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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 on June 28, 2008 11:36 PM • 5 Comments •
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 on June 27, 2008 6:51 PM • 4 Comments •
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...
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Posted on June 10, 2008 4:27 PM • 2 Comments •
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 on June 3, 2008 8:00 PM • 20 Comments •
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 on February 23, 2008 4:37 PM • •
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 on December 1, 2007 9:50 AM • 1 Comments •
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...
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Posted on September 27, 2007 2:00 PM • 10 Comments •
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 on September 8, 2007 8:09 PM • 3 Comments •
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 on August 13, 2007 10:43 PM • 8 Comments •
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...
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Posted on April 3, 2007 10:15 AM • 13 Comments •
If pubic lice are not the sort of thing you want to be seen reading about, let me give you the opportunity to close your browser window right now. But if you're at all curious about the secret that...
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Posted on March 7, 2007 12:00 PM • 44 Comments •
Darwin gave a lot of thought to the strangest creatures on this planet, wondering how they had evolved from less strange ancestors. Whales today might be fish-like warm-blooded beasts with blowholes and flukes, but long ago, Darwin argued, their ancestors...
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Posted on February 19, 2007 2:22 PM • 18 Comments •
Thanks to PZ Myers for calling attention to this superb video of Corydceps, a parasitic fungus that drives its insect host up a plant before growing a spike out of its head. Leave it to David Attenborough, master of the...
Posted on December 4, 2006 9:30 AM • 19 Comments •
Well, the talk at Cornell last week went very well. Thanks to everyone who came. If you want to hear me wax rhapsodic about parasite manipulations (and explain how scientists study their evolution), you're in luck. Cornell has put the...
Posted on November 14, 2006 10:41 AM • 8 Comments •
Attention all Loom readers in the Cornell University area: I'm heading up to Ithaca to give a talk tomorrow on a subject near and dear to my heart--how parasites turn their hosts into puppets and slaves. I'll be at the...
Posted on November 7, 2006 9:56 AM • 4 Comments •
Toxoplasma, that mind-altering, cell-manipulating, all-around awesome parasite that sits in the brains of billions of us, is back in the news. Infection with the parasite raises the chances a woman will have a boy from 51% to 72%. The average...
Posted on October 12, 2006 3:05 PM • 8 Comments •
I'm heading out of blog contact for a couple days, so allow me to share one of my favorite posts, from last January--on wasps that perform brain surgery....
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Posted on August 4, 2006 1:46 PM • 7 Comments •
Once again, I hear the siren song of Toxoplasma, the parasite that dwells in the brains of 50 million Americans. Toxoplasma gondii is an extraordinary creature, whose exploits I've chronicled in previous posts , an article in the New York...
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Posted on August 1, 2006 7:08 PM • 74 Comments •
Next time I go to the doctor, I think I'll get him to give me a test for Toxoplasma. Fifty million Americans have the parasite, so I wouldn't be the first. And if I was carrying it around in my...
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Posted on June 20, 2006 12:19 AM • 9 Comments • 2 TrackBacks
If you keep a vegetable garden, there's a fair chance you'll encounter a grisly sight this summer. Some poor caterpillar will be clutching a leaf, with the pupae of parasitic wasps sprouting off its back. It has just died in...
Posted on May 15, 2006 4:02 PM • 6 Comments •
At the Loom we believe that the path to wisdom runs through the Land of Gross. We do not show you pictures of worms crawling out of frog noses merely to ruin your lunch. We do not urge you to...
Posted on April 10, 2006 3:47 PM • 6 Comments •
Even I have my limits....
Posted on March 17, 2006 2:19 PM • 10 Comments •
Loyal readers need no introduction to this bit of entomological "Faces of Death." Others who think this must be some sort of hoax, read this (or this). Courtesy of Dr. Fred Liebersat, oracle of the emerald cockroach wasp....
Posted on March 10, 2006 2:51 PM • 3 Comments •
The Discovery Channel picked up my cockroach zombie story and interviewed Dr. Fred Liebersat on his research. They included some cool footage of the roach and its sinister wasp brain surgeon. To watch, go to their archives and scroll to...
Posted on March 10, 2006 9:01 AM • •
My post on zombie roaches and brain surgeon wasps seems to have hit a nerve. There have been well over 100,000 hits on that post alone, and 175 comments have been posted. I imagine that most people haven't read through...
Posted on February 14, 2006 1:46 AM • 4 Comments •
I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome...
Posted on February 2, 2006 9:43 AM • 212 Comments • 12 TrackBacks
Are brain parasites altering the personalities of three billion people? The question emerged a few years ago, and it shows no signs of going away. I first encountered this idea while working on my book Parasite Rex. I was investigating...
Posted on January 17, 2006 7:14 PM • 101 Comments • 7 TrackBacks
This year's Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was announced this morning. Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren won for discovering that ulcers can be caused not by stress or genes but by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori (shown here)....
Posted on October 3, 2005 2:28 PM • 6 Comments •
I've got two stories in tomorrow's New York Times about getting sick. One is about malaria. I've always been fascinated by how parasites can manipulate their hosts for their own ends, and much of my book Parasite Rex is dedicated...
Posted on August 8, 2005 10:39 PM • 22 Comments •
One of the most exciting lines of research in evolution today is how parasites have become so good at making us sick. A case in point appears in the latest issue of Genome Biology (full text of paper here). It...
Posted on June 3, 2004 12:34 PM • 2 Comments •
Few humans have been as successful in Hollywood as parasitoids.
Posted on January 7, 2004 12:09 PM • 5 Comments •
Biologists these days can paint many different portraits of the same organism. They can follow the tried and true style of Aristotle and paint with a broad brush, describing what they can see with the naked eye--number of legs, color...
Posted on October 13, 2003 10:21 PM • •
As someone who writes a lot about evolutionary biology, I've often had people say to me, "I just can't believe that evolved." Originally, that referred to the lovely side of nature--the beauty of flowers, for example, or the grace of...
Posted on October 2, 2003 10:53 PM • •
Carl Zimmer is a science writer. PLEASE VISIT THE LOOM AT ITS NEW HOME.
