Link: A hookworm history in mining
I’ve been doing a bit of reading about hookworm infection for an essay, and I happened across a piece by Rebecca Kreston from Discover’s “Body Horrors” a few...
All posts tagged with parasites
Quote: McNeill on the cost of parasites
From Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill, a passage synthesizing the role of endemic parasites in weakening entire populations:
Bedbugs: from bats to beds
Carl Zimmer reported this week in the New York Times on research into the natural history of bedbugs in Europe: “In Bedbugs, Scientists See a Model of Evolu...
Explaining face mites
The new online publication Vox is running an explainer about the species of face mites that live in your skin: “These mites live on your face and come out to...
"When you get a tick up your nose, you tell the story"
My University of Wisconsin-Madison colleague Tony Goldberg has a new paper doing some innovative ecological genetics: “UW scientist sniffs out possible new t...
Population structure and chimpanzee malaria
A new paper examines the parasite load of a group of wild chimpanzees for Plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria DeNys:2013. Several strains of Plasmod...
Worm me up
Robin Ann Smith contributed a guest post to Scientific American, titled “The worms within”. The main idea is that the immune system evolved to deal with para...
Bedbug bitery
USA Today says, “Let the bedbugs bite.”
Falciparum malaria came from gorillas
Malaria in humans is caused by one of five different species of Plasmodium parasites. The deadliest of these is P. falciparum, especially within Africa where...
Parasite wrecks
When I used to think about the 21st century, I didn’t expect they’d be telling me to go easy on the head lice.
No indigenous American head lice?
Not a lot of detail in this story, but it's an interesting datum:
Escaping the male-killer
At the moment, our yard here has many more butterflies than the "butterfly garden" at the zoo. That's mostly attributable to the zoo's complete lack of milk...
The plaque record of human migrations
I let this story pass by last week, but I can't resist the version with the excellent headline: