Word: spore
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...start with medicine. In 1928 the young Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming sloppily left a lab dish growing bacteria on a bench when he went on vacation. It got contaminated with a Penicillium mold spore, and when he returned, he noticed that the mold seemed to stop the growth of the germs. His serendipitous discovery would eventually save more lives than were lost in all the century's wars combined...
When he returned, he noticed a clear halo surrounding the yellow-green growth of a mold that had accidentally contaminated the plate. Unknown to him, a spore of a rare variant called Penicillium notatum had drifted in from a mycology lab one floor below. Luck would have it that Fleming had decided not to store his culture in a warm incubator, and that London was then hit by a cold spell, giving the mold a chance to grow. Later, as the temperature rose, the Staphylococcus bacteria grew like a lawn, covering the entire plate--except for the area surrounding...
...that a wide variety of active molds, including Stachybotrys and Penicillium, continued to grow inside the building, alongside bacterial levels that were 200 times as great as OSHA's suggested "contamination threshold." Yet the '96 report, prepared by Crawford Risk Control Services for Southwest's insurance company, rated airborne spore counts inside the building as "normal" compared with those outside. Reviewing this record, Dr. David Straus of Texas Tech University's Health Sciences Center observed, "There's nothing normal about Stachybotrys. It produces a bad toxin. That's all I can say." Moreover, argues Cornell's Alan Hedge, the inspectors...
...tune, which he titled Bye, Bye Amer'ca Online. ("So bye bye to Amer'ca Online/ Drove my modem to a domain and it's working just fine./ And good old geeks are cheering users offline/ Saying this'll be the day that they die.") Like most amusing online spore, it flew around the Net, causing a number of people to E-mail Cassell their thanks. One of them became Cassell's live-in girlfriend. "So I guess you could say AOL changed my life," he admits. Which might explain why he doesn't do the obvious: cancel his subscription...
This much is known: the disease is carried by a microscopic protozoan called Myxobolus cerebralis, whose spores are released when infected fish die. These spores are not in themselves harmful to trout. It is only after they have been ingested by inch-long Tubifex worms in the mud that the parasites become dangerous. In the worm's gut, the protozoan takes a new form: grappling-hook-shaped spore cases that when released from the worm, can invade the gills and skin of tiny rainbow fry. The infection eats away at the cartilage of young trout, leaving them deformed, discolored...