MIT scientist Dr. Todd Rider has
developed a viral infection treatment that works by triggering host cell suicide when it finds the cell has been producing double-stranded RNA. Since dsRNA is the mechanism by which all viral infections proceed, but is not part of normal cellular function, the treatment seems both universal and safe.
[more inside]
posted by seanmpuckett
on Aug 11, 2011 -
49 comments
The UN's FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) have announced that they believe rinderpest, an frequently fatal viral disease that affects livestock and wild ruminants, to have been eliminated. This is only the second virus, after smallpox, to have been wiped out.
The BBC and
the Guardian discuss the story in brief, and
Science has a slightly more in-depth look at it. The FAO themselves have put up an
interesting history of the disease and its treatment.
posted by Dim Siawns
on Oct 15, 2010 -
17 comments
(Late) Friday Flash Fun:
CellCraft. Build and improve a cell, learn how real cells work, and save the Platypus species!
posted by cthuljew
on Jul 10, 2010 -
13 comments
10 years ago yesterday, The
ILOVEYOU or LOVELETTER computer worm successfully attacked tens of millions of Windows computers in 2000 when it was sent as an attachment to an email message with the text "ILOVEYOU" in the subject line.
Mefi Was There that day when Onel De Guzman released a virus that he had proposed creating as part of his undergraduate thesis.
The BBC Looks Back. The key part of the virus was not any technical trick but the wording of the subject line - ILOVEYOU - and its attachment LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.
posted by Blake
on May 5, 2010 -
28 comments
A new
HIV vaccine is showing promising results, reducing the risk of contracting the virus by 32 percent. While further tests are still needed, the vaccine is a combination failed HIV vaccines
AIDSVAX and ALVAC, based on the Canary Pox virus.
The study itself faced
criticism from the outset.
posted by borkencode
on Sep 24, 2009 -
41 comments
In 1984 computer pioneer Ken Thompson wrote one of the seminal works of computer security,
Reflections on Trusting Trust [PDF]. In it he postulated putting a trojan horse inside a compiler as a means of infecting software compiled by it. 25 years later somebody has finally done just that. Researchers at anti-virus house Sophos have
discovered a virus that places a backdoor into applications compiled with the Delphi language. They've identified at least 3000 separate Delphi applications that have had this backdoor compiled into them so far, including banking programs and programs used for cellphone programming.
posted by scalefree
on Aug 20, 2009 -
52 comments
April 1 is the 91st day of the year (92nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 274 days remaining until the end of the year. April 1 is most notable in the Western world for being
April Fools'
Day.
[more inside]
posted by jbickers
on Mar 31, 2009 -
42 comments
A German researcher accidentally jabbed her finger with a hypodermic loaded with the
deadly Ebola virus. 48 hours later, she was injected with an
untested, experimental vaccine, developed by an international team of virologists and biologists. Though she may never have been infected, she was certainly in danger; in 2004, a similar incident caused the death of a
Russian scientist at a former Soviet biological weapons lab.
posted by permafrost
on Mar 29, 2009 -
39 comments
Obesity can be “caught” as easily as a common cold from other people’s coughs, sneezes and dirty hands.... As many as one in three obese people may have become overweight after falling victim to the highly infectious cold-like virus, known as AD-36.
posted by caddis
on Jan 26, 2009 -
327 comments
New Scientist reports today that inhabitants of the former Roman Empire have much lower levels of a gene variant that protects against the virus that causes AIDS -
CCR5-Delta32 to be exact. Previously, this genetic mutation had been attributed to the spread of the
Black Death.
posted by Lizc
on Sep 4, 2008 -
16 comments
Darwin's Surprise. "There may be no biological process more complicated than the relationships that viruses have with their hosts. Could it be that their persistence made it possible for humans to thrive?"
[Via Disinformation.]
posted by homunculus
on Nov 27, 2007 -
63 comments
Obesity has been called an epidemic in the United States.
Looking at an
interactive statistic [CNN, flash] of the state-by-state numbers is sobering
mf.
64% of adults are overweight and approx 25% are obese
[
Wikipedia 1,
2].
The usual suspects have so far been a culture of low-exercise
mf
high-consumption (due to
urban sprawl, driving, TV, ... ),
microbes mf,
genetic predisposition,
and bad diet
(the ubiquity of
junk food with its high levels of fat, sugar and salt.
Recently the high fructose levels in the common American diet has also been noted.
Fructose comprises 50% of table sugar and up to 90% of high-fructose corn
syrup (HFCS), both ingredients found in copious
amounts in most American 'convenience' foods.
[Wikipedia: Fructose#References, Wikipedia:HFCS]).
Now it seems that a
decisive
assessory
is a common virus, the
Human Adenovirus-36, which may really make obesity
an actual epidemic. [
Int. Journal of Obesity,
CNN]
posted by umop-apisdn
on Aug 21, 2007 -
48 comments
Dr. Stephen Lanka claims that H5N1 doesn't exist. Or
AIDS. Or
disease-causing viruses in general.
"In humans, in the blood or in other bodily fluids, in an animal or in a plant there never have been seen or demonstrated structures which you could characterize as bird flu viruses or flu viruses or any other supposedly disease-causing virus. The causes of those diseases which are being maintained to be caused by a virus, also those in animals, which can arise quickly and in individuals either one after the other or several at the same time, are known since a long time back. However much you stretch things in biology, there is simply no place for viruses as the causative agents of diseases. Only if I ignore the findings of Dr Hamer’s New Medicine, according to which shock events are the cause of many diseases, and the findings of chemistry on the effects of poisonings and deficiencies, and then if I ignore the findings of physics about the effects of radiation, then there is a place for imaginings such as disease-causing viruses."
posted by Sticherbeast
on Jul 24, 2006 -
118 comments
A monstrous discovery suggests that viruses, long regarded as lowly evolutionary latecomers, may have been the precursors of all life on Earth.
"We haven't even begun to scratch the surface. The numbers are mind-boggling. If you put every virus particle on Earth together in a row, they would form a line 10 million light-years long. People, even most biologists, don't have a clue. The general public thinks genetic diversity is us and birds and plants and animals and that viruses are just HIV and the flu. But most of the genetic material on this planet is viruses. No question about it. They and their ability to interact with organisms and move genetic material around are the major players in driving speciation, in determining how organisms even become what they are."
posted by five fresh fish
on Feb 17, 2006 -
60 comments
On January 19, 1986, the first PC virus —
Brain — was detected. It was virtually harmless, and the Pakistani creators
claim that it was only intended to protect their copyrights. (They did, after all, include their own address and phone number in the machine code.) In the past 20 years, though, both
creating viruses and
destroying them have become billion-dollar industries.
posted by Plutor
on Jan 19, 2006 -
48 comments
Is H5N1 flu transitioning to a human-to-human illness? Recent
reports of familial clusters suggest that it may be, though there are certainly other possible explanations, such as families living in environments contaminated by virus-laden bird feces. On the other hand, it would seem that epidemiologists are growing increasingly interested in the possibility that these clusters are indicative of human-to-human transmissions. Further, the virus may be inching towards being asymptomatic, which isn't as good as it sounds: if people can carry the virus and transmit it to others without showing symptoms, it will be very difficult to impossible to tell who is a vector and highly difficult to control any emerging epidemic.
posted by chakalakasp
on Dec 2, 2005 -
23 comments
