A parasitic cancer or transmissible cancer is a cancer cell or cluster of cancer cells that can be transmitted from animal to animal. Cancer is not normally a contagious disease, but there are two known exceptions: one is in dogs, and the other is in the Tasmanian devil.

These transparent glass sculptures were created to contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the artificial colouring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena. Jerram is exploring the tension between the artworks' beauty and what they represent, their impact on humanity.

[...] The sculptures were designed in consultation with virologists from the University of Bristol using a combination of different scientific photographs and models.

These super-small cells are extremely suitable for life on otherwise untenable planets, with their minuscule food requirements, extreme resilience, and adaptability to micro-niches which couldn't support even regular sized bacteria. As well as existing where others couldn't, these sublilliputian lifeforms could persist on planets where catastrophes wiped out everything else.

A parasitic twin (also known as an asymmetrical or unequal conjoined twin) is the result of the processes that produce vanishing twins and conjoined twins, and may represent a continuum between the two. Parasitic twins occur when a twin embryo begins developing in utero, but the pair does not fully separate, and one embryo maintains dominant development at the expense of the other. Unlike conjoined twins, one ceases development during gestation and is vestigial to a mostly fully-formed, otherwise healthy individual twin. The undeveloped twin is defined as parasitic, rather than conjoined, because it is incompletely formed or wholly dependent on the body functions of the complete fetus.

In sufferers of the disease, the skin contains massive, diamond-shaped scales, and tends to have a blue color. In addition, the eyes, ears, mouth, and other appendages may be abnormally contracted. The scaly keratin greatly limits the child's movement. Because the skin is cracked where normal skin would fold, it is easily pregnable by bacteria and other contaminants, resulting in serious risk of fatal infection.

Sufferers are known as harlequin fetuses, harlequin babies, or harlequins.

"By creating a lamp that can only be used once, the user must consider when light is needed the most, forcing them to rethink how wasteful they are with energy, and how precious it is."

Luminol is the secret ingredient behind the glow. It's a chemical forensic scientists use to check for blood, glowing bright blue when coming into contact with the iron in red blood cells.

The neck-less baby with its head almost totally sunk into the upper part of the body and with extraordinarily large eyeballs literally popping out of the eye-sockets, was born to Nir Bahadur Karki and Suntali Karki at the Gaurishnkar Hospital in Charikot. The Karki couple is a permanent resident of Dolakha’s Bhirkot VDC.

“the baby has a condition called anencephaly, a neural tube defect (like the cyclops baby), with no proper brain formation. The baby would have died a few days later. That’s why women are advised to take folate in early pregnancy.”

“I think this establishes what had always been considered a psychiatric disease as an infectious disease,” said Dr. Mikovits

emale wasps of this species sting a roach (specificially a Periplaneta americana, Periplaneta australasiae or Nauphoeta rhombifolia[1]) twice, delivering venom. A 2003 study[2] proved using radioactive labeling that the wasp stings precisely into specific ganglia of the roach. She delivers an initial sting to a thoracic ganglion and injects venom to mildly and reversibly paralyze the front legs of the insect. This facilitates the second venomous sting at a carefully chosen spot in the roach's head ganglia (brain), in the section that controls the escape reflex. As a result of this sting, the roach will first groom extensively, and then become sluggish and fail to show normal escape responses.[3] In 2007 it was reported that the venom of the wasp blocks receptors for the neurotransmitter octopamine.[4]

The wasp proceeds to chew off half of each of the roach's antennae.[1] Researchers believe that the Wasp chews off the antenna to replenish fluids or possibly to regulate the amount of venom because too much could kill and too little would let the victim recover before the larva has grown. The wasp, which is too small to carry the roach, then leads the victim to the wasp's burrow, by pulling one of the roach's antennae in a manner similar to a leash. Once they reach the burrow, the wasp lays a white egg, about 2 mm long, on the roach's abdomen. It then exits and proceeds to fill in the burrow entrance with pebbles, more to keep other predators out than to keep the roach in.

With its escape reflex disabled, the stung roach will simply rest in the burrow as the wasp's egg hatches after about three days. The hatched larva lives and feeds for 4–5 days on the roach, then chews its way into its abdomen and proceeds to live as an endoparasitoid. Over a period of eight days, the wasp larva consumes the roach's internal organs in an order which guarantees that the roach will stay alive, at least until the larva enters the pupal stage and forms a cocoon inside the roach's body. Eventually the fully-grown wasp emerges from the roach's body to begin its adult life. Development is faster in the warm season.

They say the gesture allows a bug named Cytomegalovirus, which is dangerous in pregnancy, to be passed from man to woman to give her time to build up protection against it.

The bug is found in saliva and normally causes no problems. But it can be extremely dangerous if caught while pregnant and can kill unborn babies or cause birth defects.

Writing in the journal Medical Hypotheses, researcher Dr Colin Hendrie from the University of Leeds, said: "Female inoculation with a specific male's cytomegalovirus is most efficiently achieved through mouth-to-mouth contact and saliva exchange, particularly where the flow of saliva is from the male to the typically shorter female."

The experiments showed this fecal armor could successfully repel predators.
Often the predators did not even investigate the potential meals, presumably because the beetles fooled them into believing they were just turds.

To escape predators, the hagfish exudes copious quantities of a viscous slime. That's the nice bit. To feed, it enters its victim through the mouth, gills or anus, and devours it from the inside out.

Things start to get complicated when you consider their life cycle. Let's start with a feeding animal living on a lobster's mouthparts: this individual – it's hard to assign a sex – can then produce one of three kinds of offspring: a "Pandora" larva, a "Prometheus" larva or a female.

The Pandora larva develops into another feeding adult – a straightforward case of asexual reproduction. By contrast, the female remains inside the adult and awaits a male – but, attentive readers will be crying, what male?

The answer lies in the Prometheus larva. This attaches itself to another feeding adult, then produces two or three males from within itself. These dwarf males, which are even more internally complex than the other stages, seek out the females and fertilise them – though the details are unknown.

Once the female has been fertilised, she leaves the adult's body and hunkers down in a sheltered region of the lobster's mouthparts. Her body, no longer needed, turns into a hard cyst. Inside this, a fertilised egg develops into yet another stage: the chordoid larva.

In due course this larva hatches and swims off to colonise another lobster. Once it has attached itself to one, it develops into another adult and the cycle begins again.

...Linnaeus's two-toed sloths Choloepus didactylus at the Estación Biológica Quebrada Blanco in north-eastern Peru have developed the delightful habit of climbing into an outdoor latrine building, seeking out the latrine contents AND EATING THEM ...

At just 1 millimetre long, the wasp Copidosoma floridanum hardly looks like it's the source of a devastating clone army that devours its victims from the inside out. The army can only manage this because it employs self-sacrificing child soldiers – having no prospect of growing to adulthood, they sacrifice themselves to protect their siblings.

This epic battle takes place inside a caterpillar called the cabbage looper, an agricultural pest that lays its eggs one at a time on the surfaces of leaves. Once laid the egg is vulnerable – if found by a female Copidosoma she will lay one or two eggs in it.

One egg might not sound so bad, but this is no ordinary egg. It is polyembryonic, meaning that the single embryo cell at its heart can repeatedly clone itself. As a result, just one egg can produce up to 2000 offspring.
...
Once the host embryo develops into a caterpillar, the Copidosoma clones form an army. Yet the clones are not identical. Instead they are divided into castes, just like bees in a hive.

The most common caste of larvae is essentially maggots. They feed by drinking the host caterpillar's blood and, all being well, eventually emerge and become adult wasps. They are called reproductive larvae and there could be 1000 in a single caterpillar.

The second caste is the precocious larvae. These develop earlier than the reproductive larvae – hence their name – and they look quite different, with a thinner body and larger mandibles. They have no sex cells and will never become adults or reproduce. These are the child soldiers.

Copidosoma larvae may well find themselves sharing the caterpillar's body with competing parasites laid by another species of wasp. The precocious larvae are there to kill these competitors, and are produced in greater numbers if competitors are detected.

This turns out to be a pretty effective way of dealing with competing species, but the precocious larvae face other threats too. If more than one Copidosoma egg is laid in the same host, the two armies go to war.

Shaped like flying saucers, both males and females of the new jellyfish have gonads on the outsides of their bodies, unlike any of the approximately 3,000 other jellyfish species known to science .
Gonads are the reproductive glands that produce sperm in males and eggs in females.
Arranged in a "crater" at the center of the jellyfish's top side, the gonads, upon close inspection, resemble "skyscrapers in a downtown business district," said Lisa-Ann Gershwin, curator of zoology at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, Australia.

September 22, 2009—California has a new star, the Eastern Pacific black ghostshark.

But the newly identified species prefers to stay out of the sun—and the spotlight. And with a club-like sex organ on its forehead, the male ghostshark isn't likely to get any leading man roles.

Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have discovered a caste of genetically identical "warrior worms" -- members of a parasitic fluke species that invades the California horn snail.

The findings are reported in the early online version of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"We have discovered flatworms in colonies with vicious, killer morphs defending the colony," said Armand M. Kuris, professor of zoology, in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology. "These flukes have a strongly developed social organization, much like some insects, mammals and birds." The tiny warrior worms are only a couple of millimeters in length, yet they are powerful thanks to relatively large mouths.

These worms form colonies in snails. Reproductive worms and soldier worms cooperate to grow and defend their colony within the snail. These two types of individuals look and behave differently, explained first author Ryan F. Hechinger, assistant research biologist with UCSB's Marine Science Institute. The warrior worms attack other invasive parasites trying to invade the snail.

[...]

These colonies also act like an immune system, defending the body of the snail from other fluke infections, said second author Alan C. Wood, a marine science lab manager at UCSB. The soldiers behave like white blood cells; they attack other unrelated flukes, biting and killing them.

These flukes with soldier castes may also have a biomedical application. They might be used in the biological control of major human parasitic diseases such as blood flukes. There are 200 million cases of blood fluke diseases worldwide, said Kuris. The soldier worms might eliminate infections from forming in the snail hosts, preventing infections in humans. Liver flukes might also be controlled.

Perhaps human tears contained a chemical signal too, Sobel thought. So he asked six women to watch triple-hanky chick flicks such as "My Sister's Keeper" and let their tears trickle into a test tube.

Satirist Stephen Colbert envisions his “Colbert Nation” mentally marching in lockstep with his special brand of patriotism. But scientists have done him one better, by creating tiny worm-bots completely under their control.

Rather than comedic persuasion, these scientists are using a dot of laser light. With it they can make a worm turn left, freeze or lay an egg. The researchers report their work online Jan. 16 in Nature Methods.

The new system, named CoLBeRT for “Controlling Locomotion and Behavior in Real Time,” doesn’t just create a mindless zombie-worm, though. It gives scientists the ability to pick apart complicated behaviors on a cell-by-cell basis.

[...] Transparent and small, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is particularly amenable to light-based mind control. Another benefit of the worm is that researchers know the precise location of all 302 of its nerve cells. But until now, there wasn’t a good way to study each cell by itself, especially in a wriggling animal.

“This tool allows us to go in and poke and prod at those neurons in an animal as it’s moving, and see exactly what each neuron does,” says study co-author Andrew Leifer of Harvard University.

The system is based on the emerging field of optogenetics, in which light is used to turn cells on or off. Leifer and his colleagues genetically engineered light-responsive molecules into particular groups of cells in the worm.

Then, a computer program that the team developed figures out where in the microscope’s field of view a target cell is. Once the cell is pinpointed, the program directs lasers so that a tiny beam of light hits the cell.

Researchers believe that the rocks containing these fossils, found in southern Anhui Provence, date between 635 million and 580 million years ago. The new types of organisms discovered in them include two that are fan-shaped, as long as 2 inches (5 centimeters), and resemble seaweed, as well as three other new types of organisms that are difficult to classify as animal or plant.

Until now, scientists had thought the oldest collection of fossils of large, complex life forms was the Avalon assemblage, dating back to about 579 million to 565 million years ago. It contained equally strange and unclassifiable organisms called rangeomorphs.

Baculoviruses infect invertebrates, with each species of virus typically infecting only one species of host. Caterpillars are a particularly favorite target; the insects swallow baculoviruses sprinkled on the leaves they munch. (“How did the viruses get there?” you may ask. Very good question–which we’ll get to in good time.)

Once inside the caterpillar, a baculovirus infects a host cell. The cell produces huge numbers of new baculoviruses. They come in two forms. Some of the viruses can slip out of the host cell on their own to infect new cells. Others stay in the cell, which makes huge quantities of a viral protein called polyhedrin. The viruses become embedded in massive polyhedrin blocks, like fruits in a fruitcake. A caterpillar may produce 10 million viruses from swallowing a single viral fruitcake. It even becomes visibly swollen with all its new viruses.

Soon the virus-packed host gets an uncontrollable urge to creep its way to the tops of plants, where it clamps on tight, hanging down as shown in the picture above. In fact, scientists noticed these strange death throes long before they knew that baculoviruses that caused it. They dubbed it tree-top disease.

After an infected caterpillar takes its position at the top of a plant, the virus releases an enzyme that literally makes the animal dissolve. The tough viral fruitcakes come tumbling out, landing on leaves below where they can infect a new host.

Hearing about tree-top disease gave me a deep sense of deja vu. A number of very different parasites have evolved the same strategy for getting to new hosts. Just a couple weeks ago, for example, I blogged about a fungus that sends its ant hosts to the undersides of leaves, whereupon the fungus sprouts branches out of the ant’s head and showers spores down on new victims. Lancet flukes send their hosts up to the tips of grass blades so that they can be eaten by grazing cows and sheep. It’s fascinating that even a virus–with just a few genes–can trigger this behavior as well.

...Vitargent combined the green fluorescent protein gene from jellyfish and spliced it into the genome of the fish directly next to a gene that detects oestrogen. Chemicals that have oestrogen-like activity cause the 1mm long fish larvae to express the modified gene, making them glow. The higher the concentration of oestrogen, the brighter the glow.

The 11-month-old Gippsland boy was born in a shiny membrane, similar to plastic wrap, which he shed bit by bit over his first few weeks of life.

Cordyceps fungi invades its hosts (mainly arthropods), and its mycelium eventually replaces the host's tissue. Once the arthropod is dead, cylindrical or branching growths emerge from the creature's dead body. Some species also have mind-control capabilities, convincing the host to travel to a place where the fungus will find optimal growth conditions before the host dies. If you haven't seen it yet, this video from Planet Earth shows a Cordyceps fungus in action:

A. eiselti is the largest tetrapod to lack lungs, double the size of the next largest.Caecilians such as Atretochoana are limbless amphibians with a snake-like body, marked with rings like that of earthworms. It has significant morphological differences from other caecilians, even the genera most closely related to it, despite the fact that those genera are aquatic. The skull is very different from those of other caecilians, giving the animal a broad flat head. Its nostrils are sealed, and it has an enlarged mouth with a mobile cheek. Its body has a fleshy dorsal fin.

Most caecilians have a well-developed right lung and a relictual left lung. Some, such as Atretochoana's relatives, have two well-developed lungs. Atretochoana, however, entirely lacks lungs, and has a number of other features associated with lunglessness, including sealed choanae, and an absence of pulmonary arteries. Its skin is filled with capillaries that penetrate the epidermis, allowing gas exchange. Its skull shows evidence of muscles not found in any other organism. The Vienna specimen of Atretochoana is a large caecilian at a length of 72.5 centimetres (28.5 in), while the Brasília specimen is larger still at 80.5 centimetres (31.7 in). By comparison, caecilians range in length from 11 to 160 centimetres (4.3 to 63 in).

A, schmatic representing the linkages that form the feeding position of dragonfishes and utilization of the occipital-vertebral hinge to create high gape angles. B, head-on view of Malacosteus niger, demonstrating its hypothesized feeding position (sensu Günther & Deckert, 1959). ph, protractor hyoideus.