The study was published last week…” story continued here at ScienceDaily.

Now that we’re all on the same page, what if I told you that recent research suggests that some chubby chasers (i.e. EVERY RAPPER EVER) might just be stressed out? That is, what if psychological stress leads one to chase the chubby? Let’s explore this hypothesis further in today’s post.

So, if I don’t state upfront that women of all sizes are beautiful (and they are), then the people of the Internets will yell at me. That aside – let’s be real. As a woman, I can tell you that there’s a not-so-subtle message in society that goes something like this:

Feel free to get into some kind of deep philosophical debate in the comments section about your own convictions and opinions on this matter, but I basically just called it like it is.

Women should either be thin but not too thin, or thick but not too thick. For the sake of this post, however, let’s focus on the thick ones. Women like Kim Kadashian and Beyoncé Knowles have done much to put “thick” women on a bit of a pedestal. The field of rap music would appear to concur:

With the exception of Drake, whose lyrics aren’t always what I would call self-explanatory, these rappers are all obviously concurring that bigger is better when it comes to women’s bodies.

Now, because I spin this as a science blog, let’s talk about science: what factors are influencing whether men (or women) go for heroin chic or pleasingly plump? This is quite the burning question in today’s society and, lucky for us, researchers from London published the results of their experiments on this very matter last month.

British!

Eighty-one White British heterosexual males ranging from ages 18 to 42 were divided into two groups: Group One contained 41 men who would undergo a stressful experience, and Group Two contained 40 men who would not experience stress. And what exactly was the “stress” experience? It went like this:

You walk into a room where four people are sitting at a table with tape recorders and video cameras. Then you stand in front of them at a microphone and try to give a speech off the top of your head for five agonizingly long minutes, hoping to convince them that they should hire you for some fictional job. And, just in case this type of hideous task happens to be your thing, you have to stay up there at the mic and try to subtract 13 from 1022 over and over again (i.e. 1022, 1009, 996, 983…) as fast and as accurately as possible. I’m not making this up, kids; unrehearsed public speaking and mental math — if that doesn’t stress you out then I’d like to know what does.

Oh, and in the mean time, the Group Two guys were just sitting quietly and unknowingly while the Group One guys were being tortured. Unfair.

After all this stressing or not-stressing, all men in the study were told to look at women with body types covering everything in the range from emaciated to obese. The men had to rate the ideal body, and the thinnest and largest bodies that they would still consider physically attractive. Thus, the men established an “attractiveness range.”

The results were pretty straightforward: men who had been stressed gave significantly higher ratings to normal and overweight women’s figures, chose a significantly heavier women’s frame as their “ideal,” and reported a significantly wider attractiveness range, almost exclusively due to the inclusion of larger women. Awesome!

If I had to wave my hands around and explain this, I’d say: the male mind, being a product of evolution, knows that when things get tough, one needs a female who can handle the stresses of the environment. That is, women who have more fat deposits and can go longer with scarce food stores, women who are more physically apt to fight off bears and whatnot, women whose bodies are more likely to carry a fetus to term when the metaphorical, ecological s–t hits the fan.

I’m NOT saying that skinny women have any less inherent value than women of other sizes. Not even close. I’m just telling you the first thing that comes to my mind when I see an experiment that shows stressed guys preferring bigger girls. I’m not a medical doctor or a psychologist or anything beyond an overly flippant blogger and an MIT/Harvard trained biologist, ooooh snap.

In summary:

• A lot of rappers are probably really stressed out from all the gun violence and drug dealings so evident in their lyrics, inclining them to lust after women of the thicker type.
• Rosie O’Donnell could probably take down a bear before Lindsay Lohan could.
• If you ask your man whether you look fat in your outfit and he says “no,” he’s either being honest with you, lying to your face, or so stressed out at work that he sees your fatness as an evolutionarily sweet deal.

Stay nerdy!

Oh! And did you like what you read here today? Then click around, especially on those social media buttons! Over to the right, look, along the side of the page — there are buttons to get to us on Facebook or Twitter, or to grab our RSS feed. At the bottom of this post you can share it, like it, tweet it, dig it — so many options! Heck, go crazy, buy something from the online store! Use the Donate button in the sidebar and have a blast! Remember, I’m just a lowly graduate student who is about to go have a bag of popcorn for breakfast+lunch and who chooses to skip work to make blog posts just for the pure love and enjoyment of it. And for the entertainment and edification of my dear, dear readers.

We at TryNerdy thank you!

-K

P.S. That “we” is totally just for effect. There is no “we,” unless “we” is me and my three cats. Nothing like being painfully honest with your readership…love ya!

Swami V, & Tovée MJ (2012). The Impact of Psychological Stress on Men’s Judgements of Female Body Size. PloS one, 7 (8) PMID: 22905153

It happens to be one of many Awesome ThinkGeek Shirts. If you are reading this post, then A) you’ve probably already heard of ThinkGeek, and B) there’s a good chance you know what the molecule on that shirt is.

If neither A) nor B) applies to you, though – that’s okay! Because I plan to discuss 1) what the molecule represents, 2) which school I think the shirt is poking fun at, and why it’s of personal interest to me, and 3) what the molecule has to do with schooling, anyway.

This will be fun…

1. I don’t like to beat around the bush. The molecule is ethanol.
Look, Wikpedia says so: I’ll just hope that you, dear reader, have taken a chemistry class at some point in time, and I just want to remind you that anytime you have a bunch of carbons and hydrogens with an -OH sticking off of it (like in the figure below), it’s often an alcohol of some sort. And the name of the alcohol will very likely end with the suffix “-ol.”

But I want to be really clear on something: the only alcohol you should actually consume (if you choose to consume alcohol) is ethanol. ETHANOL, people. Drinking methanol can cause permanent blindness, unconsciousness, and death. Forty percent of the methanol in the world is used to make formaldehyde, which is the stuff used to embalm dead people and pets and such. So that’s not what you want. Propanol is thought to be 2-4 times as potent as ethanol, so I don’t think you want to go the propanol route either. Just…stick to ethanol, if anything. You don’t want to be this guy:

Shoulda stuck to ethanol, man.

2. Look at this logo again:

Observe the bold, striking crimson inside the oval. See the golden leaves of some sort, hugging the oval tenderly. Note, if you will, the abundance of H‘s, and how the letters are connected by cute little lines.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Well, now look at this logo:

Observe the bold, striking crimson inside the shield. See the golden leaves of some sort, hugging the shield tenderly. Note, if you will, that the school represented is the most popular school worldwide that starts with the letter H, and how the letters of the motto are connected with cute little lines.

Am I wrong in thinking that the Awesome ThinkGeek Shirt above is inspired in some part by the logo for Harvard University? I think not. And, well…this tickles me to no end because I’m currently a PhD candidate at Harvard (I refuse to accept any cool points for this). And although some might think there’s irony in using the symbol of hoity-toity Harvard to make a play on alcohol…it’s not as ironic as you might think.

Ever heard of “work hard, play hard”? From what I’ve observed, Harvard students party like students at most other campuses. As an example, I point you to this list of 15 Harvard Drinking Games. Yeah, so, we’re not the most uncool school in the world, and we’re not unfamiliar with the world of alcohol consumption and the concept of beer blankets and whatnot. I mean, you watched The Social Network , right?

3. Let’s talk about higher education and alcohol consumption. For many young people, going off to college is their first time being completely out from under Mom’s and Dad’s thumbs, and with that comes self-discovery, all types of life lessons, and a ridiculous amount of drinking. Beer pong. Flip cup. You know what I’m talking about.

Coming soon to an Olympics near you.

A study out of the University of Florida and Texas A&M found some strikingly obvious facts about what influences students to drink:

1. Emotional status. A “bad day at work” or “boyfriend or girlfriend broke up with them” can impact a student’s drinking behavior, particularly in the direction of drinking more.

2. Monetary considerations. Excess cash means more drinks; less cash means fewer drinks. (Mind. Blown.)

3. Surrounding environment. If you’re with your best buddies, you’ll drink more. If you’re with a bunch of sketchy strangers who might slip something into your drink, you’ll drink less.

4. Drinking games. As I alluded to before, drinking games go with the college drinking scene like brooms go with Quidditch. One student participant gives a poignant explanation, in his own words: “this person says that they can do this many shots, well then I have to one up that. I cannot let that person out show me.” No, he’d never live it down if someone got drunker than him.

5. Other people. If someone buys a round of shots for everyone at the bar, you’re more likely to drink (direct effect). If you’re at a frat party where you know that drinking is the theme of the general environment, you’re more likely to drink (indirect effect).

In summary:

Stay nerdy

Koehrer P, Creuzot-Garcher C, & Bron AM (2011). Methanol poisoning: two case studies of blindness in Indonesia. International ophthalmology, 31 (6), 517-24 PMID: 22200859

Rajamani A (2012). Two cases of toxic methanol ingestion, one leading to brain death: case reports and a brief review. Critical care and resuscitation : journal of the Australasian Academy of Critical Care Medicine, 14 (1), 56-9 PMID: 22404063

Cascallana JL, Gordo V, & Montes R (2012). Severe necrosis of oesophageal and gastric mucosa in fatal methanol poisoning. Forensic science international, 220 (1-3) PMID: 22398189

Barry AE, & Goodson P (2012). Contextual Factors Influencing U.S. College Students’ Decisions to Drink Responsibly. Substance use & misuse, 47 (10), 1172-84 PMID: 22662910

Aren’t they the cutest?

So, if you’re STD savvy, you might have realized that all of the plush toys above are named after venereal diseases. These adorable little guys are the Venereals. I want to reiterate that these are cuddly toys that look like the actual infectious agents that give you these diseases. A little weird, maybe? Yes.

But I own them all. Can you imagine a better conversation starter? (“Oh that’s cute, what is that little star-shaped toy?” …”Herpes.” ). If you’ve ever wanted nerdy street cred, now is your chance. Just click the link for Venereals and these nasty little cuties can be all yours. Now let me explain myself….

1. Take pox for example. Pox also goes by the name syphilis, which you’ve probably heard of. Technically, the bacterium is called Treponema pallidum, but that’s not so catchy. But the plush toy for syphilis looks surprisingly similar to the actual bacterium:So these toys are the real deal. You could even call them learning tools, but something tells me that these should only belong to high school-aged and older individuals, despite how much a 5-year-old would want to cuddle them.

As cute as plushie syphilis is, you don’t want to get syphilis. You really don’t.

Syphilis gives you very un-sexy ulcers and a crazy amount of nodules all over the body:

Yup, definitely not cute. So have fun cuddling your syphilis plushie, but don’t actually, you know, come in contact with syphilis.

Luckily, if you’ve had syphilis for less than a year, penicillin should cure you right up. But, again, my advice is to avoid syphilis at all costs. And if you do end up with it, don’t spread it around.

2. Herpes is way too cute not to talk about. Look at this little guy:

Okay, so the actual herpes virus on the right isn’t nearly as lovable as the star-shaped, innocent-eyed, fluffy herpes on the left…. And many of us know what herpes looks like on someone’s face:

Ouch. Not a good look. And I’m betting it’s painful, too. Quite sadly, there isn’t actually a therapy to remove the herpes virus from the body. The best you can hope for are antiviral medications to reduce the frequency and severity of outbreaks for the rest of your life.

But again, the toy is too cute. And that’s what really matters.

3. Finally, it would be unforgivable if I didn’t feature chlamydia. LOOK at this face!

Despite the terrible letdown of the actual chlamydia bacterium’s appearance, the guys who designed this plushie toy deserve a lot of kudos. Look closely at the soft chlamydia. Look into its eyes. Those hopeful eyes that say, “I want to be your friend! Please be my loving friend.” And that hair! Timeless.

Oh yeah, but um, you don’t actually want to get chlamydia either. To my guy readers: you don’t want to have burning pee or unusual discharge from your penis or tender testicles. If chlamydia really takes hold in your testes, you can become sterile. I wouldn’t wish these things on my worst enemy.

And ladies: chlamydia likes to set up shop in your cervix, which can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, which can cause difficulty with getting pregnant. And your pee will burn too. So chlamydia is an all-around bad time for everybody. Take heart though: chlamydia can effectively be cured with antibiotics.

You still shouldn’t go getting it though. What you should get is the adorably cute cuddly Chlamydia doll. It’s a tough choice between chlamydia and Herpes though…so that’s why I got ALL the Venereals! They keep each other company, and I love each of them in my own little way.

I’m the talk of all my friends, and you can be too. Just imagine all the nerdy hipster points this will get you! Now get those Venereals! But not the diseases. In all seriousness, men and women should carry condoms.

Stay nerdy and safe!

P.S. If you’re a bit weirded out about cute STDs, or you don’t feel comfortable getting those for children, check out Black Death, E. coli, Common Cold, and other wonderful, cuddly microbes!

Thank me later.

Janier M, Libar E, Bonnet A, Meunier P, Tabet M, Mathourais M, Paterour C, & Porcher R (2012). Treatment of late syphilis with 2.4 million units benzathine penicillin G (BPG): tolerance of single versus divided doses. Sexually transmitted diseases, 39 (5), 359-60 PMID: 22504599

De Clercq E (2012). Human viral diseases: what is next for antiviral drug discovery? Current opinion in virology PMID: 22846888

I am back and ready to reclaim my title as Least Dependable Blogger ever!

Not, but really though…I got engaged recently. It’s kind of a big deal! So between planning a wedding, seeing how much they cost (OMG), and bringing home a third kitten…blogging got pushed to the wayside. And I’m sorry but OH MY GOSH LOOK AT THE KITTY:

Awwwww!

In all honesty, I think the blog will be going in a very different direction. There are tons of sites that are juggernauts when it comes to science blogging (e.g. ScienceDaily.com). But, if I’m keeping it real, I like to think that my love of sarcasm sets my blog apart.

So I think I will maintain my wittiness, but try to get people to bring nerdy stuff into their homes….

And I will leave you on that cryptic note…

But I digress. You know how, sometimes, right before you fall sleep, you’ll have those weird hallucination-type things, and it’s somewhere in between waking and sleeping and feels surprisingly real? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then this post may not make any sense to you.

For the rest of you, check out this research where people actually studied those hallucinatory moments right before sleep. By the way, being a participant in this study seems like it was equal parts awesome and annoying.

Who doesn’t like Tetris? (No one.) For this study, in which the participants were almost certainly financially compensated, researchers asked test subjects to play Tetris for two hours every morning for three consecutive days — sign me up! Here is a diagram, because this is the awesome part of the study:

Being woken up 15 seconds after falling asleep.

Then, the researchers told the subjects to take a nap in the afternoon (this study just keeps getting better). Here’s the catch: subjects were woken up either 15, 45, 75, 120 or 180 seconds after falling asleep. The subjects, after mumbling expletives to the scientists, then reported their “mental content” to three judges.

In what may or may not be a surprising result, 10% of the subjects (48 out of 485 people) reported experiencing exact replicas of the sights and sounds of Tetris. This was in contrast to two control groups: one in which the subjects played no games (sad face) and only 1 person in 107 reported Tetris-related hallucinations (ummm…Tetris fanatic much?); in the second group, participants played Tetris after the nap (still a sweet deal), and only 3 out of 112 of those guys pre-dreamed about Tetris (oh, the anticipation!).

So the key takeaway here is simply this: Don’t watch Nightmare on Elm Street films right before taking a nap. Not only because Freddy Krueger will enter your dreams and kill you (duh), but because you might vividly hallucinate about him right before you fall sleep. And no one wants that.

Stay nerdy

Kusse C, Shaffii-LE Bourdiec A, Schrouff J, Matarazzo L, & Maquet P (2012). Experience-dependent induction of hypnagogic images during daytime naps: a combined behavioural and EEG study. Journal of sleep research, 21 (1), 10-20 PMID: 21848802

Hmmm...I smell about 28 years old.

People frequently complain about that “old person smell.” Mothers often delight in that unique “baby smell.” And sometimes young 20-something guys smell kind of gross (just kidding! Sort of).

But does any of that have a basis in science?

Yes, yes it does. This post will describe the smelly, somewhat weird, yet informative study that proves that your odor might just give away your age (sorry, ladies).

First, researchers at the Monell Center divided participants of the study into three age groups: young (20-30 years old), middle-age (45-55), and old-age (75-95). Each group contained 12-16 individuals.

[Approximation of what the participants looked like.]

So this is where it gets weird. Each of the participants slept for five nights in a row with some kind of armpit pads that were later divided into four parts and put into jars by the researchers. Five nights sleeping with armpit pads.

(I have no idea what armpit pads look like, so let’s go with my best approximation.)

The scientists almost certainly did not use a dagger to cut up the armpit pads, but just go with me here.

Once the armpit pad pieces were placed in glass jars, 41 “young people” (20-30 years old) were given two jars in 9 different combinations and asked to indicate the smell that came from the older person. They also rated the intensity and pleasantness of the odor, and guessed the donor’s age.

And these 20-30 year-old folks were actually able to tell the three different donor age groups apart by smell. In fact, the old people’s odors were the ones that drove the ability to differentiate the ages, and old-people smell was considered less intense and less unpleasant than those of the other groups! Take THAT old-people-smell stigma!

Later on, researchers will try to figure out what molecules in our armpit smells make the odors different, and how our brain is able to figure out those differences. But for now, this is really kind of gross awesome.

Stay nerdy!

Mitro, S., Gordon, A., Olsson, M., & Lundström, J. (2012). The Smell of Age: Perception and Discrimination of Body Odors of Different Ages PLoS ONE, 7 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0038110

Yo.

I have a soft spot for apes. Probably in no small part because I am one. Like, I could watch the movie Dunston Checks In on repeat all day. The film features the most lovable Pongo  (orangutan) managing the cleverest of feats. Seeing this movie should be on everyone’s bucket list. But, I digress.

So, we already know that non-human apes can act in movies. This in itself warrants awe and ponderous reflection. However, if you’re like me, you’ve assumed all your life that apes are intrinsically innocent creatures, who go around grinning, nibbling on bananas, and carrying baby versions of themselves on their backs.

But, even if you’re not like me, you may still be surprised at what the latest science has shown about chimpanzees’ capacity to plan out devious acts ahead of time…. I.e., they’re not just mischievous, they plan ahead and lie in wait to spring their mischief. So maybe Rise of the Planet of the Apes isn’t the most far-fetched movie ever made?

This guy:

In unison now: Awwwww. He looks like all he wants in this world is a jungle gym
and some fruit (I think that goes for us as well). Sure, if you’re at the zoo and you walk by he might throw a little rock or something at you, but where else is he going to get his fun? He just wants to be your friend!

… Or does he?

Research published last week out of Sweden involved watching a captive chimpanzee very, very closely. Here’s the short story of what they concluded: 1) Chimps like throwing things at people (hey, sometimes I do too), 2) Chimps will stockpile projectiles in advance, 3) Chimps will manufacture concealments for these projectiles ahead of time, 4) Chimps will make these hidden stashes right next to the visitor observation area, and 5) Chimps will modify their behavior so they make fewer displays of dominance, i.e., they’ll lull you into a false sense of comfort.

I would like to animate this for you:

I’m not one to tell people how to feel, but you should be impressed. Seriously, I don’t think a human kid could pull that off until he was at least 5 or 6 years old. So, y’know, don’t underestimate the next chimp you meet. He might have more planned for you than just grinning and somersaulting.

Stay nerdy.

P.S. If you liked this post, show love by using the buttons at the bottom! If you like Try Nerdy, use the buttons on the right to Like/Follow us! Thaaanks

 
Osvath, M., & Karvonen, E. (2012). Spontaneous Innovation for Future Deception in a Male Chimpanzee PLoS ONE, 7 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0036782

I'm okay with these kinds of shrooms.

I don’t do shrooms. I don’t advocate for anyone to do shrooms. I know people who have done shrooms, but that’s about it.

I’m talking about mushrooms (aka “magic mushrooms”) containing psychoactive compounds, that people often ingest for recreational purposes.  And so, y’know, over the years as people have regaled me with their shroom-tripping experiences, it’s always something along the lines of “I thought all of the birds were going to attack me!” or “I saw mud people growing out of my living room carpet!”

A) This doesn’t sound fun to me in any way, and B) based on this, I’d assumed that shrooms make people’s brains way too overactive, for them to be experiencing things above and beyond reality.

But, new research says I was wrong about shrooms. Let’s discuss.

Trippy?

From what I previously understood, people would ingest mushrooms, and if they were in a negative state of mind, they’d have a “bad trip.” If they were with friends, with other people tripping, they were more likely to have a “good trip.” Aspects of these trips seemed to include lots of visual and auditory hallucinations: “halos” glowing around light sources, warping colors, maybe some synesthesia.

So I just figured that magic mushrooms must hyper-activate the parts of the brain that perceive color and sound, to the point where people perceive things that aren’t even there.

However, recent research out of the U.K. says that, surprisingly, I’ve got it all backwards. Scientists at the University of Bristol took 30 people and injected them directly with either a saltwater placebo or two milligrams of psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in shrooms. I want to make an aside here: the paper says that “All subjects had previous experience with a hallucinogenic drug but not within 6 wk of the study.” Okay cool, so here’s what I’m imagining:

Within a minute or two, the test subjects started to feel the effects of the psilocybin, and the researchers gave them fMRIs during their trips. Surprisingly to me, and to the scientists, brain activity and blood flow decreased by up to 20% during the influence of the drug, and these decreases were proportional to the reported intensity of the trip! The specific parts of the brain that experienced the suppressed activity and blood flow included the thalamus, the medial prefontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex.

The thought behind this finding is that when people do shrooms, pathways in the brain that would normally restrict cognition are temporarily turned off, allowing people to cognate at higher levels than ever before. Some of these same cognition-restraining pathways are overactive in cases of depression, but I won’t go so far as to suggest shrooms as a treatment for depressive disorders!

In any case, I won’t discourage any research group from trying to find therapeutic value in naturally-occurring psychoactive drugs like psilocybin. In the U.K., at least, mushrooms even rank in as the least harmful drug by some measures:

The brain is already fascinating, and studies like this make it clear that there is a ton of work left to be done in the neuroscience field. The brain is constantly surprising us.

Stay nerdy!

Carhart-Harris RL, Erritzoe D, Williams T, Stone JM, Reed LJ, Colasanti A, Tyacke RJ, Leech R, Malizia AL, Murphy K, Hobden P, Evans J, Feilding A, Wise RG, & Nutt DJ (2012). Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109 (6), 2138-43 PMID: 22308440

How I feel about viruses.

You know what really grinds my gears? The fact that there are people who would tamper with my site, and give it a virus or something. Everything’s fine now, but what gives? Did they get really frustrated when they Googled “great tits” and found a link to my post about the correlations between brain size and sociability? And then instead of just, y’know, closing the tab with my site, they wasted time in their lives (and, ultimately, in mine) to do something purely malicious? “Arg, down with science, RAWR!!!” *Eye roll*

So, for today, I’m going to turn the negative energyaround, and use it as motivation to give you a post all about some different types of biological viruses out there. Because they’re actually incredibly interesting and sci-fi-ish, in that they can take over your cells and use them for their own selfish purposes, even though they’re not technically “alive.” Plus, there’s all sorts of cool new science in the works to outsmart viruses and shut down their operations.

Oh, and one more thing — haters of all kinds (hateful commenters, hateful hackers, and whoever else), well, they may be able to bring down my spirits temporarily, or even bring down my site, but at the end of the day it means I’m awesome enough that somebody got worked up about it.

1. The computer virus. I actually know next to nothing about these, but I want to assume that the people who propagate them look like the guy above.

It's retro, duh.

2. The retrovirus. Ah, the retrovirus, a classic. He’s got a traditional virus structure: a head, where he holds his genetic information, and a tail with tail fibers so he can position himself on certain types of cells. What does he do once he’s in position on the cell? He injects his genetic material into it so that the cell is tricked into encoding more viruses just like the original, until the cell is full of viruses. At this point the cell explodes, releasing lots more retroviruses to repeat the process.

It goes something like this:

At this point, the retrovirus could probably leave if he wanted. The damage has been done. Your cell starts to take those viral genes and make virus parts.

But then things get real…the virus parts assemble. Your cell knows he’s in trouble.

Those viruses just build up in that cell until it’s too much — the cell explodes. The vicious cycle repeats as the new viruses seek out other unsuspecting cells. Assuming these cells are important, this situation really sucks.

(Other viruses don’t have names that lend themselves so easily to parody, I’m sorry.)

[Click here for my depiction of a virus dressed as the Pope.]

2a. The lentivirus (subtype of retroviruses). I have used my powers of foresight to understand that a cartoon of a virus dressed as the Pope (with whom I have no qualms) could be deeply offensive to some readers. However, the “lent” in “lentivirus” makes me think of Catholicism. In any case, a lentivirus is a type of retrovirus, so everything that the retrovirus did above, the lentivirus does as well. The key difference between the two is that lentiviruses take significantly more time before ultimately bursting out of a cell with new viruses, and they can pack tons of viral genes into a host cell.

Model of HIV's structure

A lentivirus you probably know already is HIV! HIV, as in the virus that usually leads to AIDS. HIV hijacks immune cells, and when someone loses too many immune cells, they have acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. This is unfortunate because people with AIDS can die even from simple infections that wouldn’t phase most healthy people. People with HIV infection are often given protease inhibitors, because proteases act as the enzyme that glues all those pieces of viruses together to make functioning viruses.

Marijuana, which is already prescribed to AIDS-sufferers to alleviate pain and increase appetite, has recently been shown to actually inhibit the HIV virus itself in late-stage AIDS patients. The mechanism of how marijuana may be able to help slow or stop the spread of HIV in late-stage AIDS is kind of complex, but a fairly layman’s terms article can be found here.

Ade-no-virus...get it?

3. Adenoviruses. If you can come up with a better witty cartoon for adenoviruses, please let me know. Like, really, leave a comment. Also, it’s pronounced “ad-n-oh-vy-ruhs,” just so you don’t go around talking about “aid-noh-vy-ruhses” and sounding like a noob. The essential feature of adenoviruses is that they don’t have the encasement, or viral envelope, that surrounds the heads of other types of viruses. The viral envelope (found on retroviruses, for example) is just something to help the virus fuse to the surface of a cell, so that the virus can get in easier. This simply means that adenoviruses (which usually cause upper respiratory tract infections) find their way into cells differently than other viruses do, but once they get their genes into the cells, it’s the same tragic story all over again.

An adenovirus looks like this:

My drawing would've been horrible.

And it uses the knobs at the ends of those rod-like things to bind cell receptors and make cells think it’s okay to take the virus in. It’s like the cell gets biologically Punk’d. Except the virus doesn’t come out from backstage at the end and tell the cell it’s not really dead…the cell is dead.

So, as you can see, viruses of any kind, like the ones that hurt your website or the ones that kill you, are no fun. While this post has been a gross oversimplification of viruses and their mechanisms of infection, there’s plenty of reading out there if you want to learn more. And knowing how viruses work is probably the best way to start figuring out how to stop them.

Stay nerdy (And let’s make this post go viral, eh?!)

P.S. Be the hipsterest hipster in town: get Try Nerdy gear from our online store!

Deu E, Verdoes M, & Bogyo M (2012). New approaches for dissecting protease functions to improve probe development and drug discovery. Nature structural & molecular biology, 19 (1), 9-16 PMID: 22218294

Costantino CM, Gupta A, Yewdall AW, Dale BM, Devi LA, & Chen BK (2012). Cannabinoid Receptor 2-Mediated Attenuation of CXCR4-Tropic HIV Infection in Primary CD4+ T Cells. PloS one, 7 (3) PMID: 22448282