Stories tagged the horror
The golden web of an orb-weaver: Little does this spider suspect that it is about to be captured and milked by the clinically insane.
Courtesy Tai Po Kau Nature ReserveAfter decades of frustration and failure, mankind’s dream of weaving a blanket entirely from the stuff of nightmares has become a reality.
For centuries, the very possibility of creating fabric from nightmares was considered little more than a fever dream, and the criminally insane resigned themselves to nightmare cloth substitutes, like hammered-flat baby rabbits, and prison toilet paper. Inventive though these are, like soymilk, they fooled no one.
Then, at the end of the 19th century, reports began to filter from Africa that a French missionary in Madagascar, exploring the dark peaks of his own madness, was creating fabrics of almost pure nightmare.
The missionary had supposedly created a spider-milking machine, into which he was placing massive Golden orb-weaver spiders, collected in their hundreds by local young girls. (Having little girls collect the spiders made the nightmare purer, but was not strictly necessary. Leave it to a missionary for such meticulous detail.)
The spiders were restrained in “a sort of stocks,” and then the beginnings of a strand of silk was coaxed from their abdomens and attached to a hand cranked wheel, at which point several hundred yards of the orb-weavers’ characteristically golden silk could be withdrawn from each spider. When the creatures could yield no more silk, they were released, apparently unharmed, back into the wild, where they would regenerate their webbing material after several days. The spooled spider silk could then be woven like any other material… but scarier.
Seemingly too “good” to be true, the missionary’s experiments were never replicated, and generations of madmen made do with sheets of dried bat saliva and mortuary blankets. Until now.
A “textile expert” and a visionary in what liberal arts colleges refer to as “insane studies,” Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley, recreated the missionary’s spider-milking machine, and after four years and one million spiders they have created an indestructible golden blanket, woven of pure nightmares.
The madmen discovered that while a single spider might produce a strand of silk up to 400 meters long, the material is, of course, exceptionally light. It took approximately 14,000 spiders to produce a single once of silk. The final 11 foot by 4 foot piece of fabric weighed about 2.4 pounds (~38 oz). So many, many spiders were involved, and lots of time. To help pass the long months of spider-milking, the artists whispered their secrets into mouse holes, and built razor blade houses.
The final intricately patterned textile has a rich, naturally golden color—the golden orb-weaver is named for the color of its silk, which attracts pollen-seeking insects in sunlight, and blends with background foliage in shadow. The spiders can adjust the exact tone of their webbing based on ambient light levels and color, so this textile has a unique shade based on how a million spiders perceived the room containing the tiny spider stocks.
The fabric is also exceptionally strong. Spider silk can stretch to 140% without breaking, and has tensile strength comparable to or exceeding that of modern fabrics like Kevlar, used for bullet-proof body armor. The complex protein structure that gives spider silk its strength has also makes it very difficult to reproduce artificially (that is, it hasn’t been done). Attempts have been made to insert the gene for spider silk protein production into goats, which then produce the protein in their milk, if not actual fibers. Unlike silk moths, spiders aren’t suited for mass production of silk, as they tend to kill and eat each other. And so it takes a madman, obsessed with drawing the secreted material for trapping prey from a hand-sized, venomous arachnid predator, to obtain enough spider silk to actually make something form it.
Despite civilization’s unwritten, yet long-standing rules against allowing madmen to have golden bulletproof cloaks, there is little to be done in this situation, seeing as how they made it themselves. Out of nightmares.
The textile is now on display at the American Museum of Natural History. (And, again, a photo of it can be seen here.
Tags : 
Tens of thousands of childhood nightmares: wrapped up in one little package.
Courtesy bug_girl_miRemember stumbling through the world as a stupid little kid? You touched bugs. You dug holes. You explored mud. And then… then you heard about killer bees. Killer bees and flesh-eating diseases. Killer bees, flesh-eating diseases, and tiny eggs that could come off a picnic table, get into your body, and hatch into something that would eat your brain.
It wasn’t the end of your childhood, it just gave you something to think about all the time. No, you’re childhood didn’t end until you were able to convince yourself that these things—killer bees, flesh-eating bacteria, brain eggs—were harmless… if they even exist at all.
Well guess what: they do. They exist, and they are dangerous! Your childhood is long gone, and now so is your adulthood. Welcome to the next stage in your life: The childhood nightmare spotlight!
Today’s feature: raccoon poop brain parasites! They’re real, and they’re all up in your brains!
So, what’s nice about raccoon poop brain parasites as a childhood nightmare—as opposed to childhood nightmares like killer bees, or one of those little fish that will swim up your urethra—is that even we fancy city-folk are vulnerable to it.
See, there is, in this world, a thing called Baylisascaris procyonis. B. procyonis is a species of roundworm. It is a parasitic species of roundworm, in fact, known to infest the guts of raccoons. Should procyonis eggs find their way into a human (and more on ust how they might do that in a minute), there’s no need to worry about them turning into worms and going crazy in the intestines—the parasite really only wants to do that to raccoons. Instead, the eggs hatch into larvae, and enter the blood stream, traveling about the body to wherever suits them. I think that whoever wrote the wikipedia article on them puts what happens next rather well:
A great deal of damage occurs wherever the larva tries to make a home. In response to the attack, the body attempts to destroy it by walling it off or killing it. The larva moves rapidly to escape, seeking out the liver, eyes, spinal cord or brain. Occasionally they can be found in the heart, lungs, and other organs.
This can lead to a whole range of symptoms from skin irritation to blindness to brain damage (and what doctors call “craziness”) to death.
So how do they get in you? You have to eat poorly cooked raccoon, or uncooked raccoon feces.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Phew! It’s been years since I’ve had undercooked raccoon, and I almost never put raccoon feces in my mouth anymore. Not since college! I don’t even know where to get raccoon feces these days!”
Shows what you know. Raccoons are everywhere, even in your precious, safe cities. And when they pick a spot to relieve themselves, they really go for it. Raccoons, as it happens, us communal “latrines.” That means that multiple raccoons will pick a spot in, say, your back yard, to all go to the bathroom on. Each gram of raccoon feces can contain up to 20,000 worm eggs, so when you’ve got a latrine full of raccoon mess, you’ve got plenty of potential brain parasites. Especially if you’re in the habit of putting everything in your mouth, or of cleaning your yard with a leaf-blower. (The leaf blower would fill the air—and possibly your mouth—with tiny particles of raccoon feces and brain parasite eggs.)
Not many people get the disease (only 14 in the last 30 years, says this article, or possibly 25 in the last 6 years, like this article says) but getting it is bad enough that you might want to give it a little thought. Or lots of though, late at night. Don’t believe me? Read this article again.
The best way to avoid it is to keep that raccoon feces out of your mouth. And to follow the simple tips on cleaning up raccoon latrines offered in this article (which you already looked at). My favorite anti-raccoon latrine tip? “Flame” the latrine with a propane torch! It’s like Aliens!
At any rate, you’re probably safe. Possibly safe. Safe-ish.
You really could have raccoon poop brain parasites, you know. There were probably some on your deck, and you didn’t even think about it when you were eating that watermelon.
You probably have a headache right now.
Bleh.
Check out the video, y’all. It was taken in a sewer in North Carolina somewhere, and it appears to show the end of the world. (Yes, I believe the end of the world will involve gelatinous lumps pulsating in the dark.)
I noticed this on a couple sites yesterday, and the general consensus seemed to be that it was either the product of film students with too much time on their hands or part of some sort of viral marketing campaign. (What was being marketed? Possibly horror.)
But today, it looks like some folks who are more informed than your average comment board dude (whaaaat?) have chimed in, and it seems that the nightmare is all too real. According to Deepseanews (via Gizmodo—I couldn’t get the link to the original site to work) what we’re looking at “are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids (Naididae, probably genus Tubifex).”
The Deapseanews expert elaborates:
“Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting.”
So there you go. They’re alien worm-balls. (“Alien” here being used in the sense of “unfamiliar” or “strange,” rather than “from another planet.”)
The more you know, right? The more you know, the better you understand that you need to stay out of North Carolina sewers unless you’re carrying a flamethrower, or, like, a proton pack.
Another giant worm: This is as friendly as they get.
Courtesy SantheoOMG! Friday already? Where did the week go? You know how it is: it’s Sunday, and you’re testing items in your refrigerator for freshness… and the next thing you know, it’s Friday, and you’re lying on the floor in front of the fridge! It makes one wonder if he should seriously reevaluate his life.
What’s worse (worst!) is that I almost missed a Friday Extravaganza. Think about the repercussions—I could be rereading my own posts some time in the future, and I would wonder why I skipped an extravaganza. Did I just get bored with them? Was something wrong at the time? A personal crisis? I wouldn’t know what happened! I don’t want that. So an extravaganza…
It works out pretty well actually, because the first think I thought when I lifted my head off the floor and looked into the open refrigerator was, “worms.” And this week just happened to be a slightly wormy week in the news. A slightly giant-wormy week.
Check it out, y’all: Giant sand worms!
Apparently, back in olden times (the Permian period, before the dinosaurs), there used to be 3-foot-long, six-inch wide worms! The reason we don’t have cool giant worm skeletons in our museums, of course, is that worms don’t have skeletons. And all that soft, wormy tissue doesn’t fossilize very well at all. (That’s why it’s such a big deal when we find ”mummified” dinosaurs too—soft tissue almost always rots before it can fossilize.) Short of the rare cases where soft tissue does fossilize, there are other ways to find evidence of soft, extinct animals. In this case, paleontologists found the worm’s fossilized burrow. How about that?
The articles I found didn’t provide a lot of details about the worm, except that it was big, lived underground (and underground worm?!? What?!) in part of what is now England, and it’s a completely new species. Giant arthropods (like huge millipedes) had been known to live millions of years ago, but nothing like this huge worm.
Three-foot worms… yuckers. Good thing we don’t have anything like that around today, am I right?
Wrong!! Wrong wrong wrong! This is an EXTRAVAGANZA, y’all, and would never stop with just one worm during an extravaganza! So put this in your brain and shake it: There are giant worms alive today, and they’re way, way worse than you think!
Look.
See, I would have gone on living without knowing about the giant worms among us, if I hadn’t seen this little article about how a creature wreaking havoc on a British aquarium. (It’s a Friday Giant British Worm Extravaganza, I guess.) Something was chewing apart the coral in the aquarium, and devouring its fish. The aquarium staffers tried to trap the culprit, and to fish it out with bait. The traps, however, were torn apart overnight, and the baited fishing line was bitten through. In the end, they resorted to dismantling the artificial reef. Underneath all the rocks, they found a four-foot-long reef worm!
Whoa! Four feet? That beats the prehistoric worm even!
But, come on now… we humans are prone to exaggeration. The worm couldn’t be that impressive right?
No. Wrong.
I couldn’t find anything about “giant sea worms,” but searching for “reef worm” brought up the term “bristle worm.” And “bristle worm” makes sense, because the article described the worm as having bizarre-looking jaws, and thousands of bristles, each of which are able to inflict a sting that results in “permanent numbness.”
Then I found this page, which informed me that bristle worms are complex creatures, with “two to four pairs of eyes, sensory organs, a mouth, and a brain.” (I’ll let you know right now—I don’t approve of worms having brains.) And, yes, they have bristles, which can inflict extremely painful stings. The article doesn’t say anything about the bristles being poisonous, but posits that the painful sting could be caused by calcium carbonate or silica from the bristles. This page confirmed that the worms can hitch rides on rocks into aquariums, where they grown quickly, and can become a nuisance (to say the least, I guess).
Wikipedia was the next step, of course. Wikipedia teaches us that the worms will wait buried in sand or gravel until prey swims along. The worm will then attack with such speed that the prey is sometimes sliced in half by its claws/jaws. And while an average size for the worm is about 3 feet, they have been known to grow up to nine-feet-long!
What? What kind of world is this?
Also… this particular type of bristle worm is referred to as a “Bobbit worm.” What’s that all about? I’ll tell you: according to this site, at least, Bobbit worms are so nicknamed for the fact that, after mating, female worms will often “attacks the male’s penis and feeds it to her young.” That’s right, you remember now: Bobbit.
(It occurs to me that the timing in this anecdote is a little off—exactly how would you feed the penis to your young immediately after mating? But whatever.)
Oh, man. Worm extravaganza.
See? See the Bobbit worm?
Sure, it’s fish now. Next time it could be (will be) you. Happy weekend.
Add it to the list! Barreleye fish edition
Don't like the face?: Wait until you see the rectal pouch.
Courtesy Brauer, A.Welcome to another edition of “Add it to the list!” Buzzketeers. Or… is this the first edition? It feels like “Add it to the list!” has been a regular feature on Buzz for a couple years now, but, then again, I’ve been suffering from frequent and vivid waking dreams lately. So I might not be the best judge of what “actually exists” (to quote my therapists) right now.
Whatever.
As you possibly know, here on “Add it to the list!” we feature an animal, theory, vegetable, etc. that disgusts me or blows my mind. Such objects and constructs must be added to the list. That way I can keep mental tabs on them. And when the revolution comes, I’ll be able to sort all listed items into the “first against the wall” and “promotions all around” categories with confidence.
Previous items on the list (which may or may not have been featured on Buzz, and may or may not be featured in the future) include electric eels (tagged “Not actually an eel”), hagfish (tagged “Keep your lips off that thing!”), Schrödinger’s Cat (tagged “Please don’t say ‘quantum’ when I’m in the room”), and anglerfish (tagged “nobody wins the battle of the sexes”).
You get the idea, I’m sure.
So what do we learn today? Well, The Telegraph has alerted me to the existence of the barreleye fish. It seems that this singular creature has tubular shaped eyes to gather all available light in its native deep-sea habitat. Do you know what other light-gathering adaptation it has? A freaking see-through head!
OMG! These deep-sea fish! Somebody add that thing to the list!
Check it out:
It was thought that barreleye fish could only stare straight up, so that they might catch the silhouettes of prey swimming above them. Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, however, have recently observed the fish looking forward. Seeing a fish looking forward is hardly big news, I suppose, but… it’s sort of looking through it’s own head, you know? Yuckers.
Also, some species of barreleye have bioluminescent internal organs (their guts glow). And one species has a glowing rectal pouch.
I’m not sure if this fish is first against the wall, or deserving of a promotion, but, either way it must be recognized and dealt with. So, for glob’s sake, add it to the list!
Friday Relationship Extravaganza!
in Earth and Space Science, Diversity of Organisms, Interdependence of Life, Heredity, and Human Organism
Into flow charts?: This is a flow chart of a relationship. Start at the bioluminescent spike, and end at the parasitic gonads.
Courtesy steev-oIt’s Friday (T.G.I.F.), Buzzketeers, and you all know what that means. That’s right, it’s time for the Science Buzz Friday Relationship Extravaganza! (S.B.F.R.E.)
I know how much y’all like relationships, and how much you like talking about them, so it’s only natural that you clicked on the S.B.F.R.E. so quickly. But that’s not all! See, here at the S.B.F.R.E., “relationship” is also a code word for… S-E-X! Oh, naughtiest of naughties! It’s a red-letter day! Relationships and S-E-X-ual science… y’all had better sit down.
Seriously, sit down. Make yourselves comfortable. Now, I want y’all to know that this is a safe space, and we should be free to say whatever we’re feeling. Good, good… I think we’re about ready to start.
So… I understand that you feel like he has some real problems in communicating his feelings?
Why do you think that is?
No, I’m sorry, let’s let him finish—we’ll all have a chance to talk, and it’s his turn right now.
OK. I think I see what you’re saying. How do you want him to communicate? What do you wish he would say to you?
And how does that make you feel? Is that something you can do? OK… Why do you think you’re not being listened to?
I see.
Well, let’s look at it this way: at least y’all aren’t anglerfish. You know anglerfish, right, Buzzketeers? Anglerfish include those awful deep sea fish, with the big eyes, and teeth all over the place, and a glowing spike sticking out of their awful, lumpy heads. You know what I’m talking about. You saw those pictures, and then learned that they were only a few inches long, but were still kind of grossed out. And maybe some holier-than-thou biologist type pointed out to you that they weren’t gross, they were just fish that had made some spectacular adaptations to their environment, and were just living their lives like every other animal.
Well, don’t worry, you were right in the first place: angler fish really are awful and gross.
See, when they first discovered these creepy anglerfish, scientists were only finding female specimens. No males at all. So where’s the relationship relationship?
Well, eventually they did find some males, and some remarkable observations were made. The male anglerfish were pretty normal in their youth, but once they reached sexual maturity, their digestive systems degenerate. So they are unable to feed themselves. Naturally, what a mature male needs to do at that point is find a sugar momma. And fast (because, again, they’re starving to death). When the male tracks down a female anglerfish, he bites her, latching on to her body with his teeth. Enzymes in the male then break down its own mouth, as well as the female’s body, so that the two fish fuse together, to the point where they even share blood vessels. A source of sustenance now secured, the male kind of “lets itself go,” if you will. But instead of gaining weight and watching too much TV, the body of the male anglerfish, still fused with the female, degenerates, eventually becoming just a pair of gonads that hang off the female. When the first female anglerfish were discovered, scientists thought that they had parasites hanging off of them. Nope. Those were the remains of male anglerfish.
When the female is ready to release eggs, the gonads sense the change in hormone levels in the blood that still flows to them, and they release sperm, so that the eggs can be fertilized, and more horrible anglerfish can be created.
I don’t know who has it worse here—the female that has to nourish a pair of parasitic testicles (or multiple pairs), or the male, who has to latch on to a female to survive, and then becomes a pair of parasitic testicles. Either way, though, I think you’ll agree that your own messed up relationship seems pretty ideal right now, doesn’t it?
So remember, until the next Science Buzz Friday Relationship Extravaganza, keep your emotions bottled up, and if you’re ever feeling bummed out about things, just think of the never-lonely anglerfish.
A regular flaming ball: Flaming DEATH balls are on back order, I'm afraid. Also, the Pentagon doesn't really like talking about them for some reason.
Courtesy mynameisharshaImagine being burned to death. Ugh. Just awful. And, sometimes, we soft little human beings with families and goofy favorite foods do it to other soft little human beings with families and gross old pets that they love. On purpose.
Burning each other to death is an old human trick, but it really makes one wonder if we ought to totally re-think what is even remotely acceptable in our conflicts.
That said… check this out.
Weaponized, flaming, rocket, bouncy-balls. Holy cats. The Pentagon has developed what are essentially hollow bouncy balls made of rubberized rocket fuel. They have one little hole that acts as a vent, so when they are ignited they are propelled by a stream of 1000-degree exhaust to ricochet randomly around the inside of a structure.
Did you ever take one of those rubber super balls and just wail it into a room, hoping that your face wasn’t going to be in whatever path it chose in its crazy bouncings*? This would be sort of like that, but way hotter and faster.
You have to admit… it’s kind of cool.
Using explosives to destroy a facility housing or building weapons of mass destruction is a bad idea, because they can cause materials of mass destruction to be scattered everywhere. But filling the same structure with super-hot, flaming bouncy balls would pretty much wreck everything just as well, without blasting radioactive material all over a city.
Flaming death balls. Whoa.
*Are you trying to say you haven’t ever done that? Your loss.
The best part of your day: It's thinking about liquefying the insides of a bird.
Courtesy Shreeg88Things are looking up today, right?
Wrong! Look, a giant spider eating a bird!
The spider is a Golden Orb Weaver, and the bird is unlucky. It's known that larger specimens of orb weavers will occasionally eat birds, but it's very rare. So enjoy it.
A tapeworm: like a friend that will always be with you. A friend that's taller than you are. Living in your intestines.
Courtesy SavadorjoI just came across this tasty little item on CNN.com: A Chicago man recently passed a nine-foot-long tapeworm, which he believes to have gotten from undercooked salmon.
I’m not sure of the best way to express my feelings on this subject, so let’s just talk about tapeworms.
Tapeworms are, of course, parasitic flatworms. Humans can become infected with tapeworms by consuming food or water contaminated with the eggs or larvae of the worm. You might not think it, but whether one is infested with eggs or larva can make a big difference. If you accidentally eat the eggs, the larvae that hatch from them may migrate out of your intestines, and make little cystic homes in other parts of your body, like your lungs or liver. These cysts are both super gross, and super dangerous—you can die from them, and treatment is difficult. If, on the other hand, you unwittingly eat tapeworm larvae, it’s much more likely that the baby worm will snuggle up in your guts, and eat what you eat. This is super gross, and still pretty bad for you, and it’s best if you avoid it.
If you do get a tapeworm living in your intestines, as the man in the story did, you may suffer from nausea, diarrhea, abdominal pain, weakness, and loss of weight. Or you might not demonstrate any symptoms at all. But you’ll still have a huge worm living inside you.
There are a variety of tapeworm types that might infect you, including the beef tapeworm, the pork tapeworm, the dwarf tapeworm, and the fish tapeworm. Some tapeworms go through their whole lifecycle inside one host, developing from egg to larva to adult, while others attach themselves to the lining of the intestine, and others still allow themselves to be passed (into the toilet).
According to the Mayo clinic’s page on tapeworms, adult worms can grow up to fifty feet inside their hosts. So, all things considered, the Chicago guy should feel lucky.
Tapeworm eggs can be passed from one person to another via… stool… so be sure to wash your hands. Constantly.
Nothing to do with the cat, actually: She just realized that she forgot her cell phone.
Courtesy dieselbug2007How has your day been so far? Good? I suppose it’s a little early to be asking that.
Depending on how you feel about no-faced cats, your day may be about to take a dive, or really look up.
When I say “no-faced cat,” what I mean is “a real cat with no face.” This one, in particular.
Not only has Chase recuperated beautifully from having her face and leg removed, but she’s started a blog!
Medicine is amazing, cats are amazing, and the Internet is amazing.
Who knew a cat could even type?
Recent comments
A Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen
A Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen
Evolution: caught in the act!
Do you think US health care reform will lead to changes in medical research?
Subscribe
I want to learn about
Science Buzz is supported by the National Science Foundation.Copyright © Science Museum of Minnesota, 2004-2009, except where noted.
Add a new comment