Word: bacteria
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Anton Von Leeuwenhoek is famous for scraping the plaque off the exceedingly dirty teeth of the elderly men of Delft. He is still remembered today for his crude attempt at oral hygiene because he was the first person to describe bacteria and a host of other “cavorting beasties” that were visible in the plaque under his crude microscopes. (Leeuwenhoek originally called them “wretched beasties,” but time has been kind to the bacteria.) He described them jumping about with their grotesque appendages and strange methods of locomotion. He collected...
...various unconventional arms, inspectors did not even know of its existence until mid-1995, when Saddam's defecting son-in-law Hussein Kamal revealed that secret labs buried in Iraq's security, not military, apparatus were cooking up deadly germs. Iraq subsequently admitted it made batches of anthrax bacteria, carcinogenic aflatoxin, agricultural toxins and the paralyzing poison botulinum. Iraqi officials reported they had loaded 191 bombs, including 25 missile warheads, with the poisons for use in the Gulf War. They said they destroyed them after the conflict, but they presented no proof, and Western officials don't believe them...
THERE BE DRAGONS The western tip of Flores is the jumping-off point for the island of Komodo, where the world's largest lizards (or dragons, if you prefer) slink about looking for something to sink their razor-sharp, bacteria-covered teeth into. Make sure it isn't you?the odd foolhardy tourist is known to have been chomped, and even if you survive the attack the wound may become so infected that, without treatment, you could die. Day trips are popular, but true dragon fans can spend a night or two in spartan cabins in Komodo National Park...
...Some individuals, however, have come forward with the truth and confessed their shame. The day before the Tokyo court decision, a former official in charge of raising bacteria for biological warfare, Yoshio Shinozuka, visited the unit's site?one of 10,000 Japanese who do so every year. The retreating Japanese army had destroyed all buildings except the main office, which now houses a small, tasteful exhibition explaining what happened and showing items such as scalpels and poison gas canisters. Curator Wang Peng says Shinozuka told him how sorry he was for what he had done and had laid...
...body-harvesting business," says Don Keenan, an Atlanta attorney representing 14 clients pursuing claims against CryoLife. One of them is the family of Brian Lykins, 23, who died three days after what should have been routine orthopedic knee surgery last November. His death was caused by a strain of bacteria associated with decomposing tissue. "We know the cadaver that killed Brian was unrefrigerated for at least 19 hours, but nobody knows how long it had been dead before that," says Keenan. Another teenager who received tissue from the same cadaver that infected Lykins also developed an infection...