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APPLETON, Wis. — Wisconsin officials have confirmed an invasive worm species has been discovered in Appleton. Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources forest specialist Linda Williams tells Post-Crescent Media (http://post.cr/YXIBvA) Thursday that the Asian crazy worm was found within city limits. She says the DNR is creating a team of experts to advise policymakers on the Asian crazy worm problem.

Three researchers have been eating worms for 105 days, while living in a sealed laboratory in Beijing, to test whether astronauts could use them as their main source of protein. The volunteers fattened up the worms on plants grown inside the Moon Palace One biosphere at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the South China Morning Post reports. They had various preparations for eating the worms - using a bean sauce and other seasonings to make the dish as appealing as possible. The idea of feeding protein-rich mealworms to astronauts was apparently raised as early as 2009, but scientists...

Still Soft after Half a Billion Years? by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Original soft tissue fossils are revolutionizing our understanding of how and when fossils formed. Secular researchers have described dozens of them over the years, from mummified skin and hemoglobin to dried up retinas—all in rock layers designated at least tens of millions of years old.1 The science of tissue decay does not permit these long ages, calling into question the "age" of the most recent discovery: original, pliable, marine worm tube tissue found in Pre-Cambrian fossils. ...more at link

Maggots found in Atlanta airport sandwich, food inspections enhanced ATLANTA — Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport officials tell Channel 2 Action News they are enhancing the way they inspect restaurants inside the airport after a man showed Channel 2 Action News a sandwich he purchased from an airport vendor had maggots. The passenger told Channel 2's Amy Napier Viteri he bought a sandwich at an airport restaurant Wednesday morning. When he opened it he said he was stunned to find maggots on it. Joel Woloshuk says he got out his phone and recorded video of the bugs crawling on his focaccia...

As environmentalists and politicians fret about man-made Global Warming, they may be ignoring another culprit: earthworms. According to a new study by an international team of researchers, earthworms could be contributing to global warming. The study looked at results from 237 separate experiments from published stories to explore earthworms’ role in affecting global warming. “Our results suggest that although earthworms are largely beneficial to soil fertility, they increase net soil greenhouse-gas emissions,” according to the study’s abstract. Worms affect how much carbon dioxide is produced in the soil and how much escapes into the atmosphere...

How to Kill a Parasitic Worm Living Inside of You Parasitic worms are the stuff of nightmares — worms as big as twelve feet long can rummage through your intestines, and then leave in the middle of the night. Urban legends tell tales of tapeworms carried by diet pills. Some of the weird schemes for removing these parasites include a combination of duct tape, candy bars, and bodily orifices. What is the reality behind these parasites? And how can you really get rid of one, without the need for extreme measures? Tapeworms hide in your food Obtaining a beef or...

It seems an inglorious beginning, but some scientists are now convinced humanity's origins can be traced to an ancient, flat, fishlike worm. A team of researchers subjected the 505-million-year-old Burgess shale fossils of Pikaia gracilens to the latest technology and found evidence that could settle a decades-long debate about the primitive species. Notably, that they had the seeds of a spine. "We can see and discern the positive location of the notochord and the nerve chord. This was not obvious at all, you needed these techniques to see it," said Jean-Bernard Caron, the curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal...

MISSOULA- The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation filed a note it plans to appeal any decision that adversely affects a state's right to manage fully recovered wolf populations. U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy is expected to decide whether Congress acted within Constitutional bounds when it delisted wolves in parts of the West. "We are protecting our right to appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals any decision that results in another setback for conservation and science-based wildlife management," said RMEF President and CEO David Allen. An unfavorable ruling may stop wolf hunts planned for this fall in both Montana...

Smoked lizard dipped in barbecue sauce. Deep-fried crickets. Fudge-covered scorpion. Nope, these aren’t the latest exotic street food offerings from half a world away. These multilegged dishes are prepared by a vendor known as Chef John at the Arizona State Fair, held every fall in Phoenix. State fairs, of course, are synonymous with fried foods. And while the usual staples like funnel cakes remain, cooking up unusual options has become a sport in itself. At fairs across the U.S., concessionaires delight in one-upping each other with the strangest, fattiest, most questionably edible snacks, many of which fall into one of...

The racers are on the track at 2 p.m. each day. As the crowd cheers, the competitors are squirted with water to help them move, and they begin their slow crawl toward the finish line. This unconventional race, which takes place every day at the San Diego County Fair, features worms instead of horses, and it takes some contestants 10 minutes to cover the short distance. "I think it's slow, but funny because the little kids cheer on their worms," Landry Urbanowicz, who runs the worm race, said Thursday. The activity takes place in the farm area at the San...

BERLIN - A synagogue in the German city of Worms was attacked by arsonists on Monday. The attackers left a note linking their torching of the synagogue with the Israel-Palestinian conflict, according to a report in the regional paper Wiesebadner Kurier. German police found eight copies of a note written in “awkward” German, claiming responsibility for setting the place blaze. “So long as you do not give the Palestinians peace, we are not going to give you peace,” stated the note.

If worms are any indication, all the sugar in your diet could spell much more than obesity and type 2 diabetes. Researchers reporting in the November issue of Cell Metabolism, a Cell Press publication, say it might also be taking years off your life...

This creature is one of at least five new "green bombers"--deep-sea, swimming worm species armed with "bombs" (indicated by arrow) that glow a brilliant green when dropped. The glowing bombs are thought to distract predators such as fish, allowing the worms to escape. "There are no other annelids that have structures like this," said Karen Osborn, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. The annelids make up a large category of marine and terrestrial segmented-worm species, including common earthworms.

People die, but one part of them, at least in principle, is immortal. In the germline cells that produce eggs or sperm, biological time stands still. This is why babies are all born with the same age, the clock set to zero, regardless of the age of their parents. A little piece of the germline’s immortality, it now seems, can be acquired by the ordinary cells of the body, and used to give the organism extra longevity. This is the conclusion of a research group at the Massachusetts General Hospital led by Sean P. Curran and Gary Ruvkun. Their studies...

Using GPS and state-of-the-art sonar, Columbia University researchers recently made the first comprehensive map of the wonders submerged in New York City's harbors. Supplementing those findings with historical data, New York magazine reported the inventory's highlights in May: a 350-foot steamship (downed in 1920), a freight train (derailed in 1865), 1,600 bars of silver (unrecovered since 1903), a fleet of Good Humor ice cream trucks (which form a reef for aquatic life), and so many junked cars near the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges that divers use them as underwater navigation points. Of most concern lately, though, are the wildlife: 4-foot-long...

Conservation Groups Again Seek Endangered Species Protection For Giant, Spitting Worm In Wash. (AP) Fans of the giant Palouse earthworm are once again seeking federal protection for the rare, sweet-smelling species that spits at predators. They filed a petition Tuesday with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service requesting the worm be protected as an endangered species.

Worms usually come out when it rains, but this man knows another way to get them out of the ground. Gary Revell is worm grunting - an unusual method that helps him catch worms. He pounds a wooden stake, called a stob, into the ground and levels his 10-pound flat iron over the top. Then he slowly, rhythmically, rubs the iron over the stob, back and forth. He's making the ground vibrate, and after a short while, earthworms start to climb out of the soil. Gary Revell, Worm Grunter: "There's an art to it, you know. I've tried to teach...

BEIJING (Reuters) - An invasion of unidentified worms has forced 50 herdsmen and their families from their grassland homes, taking 20,000 head of livestock with them, in northwest China's Xinjiang region, state news agency Xinhua said Friday. The worms are packed up to 3,000 per square meter and chew through the grasslands like lawnmowers, leaving only brown soil in their wake, Xinhua said. The agency described it as the worst plague in three decades in Usu, about 280 km (175 miles) west of the Xinjiang capital Urumqi.

BEIJING (Reuters) – An invasion of unidentified worms has forced 50 herdsmen and their families from their grassland homes, taking 20,000 head of livestock with them, in northwest China's Xinjiang region, state news agency Xinhua said Friday. The worms are packed up to 3,000 per square meter and chew through the grasslands like lawnmowers, leaving only brown soil in their wake, Xinhua said. ... Local experts could not identify the 2-cm (1 inch) long, thorny green worm with black stripes and samples had been sent to Xinjiang Agricultural University, Xinhua said. "The pasture was green a week ago. But now...

Many animals are colorful to demonstrate fitness and health to one another—the robin's red breast is a sterling example. But pigment, like everything else in the body, comes at an energy cost. For animals that live in the dark, such an expense is unnecessary, so most are pale and colorless. Yet caecilians, amphibians with earthworm-like bodies that spend most of their lives underground, are bafflingly colorful. Combining information about caecilian behavior and evolutionary history, researchers Katharina Wollenberg at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany and John Measey at the South African National Biodiversity Institute suggest that just a little...