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A Nebraska woman has become the second known person to contract a rare infection which led to her pulling parasitic worms out of her eye. LiveScience, citing an Oct. 22 study posted in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, reports the woman believes she contracted the infection while on a trail run near the California coast last year. The woman, 68, said she was in the Carmel Valley, about 160 miles south of San Francisco, in March 2018. She felt an irritation in her right eye. When she flushed it with tap water, a 1.3-centimeter-long roundworm came out. Then she spotted...

You might think they are disgusting. But our war against intestinal worms has damaged our immune systems and mental health. Did you ever wonder why one in six children has a mental health disorder? One in every six seems to be a few too many, I would think. Did you ever wonder why 20 per cent of women, in the United States at least, have been diagnosed with depression after menopause, and why ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’ has mysteriously emerged? Why should almost half of us be allergic to something? Why should more than four in every 10 children be on...

The sea bed in the deep ocean during the Cambrian period was thought to have been inhospitable to animal life because it lacked enough oxygen to sustain it. But research published in the scientific journal Geology reveals the existence of fossilized worm tunnels dating back to the Cambrian period­­ 270 million years before the evolution of dinosaurs. The discovery, by USask professor Brian Pratt, suggests that animal life in the sediment at that time was more widespread than previously thought. The worm tunnels—burrows where worms lived and munched through the sediment—are invisible to the naked eye. But Pratt “had a...

Full title of article: "A $350 toilet powered by worms may be the ingenious future of sanitation that Bill Gates has been dreaming about" Excerpt: Worm toilets require no traditional flushing and aren't hooked up to a sewer system — instead, worms compost human waste. More than 4,000 such "Tiger Toilets" have been installed to date across India, in homes of people who were previously defecating in the open. The worm toilets smell a lot better than a pit latrine, and don't breed mosquitoes either. Here's how a $350 toilet powered by worms could change the world and save lives.

Russian fisherman Roman Fedortsov has a habit of pulling ghoulish and bizarre creatures from the deep sea. And his recent trawl did not disappoint: Fedortsov recently captured an eerily "smiling" sea worm. In a video Fedortsov posted on Twitter last week, the creature's clown-smile turns creepy as it seemingly morphs inside out in time with an uncanny, high-pitched noise added by the fisherman. (This is not a noise the creature is making.) "If the creature could scream, it would scream like this," Fedortsov wrote in the post. ..." Bristle worms are so named because they have small bristles called chaetae...

He had been experiencing a litany of symptoms his doctors couldn’t explain: lumps that kept appearing and disappearing, blinding pain in his eyes that lasted for a day and came back another, a small muscle in his forehead that he felt “snap.” His white blood cells soared, and itchy rashes covered parts of his body. His joints ached. He was constantly hungry and he had been eating a lot, but he couldn’t gain weight. There was a sinking feeling that his body had become host to unwelcome visitors, but tests showed nothing. One morning, he noticed a faint yellowish lump...

You've probably been wondering about this for a while: did the Ancient Greeks ever get intestinal worms like we do today? The answer, we can now tell you, is an unequivocal yes. Researchers from the University of Cambridge have examined Ancient Greek human remains from burials on the island of Kea and found evidence of parasites - confirming the writings of Hippocrates 2,500 years ago. Hippocrates, the famous physician and "Father of Western Medicine" who lived from around 460 to 370 BCE, wrote of many different diseases in the Hippocratic Corpus. Medicine was vastly different back then, and the descriptions...

Viewers tuning in to Blue Planet 2 were terrified last night after the nature documentary showcased a Bobbit worm eating a fish with its dagger-like jaws. One stunned fan said the tiny creature will be 'forever in my nightmares' after footage showed it emerging from the sand in order to ambush its unsuspecting prey. Others said they 'could not sleep' after watching the drama unfold while some posted hilarious memes during the programme.

But imagine what you thought may have been an eyelash turns out to actually be a worm wriggling around. This was the reality for a teenager in Mexico. The unnamed 17-year-old boy began to feel increasingly intolerable pain in his right eye. His vision also quickly declined, to the point where he could only see hand motions. After three weeks of dealing with the pain, he decided it was time to seek out a doctor, according to his case published in The New England Journal of Medicine. An eye examination revealed a flatworm, that was 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) long...

Researchers have discovered a new, giant species species of shipworm that measures up to five feet long. The giant, slimy animal was discovered after it was tapped out of a tusk-like shell. The giant shipworm lives in shallow mud bays in the Philippines and relies on bacteria in its gills to make its food.

Dave, a 16-inch-long earthworm discovered recently in England, will become part of the collection at the Natural History Museum in London.What Paul Rees recently discovered among his vegetables in England's Cheshire County is anything but garden variety: a gigantic earthworm. Rees's stepson, George, named the behemoth Dave. He's the longest earthworm recorded in the United Kingdom—almost 16 inches—but it's his mass that has really impressed scientists. Dave weighs nearly an ounce, almost twice as heavy as any other wild earthworm ever seen. That's about the size of a small chocolate bar. Before Dave, the largest earthworm (Lumbricus terrestris) was a...

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table(recipes)preserving, good living - there is no...

About a week after the Rindone family returned from their tropical summer vacation, 7-year-old Andrew started complaining about a bump on his head. "It did hurt a little," Andrew said. "And, it did itch." The boy's pediatrician thought he had an infection and prescribed antibiotics. But the bump just kept getting bigger, and a small pinhole began to appear. Then one day, Andrew was on the couch when his mother saw something that horrified her. "We kind of noticed something peek out of the hole," Jennifer Rindone said. The small opening was apparently a breathing hole for the larvae growing...

"At the end of the day" has been voted the most irritating, hackneyed expression in the English language. If once in a while it slips into our speech, no big whoop. But in her interview on With All Due Respect today, when Hillary's political director, Amanda Renteria, used the expression twice in her very first answer, it caught this NewsBuster's attention. And so I found myself counting. Three, four--could this really go on? Yes! Five, and . . . a final sixth time before the interview finally ground to an end! Not to be too apocalyptic, but it has been...

Former president Jimmy Carter on Wednesday will make a rare address to the upper chamber of the British Parliament to draw attention to the eradication of the Guinea worm disease, according to the Associated Press.

The Vermont senator vaults past Clinton in Iowa, as the rivalry heats up for the Democratic nomination. The intensifying rivalry between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders spiked a few degrees on Tuesday with two new polls showing the Vermont senator catching fire in not only his regional stomping ground of New Hampshire but also in Iowa, where Clinton enjoyed a double-digit lead as late as mid-December. Monmouth University's survey of likely New Hampshire Democratic primary voters out Tuesday showed 53 percent expressing support for Sanders, compared to 39 percent for Clinton. In Iowa, Sanders recorded his first victory over Clinton...

No one seems to know how worms got in the tap water, but residents in Old River-Winfree, a town of about 1,400 just 25 miles east of Houston, are drinking from bottles this week. On Monday evening, the first residents of the Woodlands Acres Subdivision showed up at city offices with containers full of water and small red worms they say came out of their faucets, sprinklers and shower heads. Three days and dozens of reports later, Mayor Joe Landry said "people are not taking chances." ... She said this type of contamination can occur from backflow into pipes or...

DENISON, Texas, - Rangers at a Texas park said earthworms gathering in clumped "herds" in the middle of a road looked like someone had dumped spaghetti from their car. Eisenhower State Park Superintendent Ben Herman said rangers checking back roads at the Denison park May 29 found earthworms fleeing storms had formed into balls in a straight line down the middle of the road. Texas Parks and Wildlife shared video of the worm balls on YouTube. Rangers said they thought the clumps were spaghetti until they got close enough to poke at them. "We're still puzzled why they decided to...

Washington's wolf population grew by more than 30 percent last year and formed four new packs. ... The state also found there are now 16 wolf packs and at least five successful breeding pairs.

Kevin Loria January 13, 2015Humanity is close to eradicating a human disease from the face of the earth for the second time in history. (The first eradicated human disease was smallpox, which last infected someone in 1977.) That's pretty incredible — but it's a project that has required close to three decades of work, and it isn't finished. On Monday, former US President Jimmy Carter announced at the opening of "Countdown to Zero: Defeating Disease," a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, that there were just 126 cases of Guinea worm disease left in the world. In...