Imagine being the woman with a worm in her brain

On this day in history, August 29

1833 Britain’s 1st Factory Act becomes law ‘to regulate the Labour of Children and young Persons in the Mills and Factories of the UK’.

1838 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm announce their intention to publish a German Dictionary, eventually completed in 1961, after 123 years.

1883 The first Carnegie library financed by industrialist Andrew Carnegie opens in Dunfermline, Scotland. It is the 1st of 2 509 libraries around the world that bear his name.

1883 Seismic sea waves from the Krakatoa volcanic eruption create a rise in English Channel, 32 hours after it’s explosion.

1896 Chop suey is invented in New York City by the chef of the visiting Chinese ambassador.

1929 The German airship Graf Zeppelin ends a round-the-world flight. The golden age of air travel by large gas-filled rigid airships, named after the inventor Ferdinand von Zeppelin, ends abruptly in

1937 when the Hindenburg catches fire and is destroyed while docking Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, US, killing 36 people. The disaster, caught on newsreel coverage and in photographs shattered public confidence in the giant, passenger-carrying Zeppelins and marked the end of the airship era.

1949 The USSR performs its first nuclear test at Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan, central Asia.

1997 Netflix is founded as an online DVD rental business.

2005 Hurricane Katrina devastates New Orleans. Twenty years later, parts of the city still haven’t fully recovered and it has about three-quarters of the population it had before the storm, which killed about 1 400 people, destroyed 300 000 homes, swamped 80% of the city and caused $125 billion in damage. (The Great Galveston Hurricane that decimated the island city of Galveston on the Gulf Coast of Texas on September 8, 1900, was far worse, killing up to 12 000 people in an age when populations were far smaller.)

2019 A study in the journal Science finds there is no single ‘gay’ gene, with genetics accounting for at most 25% of same-sex behaviour.

2023 A parasite worm, alive and wriggling, found in a human brain for the first time in a woman in Canberra, Australia.

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