could out-debate the election’s frontrunners even if he ate five more. “I offer to eat five more brain worms and still beat President [Donad] Trump and President [Joe] Biden in a debate,” the son of the late Robert “Bobby” Kennedy posted on X-formerly-Twitter. “I feel confident of the result even with a six-worm handicap.” Earlier in the week, the New York Times dropped a bombshell report about Kennedy’s health struggles a decade or so back, in which he claims a doctor believed some cognitive issues he was having at the time were the result of an unknown parasite that had taken up residence in his cranium, eaten part of his brain, and subsequently died. In a 2012 deposition during his divorce from his second wife, the political scion also alleged that he’d been diagnosed with mercury poisoning after a diet heavy in …

How Not to Get Brain-Eating Worms and Mercury Poisoning

How Not to Get Brain-Eating Worms and Mercury Poisoning

Published by skeptic

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, almost all of us have at least trace amounts of methylmercury—the form of mercury we tend to encounter most—in our bodies due to its sheer prevalence in the environment. However, most of the time these levels are too low to result in any kinds of health problems. While some of this can come from residing near to power plants as coal combustion releases a range of harmful pollutants including mercury, humans tend to ingest the chemical through consuming fish, says Awadhesh Jha, a toxicologist at the University of Plymouth. “A lot of industries are near the coastline and most of their contaminants, including mercury, are discharged into the aquatic environment,” he says. “So fish accumulate more of them.” While there is little information on the number of cases of mercury toxicity in the US each year, studies have shown that excessive mercury exposure can cause neurodevelopmental problems in children and expose adults to a greater risk of cardiovascular disease. In various national surveys across the US, people with …

Who’s Afraid of Brain Worms?

Who’s Afraid of Brain Worms?

Published by skeptic

Earlier today, The New York Times broke some startling news about a presidential candidate. According to a 2012 deposition, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once suffered from, in his own words, “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” The vague yet alarming description could apply to any number of parasitic ailments, among them angiostrongyliasis, baylisascariasis, toxocariasis, strongyloidiasis, and trichinosis. But some experts immediately suspected a condition called neurocysticercosis (NCC), in which the larvae of the pork tapeworm Taenia solium post up in the brain. The condition might sound terrifying—and to some observers darkly hilarious. Literal brain worms! But it does not actually involve any brain-munching, or even, technically, a true worm. The brain-invading culprit is instead a tapeworm (strictly, a kind of helminth) that typically makes its home in pigs. As far as parasitic infections go, this is “the most common one in the brain,” Laila Woc-Colburn, an infectious-disease physician at Emory University, told me. And globally, it’s one of the most common causes of epilepsy in …

‘Pesticides by stealth’: garden soil conditioners killing worms, experts fear | Invertebrates

‘Pesticides by stealth’: garden soil conditioners killing worms, experts fear | Invertebrates

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Gardeners are inadvertently killing scores of earthworms with soil conditioners marketed as “organic”, experts fear, as they call for tighter regulation on products that poison the invertebrates. Earthworms may appear humble, but Charles Darwin thought their work in improving soil structure and fertility was so important he devoted his final book to them and said: “It may be doubted if there are any other animals which have played such an important part in the history of the world as these lowly organised creatures.” However, some gardeners who want a tidy lawn remove worm casts, which can be viewed as unsightly, particularly if the casts – made of the worms’ excrement – are squashed and spread over the surface. Dozens of products available to gardeners and greenkeepers say they combat these casts, reducing the time-consuming task of their manual removal. However, most contain saponins, which have been found to be highly toxic to earthworms. Some of these are marketed as “organic soil conditioner” with no mention of the deadly effect they have on worms. Others promise …

Should you kill hammerhead worms? What to know about the invasive creatures.

Should you kill hammerhead worms? What to know about the invasive creatures.

Published by Sam

Once again, hammerhead flatworms are wriggling into the spotlight — this time in Canada. The toxic and invasive pests, which originate from Southeast Asia, have the ability to regenerate even if chopped into pieces. They have long been spotted across the United States and in other countries, including Canada. On iNaturalist, an invasive species reporting platform, there is evidence of Canadians mentioning the worms since at least 2019, with the most recent report logged as of Tuesday. Source link

Crunching worms, squeaking voles, drumming ants: how scientists are learning to eavesdrop on the sounds of soil | Soil

Crunching worms, squeaking voles, drumming ants: how scientists are learning to eavesdrop on the sounds of soil | Soil

Published by skeptic

The sound of an earthworm is a distinctive rasping and scrunching. Ants sound like the soothing patter of rain. A passing, tunnelling vole makes a noise like a squeaky dog’s toy repeatedly being chewed. On a spring day at Rothamsted Research, an agricultural research institution in Hertfordshire, singing skylarks and the M1 motorway are competing for the airways. But the attention here is on the soundscapes underfoot: a rich ecosystem with its own alien sounds. More than half of the planet’s species live in the soil, and we are just starting to tune into what they are up to. Beetle larvae, millipedes, centipedes and woodlice have other sound signatures, and scientists are trying to decipher which sounds come from which creatures. In a field divided up into test strips, Carlos Abrahams pushes a sensor the length of a knitting needle into the soil. With a pair of headphones on, he listens to the “poor man’s rainforest”: a dark landscape of miniature caves, tunnels and decomposing matter stewing away under our feet. “A few ticks and …