Dracunculiasis (Guinea Worm)
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All posts tagged: Worm
The U.S. fought the flesh-eating screw worm for decades. Now it begins again.
The United States spent more than half a century and hundreds of millions of dollars driving the flesh-eating New World screwworm as far from its borders as possible. Now, it’s back. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content. The species can eat the tissue of any warm-blooded animal, but it’s a particular threat to livestock and is often fatal for cattle. Some environmentally minded bioethicists have openly debated whether it would be moral to deliberately drive the screwworm into extinction. “There are some species that it’s worth considering wiping out altogether and I do think the screwworm is one,” said Gregory Kaebnick, a senior research scholar at the Hastings Center for Bioethics. The Agriculture Department announced Wednesday that the New World screwworm had been found in a calf in Texas — the first detection in U.S. cattle during a natural incursion since 1982. The agency reported a second case Friday. It was discovered about 6 miles from the first infection. The discovery represents a worrisome comeback for …
GitHub confirms 3,800 internal repos stolen through poisoned VS Code extension as supply chain worm hits Microsoft’s Python SDK
GitHub confirmed on May 20 that a poisoned VS Code extension installed on an employee’s device gave attackers access to roughly 3,800 internal repositories at the Microsoft-owned code storage and authorship platform. The threat group TeamPCP, formally tracked by Google Threat Intelligence Group as UNC6780, claimed responsibility and is advertising the stolen repositories for sale starting at $50,000. GitHub’s assessment: the attacker’s claim is “directionally consistent” with the investigation so far. Trend Micro, StepSecurity, and Snyk have formally tracked TeamPCP across at least seven waves of the Mini Shai-Hulud supply chain worm since March. The GitHub breach did not land in isolation. It arrived the same day a new Mini Shai-Hulud wave forged valid cryptographic provenance on 639 malicious npm package versions, one day after attackers compromised a VS Code extension with 2.2 million installs, the same day Wiz discovered TeamPCP had compromised Microsoft’s durabletask Python SDK on PyPI, and the same morning Verizon’s 2026 DBIR revealed that 67% of employees access AI tools through non-corporate accounts. Five supply chain surfaces failed in 48 hours. …
Protect your enterprise now from the Shai-Hulud worm and npm vulnerability in 6 actionable steps
Any development environment that installed or imported one of the 172 compromised npm or PyPI packages published since May 11 should be treated as potentially compromised. On affected developer workstations, the worm harvests credentials from over 100 file paths: AWS keys, SSH private keys, npm tokens, GitHub PATs, HashiCorp Vault tokens, Kubernetes service accounts, Docker configs, shell history, and cryptocurrency wallets. For the first time in a TeamPCP campaign, it targets password managers including 1Password and Bitwarden, according to SecurityWeek. It steals Claude and Kiro AI agent configurations, including MCP server auth tokens for every external service an agent connects to. And it does not leave when the package is removed. The worm installs persistence in Claude Code (.claude/settings.json) and VS Code (.vscode/tasks.json with runOn: folderOpen) that re-execute every project open, plus a system daemon (macOS LaunchAgent / Linux systemd) that survives reboots. These live in the project tree, not in node_modules. Uninstalling the package does not remove them. On CI runners, the worm reads runner process memory directly via /proc/pid/mem to extract secrets, including …
If You Thought Mark Zuckerberg Was a Pathetic Little Worm Before, Wait Until You Hear About His Latest Move
Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long been the poster child for the billionaire class, a hyper-capitalist and unnervingly out-of-touch group whose spineless obsession with hoarding more money than they could ever spend has earned them a reputation as a corrupted blight on modern society. Despite his virtually infinite wealth, Zuckerberg’s lack of basic empathy has led to widespread mockery and facetious accusations of secretly being a robot. Now, his latest move is sure to kick the allegations into overdrive. And no, we’re not talking about his coldhearted choice to cut funding for a private Bay Area school that previously provided tuition-free education for low-income students, forcing it to lay off nearly 150 employees and permanently close. We’re talking about something arguably even more craven: a pathological unwillingness to use his vast wealth to contribute to society, as evidenced by his his decision to relocate to Florida as a California bill proposing a billionaire tax continues to gain considerable …
Vermicomposting: How a DIY worm farm can compost food scraps, paper or a whole kangaroo
Compost worms can make quick work of food scraps and other waste Rob Walls/Alamy Worms. I’ve got a few. I split my time between a small inner-city apartment in Sydney, Australia, and a wild property that was once a farm, before it was abandoned in the 1970s, four hours to the south. They are opposites in almost every way – one thrums with the incessant noise of a big city, while the other moves to the beat of the wilderness: kookaburra choruses, deafening cicadas and, at night, powerful owl hoots and the gurgling, zombie-like calls of brushtail possums. But the one thing both properties have in common is that they each boast a cranking worm farm. The one on the farm is huge and deals with the organic waste of an entire household, while the one in the city is small enough to fit on a porch and easy to set up – suitable for anyone. On the farm, I’ve continued to let nature take its course on the land and use it as a …
Our modern vision evolved from an ancient one-eyed worm creature
It’s easy to take our eyes for granted. But our recent research shows they took an incredible evolutionary journey to reach their current familiar form. It has long been known that our (vertebrate) eyes differ fundamentally from the ones of our distant relatives (invertebrates), because of their cell composition and how they develop before birth. However, answers to why or how these differences first emerged long remained elusive. Our study suggests that our eyes descend from a worm-like ancestor that was roaming the oceans 600 million years ago. The same also applies to all bilateral animals, meaning animals whose bodies can be divided into roughly mirror-image left and right halves. As part of our study, we surveyed 36 major groups of living animals (covering nearly all bilateral animals) to see where their eyes and light-sensing cells are located and what they do. A pattern emerged. We discovered that eyes and light-sensing cells are consistently found at two separate locations: paired on both sides of the face, and at the midline of the head, on top …
The Worm Moon is coming and experts say it could disrupt your sleep
There is something undeniably magical about a full moon rising. The glow feels brighter, the night air sharper, and for many of us, sleep suddenly feels just a little more elusive than usual. This March, skywatchers will be treated to the arrival of the Worm Moon on March 3rd, traditionally marking the transition into spring in the Northern Hemisphere and accompanied this year by a rare total lunar eclipse. While the celestial event promises a spectacular sight, sleep experts warn that the beauty of a full moon may come with an unexpected downside: a restless night. Research suggests lunar cycles can influence how well we sleep, with some studies indicating that sleep duration may decrease by as much as 30 percent during a full moon phase. Scientists have also observed that people often take longer to fall asleep, experience reduced deep sleep, and wake more frequently when the moon is at its brightest. In other words, if you find yourself staring at the ceiling in the early hours without explanation, the moon overhead may be …