common cold
A "potentially historic" blizzard is barreling down on us here in New England, and is poised to drop up to two feet of snow on Boston. All of the schools in the area preemptively closed, our public transit system is shutting down at 3:30pm, and trying to buy groceries last night was bedlam. The snow is just now beginning to fall. Winter in New England can be rough, especially for a California-raised boy like me. It's not just because of the snow and cold, it's also the influenza and common colds.
Source - Flickr user "Placbo"
The fact that the rate of some infections can vary by season is…
This is the eighth of eight posts on evolutionary research to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial.
In Virginia, USA, sits a facility called the American Type Culture Collection. Within its four walls lie hundreds of freezers containing a variety of frozen biological samples and among these, are 99 strains of the common cold. These 99 samples represent all the known strains of the human rhinoviruses that cause colds. And all of their genomes have just been laid bare.
Ann Palmenberg from the University of Wisconsin and David Spiro from the J. Craig Venter Institute have cracked the genomes of all…