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Category: The Parasite Files
I'm sure you'd like to pretend that you have nothing in common with a tapeworm. A tapeworm starts off as an egg which then develops into a cyst. Inside the cyst is a ball-shaped creature with hooks that it can...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:36 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: The Parasite Files
It feels like a homecoming: I'm among hundreds of people who live for parasites. I arrived in Arlington Texas this afternoon to attend the annual meeting of the American Society of Parasitologists. I'm going to give a talk tomorrow about...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 6:51 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: The Parasite Files
In a couple weeks I head to Texas to the annual meeting of the American Society of Parasitologists to talk about parasites in pop culture. The symposium is called, "Parasitology: Public awareness through literature, art, and film." Our panel has...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:27 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: The Parasite Files
A caterpillar's life is not an easy one. The plants that it eats make toxins to make it sick. Birds swoop in to pluck it away and feed it to their chicks. But the most horrific threat comes from wasps...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:00 PM • 20 Comments •
Category: The Parasite Files
It's fun to write about discoveries, but mysteries are important too. In my latest column for Wired.com, I explore the mysterious death of honeybees, and the trouble scientists are having pinning down a culprit. Honey Bees Give Clues on Virus...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:37 PM • •
Category: The Parasite Files
Last year I wrote about the emerald cockroach wasp, Ampulex compressa, which injects venom into cockroaches to turn them into zombie hosts for their parasitic offspring. (More posts on Ampulex here.) The scientists I wrote about have been trying to...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:50 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Evolution
It is a day to write about Giardia, and I am happy to say that I cannot do so from firsthand experience. Friends of mine have suffered infections of Giardia in their gut, but they haven't been terribly forthcoming about...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:00 PM • 10 Comments •
Category: The Parasite Files
Science Made Cool writes from Tokyo, describing the world's only parasite museum. Someday I'll get there... Sadly, the keychain with the sushi worm embedded inside is not for sale online... Update: Mark asks whether there's an American museum in Maryland....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:09 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: The Parasite Files
Parasitoid wasps (or rather, one group of them called the Ichneumonidae) are the subject of one of Charles Darwin's most famous quotations: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:43 PM • 8 Comments •
Category: The Parasite Files
Reports are coming out this morning on a new study on one of the Loom's favorite organisms: Toxoplasma gondii, the single-celled parasite that lives in roughly half of all people on Earth and has the ability to alter the behavior...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:15 AM • 13 Comments •
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