Word: fungi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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With all those scary microbes out there, it's hard to get worked up over a toenail fungus or a case of athlete's foot. But the fungi that cause these and dozens of other infections are not as trivial as they may seem. Fungi have a way of turning nasty--seeping into the bloodstream and invading vital organs. Lately they've been doing that more and more, thanks to increased travel (which exposes people to fungi for which they have no immunity) and to immunosuppressant drugs (which leave patients vulnerable to what would otherwise be innocuous fungal infections...
...Borneo, Madagascar and the Amazon basin into objets d'art. Not a human is in sight, though Lanting's artistry and perseverance are hard to miss in these kingdoms where he was the intruder and adversary. As he notes, "I have seen leaf-cutter ants eat my tent, fungi grow in my lenses, and larvae emerge from the flesh of my leg." This reasonably priced volume is ideal for the bright child who needs to know there's a world beyond PlayStation2--a world of drama, danger and grandeur; a realm both beautiful and imperiled. Lanting's gorgeous pictorial essay...
...carotene--which the body converts into vitamin A--and additional iron, and they are working on other kinds of nutritionally improved crops. Biotech can also improve farming productivity in places where food shortages are caused by crop damage attributable to pests, drought, poor soil and crop viruses, bacteria or fungi...
Least known are the smallest organisms. By repeated sampling, biologists estimate that as few as 10% of the different kinds of insects, nematode worms and fungi have been discovered. For bacteria and other microorganisms, the number could be well below 1%. Even the largest and most intensively studied organisms are incompletely cataloged. Four species of mammals, for example, have recently been discovered in the remote Annamite Mountains along the Vietnam-Laos border. One of them, the saola or spindlehorn, is a large cowlike animal distinct enough to be classified in a genus of its own. Earth, as far as life...
...caused by a giant meteorite strike off the present-day coast of Yucatan, ended the age of dinosaurs. These catastrophes followed a typical sequence. First, a large part of biodiversity was destroyed. There was a bloom of a small number of "disaster species," such as medleys of fungi and ferns, that survived and reproduced rapidly to fill the habitable spaces emptied of other life. As more time passed, a few "Lazarus species" reappeared in localities from which they had been wiped out, having been able to spread from isolated pockets difficult to detect. Then, very slowly, across 2 million...