Though we may often think of cholera as a disease of the past, virtually eradicated when John Snow famously linked an 1854 outbreak of the epidemic in London to an infected water well on Broad Street, it still poses a threat in almost every single developing country in the world. Over 150 years after Snow essentially founded modern epidemiology, a team of American scientists are using remote satellite imaging to predict cholera outbreaks before they occur.

[ Read Full Story ]

Engineers at MIT have figured out a way to deal with virus that is better than just killing them: they're putting them to work. The researchers have developed a new technique wherein a key component of a microscopic battery is assembled by viruses, allowing for the cheap and simple construction of very small power sources.

[ Read Full Story ]

Have you lied in bed, aching from fever and coughing, wishing that awful flu virus could get a taste of its own medicine? Well, according to a new study, it turns out that some of those bugs get as sick as we do, and additionally those infections may contribute to the rapid evolution of viruses.

[ Read Full Story ]

The video shows what looks like a faint nebula in deep space, its neighboring stars resolving to their full brightness after a long exposure. Only the images are not of the very large and distant; they are exactly the opposite. It is the picture of a cell membrane and the stars are hundreds of thousands of molecules at the cell's surface, gathering together to form a particle of the HIV virus. It is the first video of any virus being born and visually illuminates a process never before documented in real time.

[ Read Full Story ]

Using living organisms to combat human disease is nothing new to medicine. The Greeks used leeches to balance the humors (didn't work). Civil war medics used maggots to clean dead tissue from wounds (did work, and is still selectively used today). The next step in fighting infection with outside help looks to come from the bacteriophages, which are viruses that only infect bacteria.

[ Read Full Story ]

If it´s a smartphone,
you bet. In 2004, virus writers released Cabir, the first proof-of-concept virus that could infect smartphones through
an open Bluetooth connection.
So far, Cabir and the 175 other smartphone viruses in the wild haven´t done enough damage to warrant headlines. But it´s only a matter of time before there´s enough financial upside for criminal hackers to begin seriously attacking smartphones. And then, watch out.

[ Read Full Story ]