Word: fungi
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...flurry of research, and the results are just in. The disease isn't AIDS, says the New England Journal of Medicine. It seems to be noncontagious, it's rare and likely to stay that way, and it probably has a variety of causes. The possible culprits include bacteria, fungi and other parasites, poisons and environmental toxins. Viruses may play a role as well, but not necessarily a single virus or even a family of them. In a Journal editorial, Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief of U.S. AIDS research, called last year's press speculation about a new AIDS virus a "media...
...years, and you will find me completely naked, living in the middle of the Ndoki with six Pygmy wives," he jokes. He thinks that the Pygmies have it right: the less you wear, the faster your skin dries after rainfall and the less likely you are to get parasitic fungi and footworms. Fay has already accumulated four nasty footworms, which burrow under the skin until they discover that you are not a pig or elephant -- their proper hosts. The worms then die, but bacteria in the little corpses infect your feet...
Other pervasive allergens are the spores made by molds, both the outdoor kind that grow on crops, grass and dead leaves and the household variety found on foods, leather, furniture and in air conditioners. All these fungi spores can produce vigorous allergic reactions. "Molds are boggling," says Washington University's Lewis. "There can be hundreds of thousands of mold spores per cubic meter of air." And, he points out, a person inhales about 10 or 12 cu m of air each...
...consequences will be a plague of mushrooms. That is how many fungi reproduce, and this mass of subterranean cytoplasm, known scientifically as Armillaria bulbosa, is one humongous fungus. The mushrooms are aboveground appendages of the real organism, a tangled mass of stringlike tendrils that spread below the surface. Just how far a given fungus can spread has always been open to speculation. Unless scientists happen to dig right where two clearly different fungi meet, there is no easy way to tell where one ends and another begins...
...just what is meant by an "individual"? A patch of grass that spread from a single seed may be considered an individual organism. The same is true with fungi, which, incidentally, are now looked upon as a kingdom separate from plants and animals. Complicating matters is the fact that pieces of the A. bulbosa may have broken off over the millenniums. If so, do the pieces count as one organism or many? There's no agreed upon answer, says Clive Brasier, a British botanist. Insisting on a yes or no, he says, "gets to be a Guinness Book of Records...