Word: viper
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...call Warnaco boss Linda Wachner, 55, lots of things, and within New York City's viper-lipped rag trade many do--ruthless, cruel, abrasive, self-serving, vulgar. And then there are the people who don't like her. But no one ever accused her of being lazy...
Beat loves this stuff. He can't stop laughing as he recounts how his TV team once put a plastic bag over a man's face and shoved his head into a cage to watch, up close, a mongoose fight a poisonous viper. And then there's the matador story. In this TV sketch, a pick-up truck decorated to look like a bull charges a matador. "Can I run the matador over?" the driver asked. Beat's quick response: "That would be funny." Beat thrives on humor as public humiliation, but also as a refuge from the rigid social...
...business end of a good poisonous plant or animal. Modern medicine is filled with drugs derived from deadly poisons, from the muscle relaxant curare (taken from South American vines that are used to poison arrow tips) to the anticoagulant Aggrastat (based on the venom of the saw-scaled viper...
...viper venoms--particularly those from the genus Bothrops, of which the Central American terciopelo snake is a member--contain compounds that closely resemble substances used by white blood cells to fend off bacterial infections. Some of these substances work by damaging or disrupting lipids within the bacterial cell wall. A decade ago, microbiologists Edgardo Moreno, of Costa Rica's National University, and Bruno Lomonte, of the University of Costa Rica, realized that a muscle-destroying toxin in terciopelo venom behaved the same...
...scientists have since isolated at least 10 microbe-fighting myotoxins from various viper venoms and synthesized nontoxic versions of them in the lab. They are talking to drug companies about doing additional research in animals and, eventually, people. If those studies pan out, Moreno says, viper-venom antibiotics could be put in everything from mouthwashes to contact lenses to fight salmonella, cholera, staph and strep...