OUR PICKSThe Conspiracies Swarming Campus Protests | Uncle Sam Wants You to Join the Mining Industry | Who Really Has Brain Worms?, and more
· A Russian Influence Campaign Is Exploiting College Campus Protests
A Kremlin-aligned network called Doppelganger has used faked versions of real news sites to push both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel disinformation
· Who Really Has Brain Worms?
A scientific inquiry
· Drone Dilemma and the U.S. Air Force
The problem with the argument about the Air Force’s supposed irrelevance is that it is missing the context of how control of the air is accomplished
· Bird Flu Detected in Colorado Dairy Cattle − a Vet Explains the Risks of the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Virus
Bird flu is not new to Colorado, but this is the first time the disease has made cattle in Colorado sick
· Uncle Sam Wants You to Join the Mining Industry
A major talent squeeze is complicating Washington’s critical mineral ambitions
· The Conspiracies Swarming Campus Protests
Disinformation and conspiracies spun out of control last week when police departments raided college campuses across the country during pro-Palestinian protests
· A (Strange) Interview with the Russian-Military-Linked Hackers Targeting US Water Utilities
Despite Cyber Army of Russia’s claims of swaying US “minds and hearts,” experts say the cyber sabotage group appears to be hyping its hacking for a domestic audience
A Russian Influence Campaign Is Exploiting College Campus Protests (David Gilbert, Wired)
A Russian influence campaign seems to be attempting to sow division in the US around the college campus protests.
As protests at universities across the country—and the responses to them by college authorities and law enforcement—continue to stoke division and anger, the Kremlin appears to have taken a page from its foreign influence playbook, using its disinformation infrastructure in collaboration with state-run media and Telegram influencers in an effort to further divide American society.
Over the past week, a disinformation campaign operated by the Kremlin-aligned network Doppelganger amassed over 130,000 views on X, according to data shared exclusively with WIRED by Antibot4Navalny, a collective of anonymous Russian researchers who have spent years tracking the Russian influence operation.
Who Really Has Brain Worms? (Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic)
Earlier today, The New York Times broke some startling news about a presidential candidate. According to a 2012 deposition, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once suffered from, in his own words, “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” The vague yet alarming description could apply to any number of parasitic ailments, among them angiostrongyliasis, baylisascariasis, toxocariasis, strongyloidiasis, and trichinosis. But some experts immediately suspected a condition called neurocysticercosis (NCC), in which the larvae of the pork tapeworm Taenia solium post up in the brain.
The condition might sound terrifying—and, to some observers, darkly hilarious. Literal brain worms! But it does not actually involve any brain-munching, or even your standard-issue worm. The brain-invading culprit is instead a tapeworm (a kind of helminth) that typically makes its home in pigs. As far as parasitic infections go, this is “the most common one in the brain,” Laila Woc-Colburn, an infectious-disease physician at Emory University, told me. And globally, it’s one of the most common causes of epilepsy in adults.
NCC typically begins after people have been exposed to feces that contain the eggs of a pork tapeworm, say while on a pig farm or handling uncooked, contaminated food. After the eggs are swallowed, they hatch into larvae in the gut. (Cont.)
