In 1980, a man walked into the Royal Perth Hospital in Australia, complaining that he was tired. He had been tired at that point for two years. The man’s medical history offered no good clues–at 44, his only indulgence was a glass of white wine at dinner each night. His doctors pushed and poked until they discovered his liver was swollen. Yet he showed none of the symptoms you’d expect from cirrhosis or liver cancer. The cause of the man’s trouble only became clear when the doctors got the report on his stool. It contained eggs from an animal known as Schistosoma mansoni–otherwise known as the blood fluke.
A reader writes, “I’m James Bernot, a graduate student studying shark and tapeworm coevolution at the University of Connecticut. Here is a tattoo I have on my calf of a Northwestern Pacific tribal shark, complete with a tetraphyllidean tapeworm near the shark’s pelvic fin.”
It’s hard for me to resist a tattoo of a shark tapeworm.
You can see the rest of the Science Tattoo Emporium here and in Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.
Originally published February 24, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.
The Star Trek fans among you are no doubt familiar with “The Menagerie,” a two-episode story from the first season in 1966. The crew of the Enterprise gets trapped on a planet occupied by aliens called Talosions who look like humans, except for their massive, vein-encircled brains.*
That story was produced the year I was born, and when I saw it about a decade later, it made a big impression on me. Could brains get that big? Would they wind up with that cantaloupe shape? Would they provide Talosians with super-intelligence?
This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
The Mind of a Madman: Norway’s Struggle to Understand Anders Breivik. By Richard Orange.
Reviewed by Maia Szalavitz
February 20, 2013
When I talk about viruses, I have to struggle with big numbers.
If you get sick with the flu, for example, every infected cell in your airway produces about 10,000 new viruses. The total number of flu viruses in your body can rise to 100 trillion within a few days. That’s over 10,000 times more viruses than people on Earth.