Word: fungus
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...potato came to Europe from the New World in the 16th Century. Its parasitic fungus followed about 1840, attacked almost every potato plant in Europe. Worst outbreak was in Ireland, whose wretched peasantry was already starving because of another parasite, the English landlord. Between 1845 and 1860, in the greatest disaster since the Napoleonic Wars, 1,000,000 Irish died directly because of potato fungus, and 1,500,000 emigrated. English industrialists used the Irish famine as a pretext to repeal the Corn Laws (which limited food imports). This, says Chemist Large, was "perhaps the most significant single event...
...botanists then believed that the potato blight was caused by fungi, which were thought to grow only on dead things, never on living plants. But when the fungus was at last proved guilty, botanists opened their eyes wide. They found fungi...
...Sufferers from athlete's foot often have to throw out all their shoes, because they are breeding spots for the offending fungus. Last week Bernard Soep, a Boston industrial designer, demonstrated a new shoe sterilizer-an inexpensive ultraviolet bulb that can be plugged into an ordinary light socket, inserted into a shoe...
...valve by which the aquatic animal closes the ear, man may substitute rubber stoppers or plugs of oiled wool or cotton. . . . This precautionary measure also lessens the occurrence of the various forms of otomycosis [fungus disease] that are frequently observed during the swimming season...
Achlya ambisexualis elaborates no less than four sex hormones which diffuse through the water, from male to female and vice versa. Hormone A, from the female, causes the male fungus to put out shoots. The shoots produce Hormone B, which goes back to the female, initiates the growth of egg-containers. The egg-containers manufacture Hormone C, which attracts the male shoots so that contact is effected (up to ranges of one-third inch). Hormone D, from the male shoots, stops the growth of the female egg-containers when they are of proper size...