Word: insects
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...just in Gaithersburg. Pediculus humanus capitis, the human head louse, is back in alarming numbers in school systems from New York to California. The epidemic had nearly been stemmed decades ago by a generation of chemical shampoos and rinses, but now the insect appears to be backed by a force more powerful than any shampoo: evolution...
...human head louse has been around for millenniums. Archaeologists have found evidence of head lice in the hair of ancient Egyptian mummies. And each year, 10 million to 12 million Americans receive unsolicited calls from the sesame seed-size insects, which set up shop in human scalps and lay eggs, or nits, that they cement to hair shafts. Head lice do not carry disease, but they are tenacious and a rather nasty sight. In the past few decades, the problem had been controlled with shampoos or soaps, many of them containing permethrin, the most widely used of the lice-killing...
...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...