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new species of an extinct giant worm was found to have terrifyingly large snapping jaws. noting that its gigantic size is comparable to the living species of the 'giant eunicid' species, better known as 'Bobbit worms', which are considered to be terrifying and opportunistic ambush predators that use powerful jaws to capture their prey. We know that being giant is related to things like competitive dominance and the modern worms that get this big are fearsome predators.

Dave, a 16-inch-long earthworm discovered recently in England, will become part of the collection at the Natural History Museum in London.What Paul Rees recently discovered among his vegetables in England's Cheshire County is anything but garden variety: a gigantic earthworm. Rees's stepson, George, named the behemoth Dave. He's the longest earthworm recorded in the United Kingdom—almost 16 inches—but it's his mass that has really impressed scientists. Dave weighs nearly an ounce, almost twice as heavy as any other wild earthworm ever seen. That's about the size of a small chocolate bar. Before Dave, the largest earthworm (Lumbricus terrestris) was a...

WASHINGTON (AP) — 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 Colombian man's lung tumors turned out to have an extremely unusual cause: The rapidly growing masses weren't actually made of human cells, but were from a tapeworm living inside him, according to a report of the case. This is the first known report of a person becoming sick from cancer cells that developed in a parasite, the researchers said.

The newly discovered Hades centipede. Credit: J. Bedek An international team of scientists has discovered the deepest underground dwelling centipede. The animal was found by members of the Croatian Biospeleological Society in three caves in Velebit Mts, Croatia. Recorded as deep as -1100 m the new species was named Geophilus hadesi, after Hades, the God of the Underworld in the Greek Mythology. The research was published in the open access journal ZooKeys. Lurking in the dark vaults of some of the world's deepest caves, the Hades centipede has also had its name picked to pair another underground-dwelling relative named after...

Collinsium ciliosum, a Collins' monster-type lobopodian from the early Cambrian Xiaoshiba biota of China. Credit: Javier Ortega-Hernández A new species of 'super-armoured' worm, a bizarre, spike-covered creature which ate by filtering nutrients out of seawater with its feather-like front legs, has been identified by palaeontologists. The creature, which lived about half a billion years ago, was one of the first animals on Earth to develop armour to protect itself from predators and to use such a specialised mode of feeding. The creature, belonging to a poorly understood group of early animals, is also a prime example of the broad variety...

Hallucigenia sparsa from the Burgess Shale (Royal Ontario Museum 61513). The fossil is 15 mm long. Credit: Jean-Bernard Caron A new study of an otherworldly creature from half a billion years ago - a worm-like animal with legs, spikes and a head difficult to distinguish from its tail - has definitively identified its head for the first time, and revealed a previously unknown ring of teeth and a pair of simple eyes. The results, published today in the journal Nature, have helped scientists reconstruct what the common ancestor of everything from tiny roundworms to huge lobsters might have looked like....

A new worm is targeting personal computers running the Linux operating system, and may also pose a threat to embedded devices such as home routers and set-top boxes, a security vendor reported this week.   Symantec said its researchers warned the malware, named Linux.Darlloz, spreads by exploiting a vulnerability in php-cgi that had been patched as early as May 2012.   "The worm is capable of attacking a range of small, Internet-enabled devices in addition to traditional computers. Variants exist for chip architectures usually found in devices such as home routers, set-top boxes and security cameras," researcher Kaoru Hayashi said...

Earthworm poo can be used to measure past temperatures, providing a window into the ancient climate. A study shows that the chemistry of small balls of chalky crystals secreted into soil by the worms varies with temperature. A UK team said the granules could be compared with other climatic "proxies", such as ice cores and deep sea sediments. Details appear in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. Scientists from the universities of Reading and York, report that the calcium carbonate (calcite) nodules dug up from archaeological sites give a unique measure of the ancient local temperatures. Because the ratios of...

A phallus-shaped worm that lived 505 million years ago is heads above the rest—it’s a “missing link” between two lineages of acorn worms, a new study says. Dubbed Spartobranchus tenuis, the odd creature is a type of soft-bodied marine animal that’s rarely preserved in the fossil record. The new specimen was first discovered in the early 1900s in an area called the Burgess Shale, a fossil-rich area in Canada‘s Yoho National Park.But the fossil went mostly unnoticed until a few years ago, when evolutionary biologist Jean-Bernard Caron of the University of Toronto “stumbled on drawers full of these worms” at...

Iranian nuclear facilities have reportedly been attacked by a “music” virus, turning on lab PCs at night and blasting AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Mikko Hypponen, Chief Researcher at Finnish digital security firm F-secure, publicly released a letter he received from an unnamed Iranian scientist. The researcher, who claimed to work for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), said that another virus has struck the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran and a secret underground research facility at Fordo, southwest of Tehran. The letter’s author reported that the virus shut down equipment (made by Germany’s Siemens Corporation) and automated systems at...

Good morning and happy June to my gardening FRiends and fellow gardeners!You may have noticed that I titled last week's thread "Keywords", and then totally forgot to write the first word about the topic. That illustrates perfectly how frazzled my mind is these days. As I was getting ready to hit the post button, I kept thinking there was something I was forgetting, but finally convinced myself that it probably wasn't *that* important, and I posted the thread. I apologize.There has been more than once that great information has been posted by one of our members, but I can't...

When the Conficker computer “worm” was unleashed on the world in November 2008, cyber-security experts didn’t know what to make of it. It infiltrated millions of computers around the globe. It constantly checks in with its unknown creators. It uses an encryption code so sophisticated that only a very few people could have deployed it. For the first time ever, the cyber-security elites of the world have joined forces in a high-tech game of cops and robbers, trying to find Conficker’s creators and defeat them. The cops are failing. And now the worm lies there, waiting … The first surprising...

Argus One airship, U.S. military drone Drones and satellites dominate the U.S. military's surveillance arsenal, but fleets of unmanned airships could soon join in keeping an eye on battlefields. One robotic airship contender, the modular Argus One, has upcoming flight demonstrations scheduled at a U.S. Department of Energy Nevada Test Site that hosted nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War. The Argus One's design resembles a segmented sky worm made of connecting modules, and has the flexibility to quickly change its flight path as it slinks through the sky. It can also carry 30 pounds of surveillance sensors or...

When first discovered in 2010, the Stuxnet computer worm posed a baffling puzzle. Beyond its unusually high level of sophistication loomed a more troubling mystery: its purpose. Ralph Langner and team helped crack the code that revealed this digital warhead's final target -- and its covert origins. In a fascinating look inside cyber-forensics

Greenlit by Dubya, accelerated by Obama. Or at least, that’s what the cyborg time travelers who brought the worm back from the future would have you believe.The evidence is only circumstantial, but … there’s an awful lot of it. Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran’s at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability...

Iran dismisses reports on cyber virus on nuclear power plant22:02, January 18, 2011 A spokesman of Iranian Atomic Energy Organization (IAEO) dismissed reports about negative impacts of Stuxnet worm on Iran's nuclear facilities, local satellite Press TV reported on Tuesday. Hamid Khadem Qaemi, rejected the report of Daily Telegraph, alleging that Stuxnet computer virus has had a negative impact on the country's nuclear facilities. Khadem Qaemi said Tuesday that the Stuxnet worm has failed to influence the progressing activities of Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran. "The Iranian atomic energy organization's security experts vigilantly identified the virus about one...

Stuxnet Worm Was Weapon, Report SaysBy Gregg Keizer, Computerworld Jan 17, 2011 11:45 am The Stuxnet worm that disrupted Iran's ability to enrich uranium into bomb-grade nuclear fuel was jointly created by Israel and the U.S., the New York Times said Saturday. Citing confidential sources, the U.S. newspaper claimed that Israel's covert nuclear facility at Dimona was used to test the worm's effectiveness on centrifuges like the ones Iran employs at its Natanz complex, which has been plagued by technical problems. **SNIP** Langner, who has spent months pulling the worm apart, said earlier this week that Stuxnet was a natural...

The New York Times reported rather conclusively on Saturday that the super-advanced computer virus that has at least partially crippled Iran’s nuclear program was developed and tested by Israel, with American involvement. Known as Stuxnet, the virus was first identified “in the wild” about two years ago. About one year ago, it infected the computers that control the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz in central Iran. By all accounts, Stuxnet has to date managed to knock out 984 centrifuges and has, according to Israeli officials, set back Iran’s nuclear program by a good three-to-four years. According to the report, the...

Russia warns of ‘Iranian Chernobyl'By Con Coughlin 5:23PM GMT 16 Jan 2011 Russian nuclear scientists are providing technical assistance to Iran's attempts activate the country's first nuclear power plant at the Gulf port. But they have raised serious concerns about the extensive damage caused to the plant's computer systems by the mysterious Stuxnet virus, which was discovered last year and is widely believed to have been the result of a sophisticated joint US-Israeli cyber attack. According to Western intelligence reports, Russian scientists warned the Kremlin that they could be facing "another Chernobyl" if they were forced to comply with Iran's...