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A magnetic resonance image of the patient's brain led doctors at Canberra Hospital and Australian National University to conduct a biopsy during which they found and removed a live third-stage larval roundworm from her right frontal lobe. Photo by EPA-EFE/Australia National University. Aug. 29 (UPI) -- Surgeons in Australia pulled a live 3-inch-long parasitic worm from the front of a woman's brain in what is believed to be the first time this type of infection has been found in humans. Doctors in Canberra found the light red worm during a biopsy they were carrying out on the patient in a...

Vishnivetskaya ... has coaxed million-year-old bacteria back to life on a petri dish. They look “very similar to bacteria you can find in cold environments [today],” she said. But last year, Vishnivetskaya’s team announced an “accidental finding” — one with a brain and nervous system — that shattered scientists’ understanding of extreme endurance. They placed the frozen material on petri dishes in their room-temperature lab and noticed something strange. Hulking among the puny bacteria and amoebae were long, segmented worms complete with a head at one end and anus at the other — nematodes. Clocking in at a half-millimeter long,...

As the sun went down after the 1862 Battle of Shiloh during the Civil War, some soldiers noticed that their wounds were glowing a faint blue. Many men waited on the rainy, muddy Tennessee battlefield for two days that April, until medics could treat them. Once they were taken to field hospitals, the troops with glowing wounds were more likely to survive their injuries — and to get better faster. Thus the mysterious blue light was dubbed “Angel’s Glow.” In 2001, 17-year-old Civil War buff Bill Martin visited the Shiloh battlefield with his family and heard the legend of Angel’s...