Word: virality
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...remember my first viral video. The year was 2001, and I was a fresh-faced teenager with my first high-speed Internet connection. Someone showed me a Flash animation featuring 1980s Japanese video-game images repurposed into a techno-music montage. Or something. I'm not really sure. I didn't understand All Your Base Are Belong To Us then, and I don't understand it now, but I can't deny its Internet significance. All I remember is that people wouldn't stop saying "Somebody set up us the bomb" for at least a week...
...region’s constancy would allow for a one-time vaccine that would not be out-moded by rapid changes in viral structure. Current flu vaccines must change every year to accommodate mutations within the virus...
...strategy takes a bead on a much smaller region, closer to the soles of the viral bobble head's feet, where the virus fuses to the cell it infects. These regions mutate less rapidly, and in fact, in the recent study in mice, published in the current issue of Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, they did not mutate at all. "If we use this approach judiciously, we should be able to keep this pocket conserved and not develop drug resistance to it," says Dr. Wayne Marasco of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, a co-author of the paper. "The exciting part...
...these antibodies potentially treat an infection once it has already occurred - by disabling the viruses and preventing them from infecting additional healthy cells - they can also position themselves in the binding site of the cells themselves, blocking the virus at the receiving end too. One more advantage of this viral weak spot: it's the same on the vast majority of influenza strains circulating each year, including the ones responsible for the bird flu, H5N1. That makes this antibody approach potentially useful not only against seasonal flu but against pandemic strains as well. (See pictures of the bird...
...hard not to be impressed by findings like that, but a skeptic will say there's nothing remarkable - much less spiritual - about them. You live longer if you go to church because you're there for the cholesterol-screening drive and the visiting-nurse service. Your viral load goes down when you include spirituality in your fight against HIV because your levels of cortisol - a stress hormone - go down first. "Science doesn't deal in supernatural explanations," says Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion...