Word: insection
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have begun to extend their range northward, while cold-loving creatures such as brook trout have vanished in some areas. Plants are pushing to higher latitudes and higher altitudes. Tropical diseases, including malaria and dengue fever, have begun to move into regions that were once too cold for their insect carriers...
Other Ig Nobel recipients included Mark Hostetler of the University of Florida who studied insect splats on car windows; the late Bernard Vonnegut of the State University of Albany who was honored for his work on "Chicken Plucking as a Measure of Tornado Wind Speed"; and a team of scientists led by Carl J. Charnetski who showed that listening to elevator music may help prevent the common cold...
...soon became apparent that the carrier was the female Phlebotomus orientalis sand fly, which passes the deadly protozoan to humans in an unusual manner (see box). The tiny insect, which cannot fly very high or far, inhabits the vast, red acacia forests, where it bites its victims in order to get protein-rich blood to develop its eggs. When female sand flies bit people driven by war or famine into the forests from areas where kala-azar was already endemic, the flies picked up the disease themselves, ready to be passed...
...peach variety better, as I adore the "real fruit chunks." I had read only one chapter of Bastard Out of Carolina, and the protagonist hadn't even finished sketching out her family history. The impending return of my cousins from work buzzed around my head like an increasingly angered insect, steadily rising in decibel. But the pleasures alone-ness had brought to me over that short afternoon, ephemeral as they may have been, had been a soothing balm for my raw and irritated nerves. To be able to select a room in which to recline while listening to the cheep...
Whether the disease does break out--and how widely it spreads--may depend less on how local governments respond than on the reaction of local citizenry. "The key is to protect yourself," says Tom Skinner of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. "That requires wearing long clothing, using insect repellent and staying indoors in the hours right before and after sunset." Avoiding encephalitis-carrying mosquitoes may be no harder than avoiding their benign kin; the stakes, however, are decidedly higher...