Mucus

One year after a 69-year-old woman used a neti pot to flush her sinuses, she was dead. When medication didn’t clear up the Seattle woman’s chronic sinus infection, her doctor suggested she use a neti pot twice a day. A neti pot is a sinus irrigation device that channels water through to wash out mucus and debris. » RELATED: 11-year-old girl died in 2016 after contracting brain-eating amoeba The woman used filtered — but not sterile or saline  — water in the pot, however. After a month of irrigating her sinuses, “she developed a quarter-sized red raised rash on the right side of the bridge of her nose and raw red skin at the nasal opening,” according to the  International Journal of Infectious Diseases . After several trips to doctors, including dermatologists, she received a  diagnosis of rosacea , but no real relief. Recommended for you Recommended for you Recommended for you About a year after the rash appeared, the woman had a seizure....

The shotgun deer season is under way throughout Massachusetts. To be successful in the woods, it is important to understand how deer relate to their environment. By taking the time to think through what they see, hear and smell, you will increase your chances of waylaying a big buck. Hunters perceive their world primarily through sight. However, it mainly through the sense of smell that deer perceive theirs. Although they use all of their senses to stay alive, research has shown us that their sense of smell is perhaps the most important to them. To be successful, hunters need to understand how they can use that sense to their advantage. A deer’s olfactory bulb in their hairless, moist nose is much larger than ours and contains almost a hundred times more epithelium. Olfactory epithelium contains millions of chemical receptors that detect odors. When we sniff, chemicals in the air are dissolved in mucus. Odor receptor neurons in olfactory epithelium detect these odors and send the si...

Nemo, the adorable clownfish in the movie Finding Nemo , rubs himself all over the anemone he lives in to keep it from stinging and eating him like it does most fish. That rubbing leads the makeup of microbes covering the clownfish to change, according to a new study. Having bacterial cooties in common with anemones may help the clownfish cozily nest in anemones' venomous tentacles, a weird symbiosis that life scientists -- including now a team from the Georgia Institute of Technology -- have tried for decades to figure out. The marine researchers studied microbes on clownfish who mixed and mingled with fish-killing anemones. "It's the iconic mutualism between a host and a partner, and we knew that microbes are on every surface of each animal," said Frank Stewart, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Biological Sciences. "In this particular mutualism, these surfaces are covered with stuff that microbes love to eat: mucus." Swabbing mucu...

Some fungi are smelly and coated in mucus. Others have gills that glow in the dark. Some are delicious; others, poisonous. Some spur euphoria when ingested. Some produce antibiotics. All of these fungi -- and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, more -- occur in North America. Of those that are known to science, 44,488 appear in a new checklist of North American fungi, published this month in the journal Mycologia . "This checklist provides the basis for understanding our national mycoflora, which is timely since there is renewed interest in cataloging all North American fungi," said Illinois Natural History Survey mycologist Andrew Miller, who led the effort to compile the data. "Hundreds of citizen scientists are interested in helping with this project." By conservative estimates, scientists have so far documented less than one-third of all fungi thought to exist in North America, said Miller, who also is an affiliate of the department of plant biology at t...