For all of you who have been covertly digging for hidden treasure up your nose, here’s proof that it really can happen. I came across this little gem on the Verge:
After returning from an African research expedition, pathobiology professor Tony Goldberg found an unexpected stowaway: a tick hiding up his right nostril. “When you first realize you have a tick up your nose, it takes a lot of willpower not to claw your face off,” Goldberg, a University of Wisconsin–Madison researcher, says in a statement.
But Goldberg managed to retrieve the tick from his nostril and send it off for analysis, leading him to not just discover a potentially new species of tick, but what could also be a new explanation for how diseases spread between chimps and humans.
Though DNA analysis could only confirm the tick’s genus — and not whether it was a new species — because it wasn’t fully developed, its presence made Goldberg curious about why it was hiding up there in the first place.
[Technical note: That “wasn’t fully developed” makes no sense. What Goldberg’s published account actually says is that the researchers couldn’t find a match on GenBank for the mitochondrial DNA they sequenced.]
Goldberg and other researchers began studying high-resolution photographs of chimps, and they noticed that 20 percent of the chimps had Read the rest of this entry »