Environment Animals Pets Dogs This deadly dog'spaghetti' has ancient origins Heartworm is one of the most widespread dog parasites. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Every year, millions of dogs come face-to-face with a life threatening parasite coiled up inside one of their vital organs--heartworm. The spaghetti-looking parasite can be fatal when left untreated. New research into the widespread canine parasite suggests that heartworm has a deeper and more complex history than scientists previously believed and some may have originated in Australian dingoes.

Fujitsu is not a parasite for continuing to profit from government contracts in the wake of the Post Office Horizon scandal, its boss told MPs. European chief executive Paul Patterson said Fujitsu had been given £500m of contract extensions despite its faulty software being at the centre of the huge miscarriage of justice. We are not a parasite, the government has got an option as to whether they wish to extend those contracts or not, he said, adding it would not bid for new business. Patterson also repeatedly refused to say how much Fujitsu would contribute to the £1.8bn redress scheme for victims of the scandal, currently funded by taxpayers. More than 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted after the faulty Horizon computer system made it look like money was missing from their branch accounts.

Intestinal parasites that still plague us today were all over Roman Britain. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The soldiers guarding the Roman Empire's northwestern frontier had a real parasite problem. Scientists analyzing the sewer drains from the Roman fort Vindolanda (near Hadrian's Wall in northern England) found three types of intestinal parasites --roundworm,whipworm, and . The findings published in the journal mark the first time that has been documented in Roman Britain.

From its role in kissing to mythological healing powers, mistletoe's roots run deep. This novella was the earliest and most popular of Dickens' Christmas stories. The kissing under mistletoe (left) and evergreen decoration hanging from the ceiling are vestiges of pre-Christian winter rites. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It's hard to imagine a holiday season without Bing Crosby's Christmas standard Originally written from the perspective of a soldier stationed overseas during World War II, his longing for the simple comforts of home and reconnecting with his loved ones at Christmas is almost palpable: " Mistletoe just inexplicably feels familiar. Every December, the evergreen sprig s that spent the offseason hidden in our subconscious are suddenly all around us. Mistletoe is the long-lost acquaintance that we instantly recognize and embrace, yet whose backstory has been lost to us. "When I talk to people about parasitic plants, I know mistletoe is the one that they'll immediately recognize even if they don't really know it's a parasite," Virginia Tech plant biologist Jim Westwood tells . Author Washington Irving, best known for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and is often credited with helping popularize the parasitic evergreen shrub in the United States. He wrote about the plant in an 1820 collection of short stories, but the roots of mistletoe go much deeper elsewhere in the world. Dating back to Ancient Greece and Rome, leafy mistletoe has long excited the imagination. Mistletoe served as a centerpiece of Celtic Rituals and Norse myths, where it bestowed life and fertility and served as an aphrodisiac, a plant of parley, an antidote for poisons, and a means of safe passage to and from Hades. According to The Living Lore, since the plant can thrive in the high branches of its host without soil, "many cultures saw mistletoe as a sacred plant, existing in liminal spaces between life and death, earth and sky, and human and divine." In Old Norse mythology, Baldr, the son of the god Odin and the goddess Frigg, was slain with a mistletoe spear. Some interpretations suggest that, "kissing under the mistletoe symbolizes forgiveness, echoing Frigg's grief and eventual reconciliation with the plant." Many early physicians and scientists saw mistletoe as a cure-all for the woes of the world. It was used to treat various diseases and conditions including epilepsy, infertility, and ulcers. In Pliny's, the writer and physician describes the Celtic ritual of oak and mistletoe. High priests dressed in white harvested mistletoe with golden sickles from the branches of sacred oak trees to make an elixir that could counteract any poison and render any barren animal fertile. "It's easy to imagine how people become fixated on mistletoe plants," says Westwood. "It stays green all winter growing in its host tree.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It's a really big deal when fossilized feces survive the ravages of time. These hardened pieces of excrement open up a window into what animals ate thousands of years ago and even what may have made them sick . Humans are not exempt from this, with dried human feces indicating we have always loved cheese and beer and that our microbiome has evolved over thousands of years. DNA recovered from 1,000-year-old dried feces indicates that intestinal infections from pinworm or Shingella may have plagued ancient people living in present day northern Mexico's Rio Zape Valley.

Wuchereria bancrofti, the parasitic roundworm responsible for lymphatic filariasis, permanently disables over 36 million people and places 657 million at risk across 39 countries. A major bottleneck for drug discovery is the lack of functional annotation for more than 90 percent of the W. bancrofti dark proteome, leaving many potential targets unidentified. In this work, we present a novel computational pipeline that converts W. bancrofti's unannotated amino acid sequence data into precise four-level Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers and drug candidates. We utilized a DEtection TRansformer to estimate the probability of enzymatic function, fine-tuned a hierarchical nearest neighbor EC predictor on 4,476 labeled parasite proteins, and applied rejection sampling to retain only four-level EC classifications at 100 percent confidence. This pipeline assigned precise EC numbers to 14,772 previously uncharacterized proteins and discovered 543 EC classes not previously known in W. bancrofti. A qualitative triage emphasizing parasite-specific targets, chemical tractability, biochemical importance, and biological plausibility prioritized six enzymes across five separate strategies: anti-Wolbachia cell-wall inhibition, proteolysis blockade, transmission disruption, purinergic immune interference, and cGMP-signaling destabilization. We curated a 43-compound library from ChEMBL and BindingDB and co-folded across multiple protein conformers with Boltz-2. All six targets exhibited at least moderately strong predicted binding affinities below 1 micromolar, with moenomycin analogs against peptidoglycan glycosyltransferase and NTPase inhibitors showing promising nanomolar hits and well-defined binding pockets. While experimental validation remains essential, our results provide the first large-scale functional map of the W. bancrofti dark proteome and accelerate early-stage drug development for the species.

Recently, the diffusion model has gained significant attention as one of the most successful image generation models, which can generate high-quality images by iteratively sampling noise. However, recent studies have shown that diffusion models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, allowing attackers to enter input data containing triggers to activate the backdoor and generate their desired output. Existing backdoor attack methods primarily focused on target noise-to-image and text-to-image tasks, with limited work on backdoor attacks in image-to-image tasks. Furthermore, traditional backdoor attacks often rely on a single, conspicuous trigger to generate a fixed target image, lacking concealability and flexibility. To address these limitations, we propose a novel backdoor attack method called "Parasite" for image-to-image tasks in diffusion models, which not only is the first to leverage steganography for triggers hiding, but also allows attackers to embed the target content as a backdoor trigger to achieve a more flexible attack. "Parasite" as a novel attack method effectively bypasses existing detection frameworks to execute backdoor attacks. In our experiments, "Parasite" achieved a 0 percent backdoor detection rate against the mainstream defense frameworks. In addition, in the ablation study, we discuss the influence of different hiding coefficients on the attack results. You can find our code at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Parasite-1715/.

Fox News senior medical analyst Dr. Marc Siegel shares his perspective on whether the mosquito-borne virus in China will spread to the United States and how AI can be detrimental to children's and young adults' mental health on'Fox Report.' A little-known disease is spreading in the U.S., primarily in the state of California, health officials warn. In a new study published in the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, researchers state that human cases of Chagas disease have been confirmed in eight states, leading them to recommend that the disease is classified as "endemic." "Acknowledging the endemicity of Chagas disease in the United States is crucial for achieving global health goals," the authors wrote. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines a disease as "endemic" when there is a "constant presence and/or usual prevalence" in a population within a specific geographic area -- in other words, the "baseline" level of disease within a community.

Tiny but mighty, honeybees play a crucial role in our ecosystems, pollinating various plants and crops. They also support the economy. These small producers contribute billions of dollars to Canada's agriculture industry, making Canada a major honey producer. However, in the winter of 2024, Canada's honey industry faced a severe collapse. Canada lost more than one-third of its beehives, primarily due to the widespread infestation of Varroa mites.

The necessity of abundant annotated data and complex network architectures presents a significant challenge in deep-learning Salient Object Detection (deep SOD) and across the broader deep-learning landscape. This challenge is particularly acute in medical applications in developing countries with limited computational resources. Combining modern and classical techniques offers a path to maintaining competitive performance while enabling practical applications. Feature Learning from Image Markers (FLIM) methodology empowers experts to design convolutional encoders through user-drawn markers, with filters learned directly from these annotations. Recent findings demonstrate that coupling a FLIM encoder with an adaptive decoder creates a flyweight network suitable for SOD, requiring significantly fewer parameters than lightweight models and eliminating the need for backpropagation. Cellular Automata (CA) methods have proven successful in data-scarce scenarios but require proper initialization -- typically through user input, priors, or randomness. We propose a practical intersection of these approaches: using FLIM networks to initialize CA states with expert knowledge without requiring user interaction for each image. By decoding features from each level of a FLIM network, we can initialize multiple CAs simultaneously, creating a multi-level framework. Our method leverages the hierarchical knowledge encoded across different network layers, merging multiple saliency maps into a high-quality final output that functions as a CA ensemble. Benchmarks across two challenging medical datasets demonstrate the competitiveness of our multi-level CA approach compared to established models in the deep SOD literature.