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You've probably been wondering about this for a while: did the Ancient Greeks ever get intestinal worms like we do today? The answer, we can now tell you, is an unequivocal yes. Researchers from the University of Cambridge have examined Ancient Greek human remains from burials on the island of Kea and found evidence of parasites - confirming the writings of Hippocrates 2,500 years ago. Hippocrates, the famous physician and "Father of Western Medicine" who lived from around 460 to 370 BCE, wrote of many different diseases in the Hippocratic Corpus. Medicine was vastly different back then, and the descriptions...

But imagine what you thought may have been an eyelash turns out to actually be a worm wriggling around. This was the reality for a teenager in Mexico. The unnamed 17-year-old boy began to feel increasingly intolerable pain in his right eye. His vision also quickly declined, to the point where he could only see hand motions. After three weeks of dealing with the pain, he decided it was time to seek out a doctor, according to his case published in The New England Journal of Medicine. An eye examination revealed a flatworm, that was 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) long...

Biologists discovered a new type of flat worm and dedicated it to the US president naming it Baracktrema obamai. Biologist Thomas Platt, who turns out to be Obama's relative, doesn't regard it to be offensive. He believes it should be an honor for the president adding that the parasite resembles his namesake very much. It's also 'long, thin and cute'.

It’s no Nobel Peace Prize, but Barack Obama has a new honor to brag about. Scientists have named a parasite after him – and there’s no worming out of it. Meet Baracktrema obamai, a tiny parasitic flatworm that lives in turtles’ blood. A new study officially names the two-inch-long, hair-thin creature after Obama.

A new species of blood fluke was found infecting the lungs of turtles in Malaysia. This parasitic flatworm has been dubbed Baracktrema obamai, in honor of the President of the United States (who is the fifth cousin twice removed of one of the discovering scientists). More...

The pursuit of reproductive success in the animal kingdom sometimes calls for extreme measures. But few creatures can match the hermaphrodite flatworm, which scientists have discovered can reproduce by injecting sperm into its own head. The tiny aquatic worm, Macrostomum hystix, is able to self-fertilise because it produces both eggs and sperm. Although it prefers to reproduce with other flatworms, when no mating opportunities are present it resorts to using its needle-like penis to inject sperm into its own head. The sperm then swim down the creature’s transparent body to fertilise eggs in the tail region, leading to viable offspring.

"...Getting to the bottom of evolution...Genetic study investigates the origin of the anus...research is opening a lively debate on the origin of the anus...Today, two evolutionary biologists have published genetic evidence in Nature1 that they claim refutes the leading theory of anal evolution..."