Nerdgasm: Science Edition

Hello to you, my hyper-cephalized companions!

Welcome to a long due "It Came from The Interwebz"!  I know that most of you were expecting, perhaps, a Thanksgiving blog, but I really have nothing to say about such a lukewarm holiday.  Warm and fuzzies do not make funny blogs, nor interesting reading material for you all.  SO INSTEAD we're going to talk about a virus that killed 5% of the world population, among other super cheery topics related to mad science, k? ^_^

It's like I was made for this or something.

Universal Flu Vaccine
Alright, so let's explain why you have been seeing things about epidemic and pandemic disease left and right.  I've been researching the Influenza pandemic of 1918 for the past 6+ months in the hope of writing a historical fiction novel.  Woot.  So now that you know, on to the nerdity!

MUST RESIST PAIN!!

The University of Texas released this month that they had synthesized and successfully tested a universal flu vaccine---that is, a vaccine that will kill every strain of flu out there.  How does this black magic work, ye ask?  Well, it sure doesn't target the virus itself.  What it does instead is to increase the amount of a certain protein (REDD1) in our cells.  Among torrential downpours of scientific terminology and a sea of statistical p-values, I have figured out that scientists believe that in low concentrations, influenza can do some weird shenanigans called "RNA-silencing" which I think (squint-point) means that it lulls our immune system to sleep for a bit while it wrecks havoc.  Now, increasing the protein is all well and good for flu, but we have these things called Natural Killer T-Cells (NK's) that attack body cells that no longer display the right protein signal.  Obviously, since these NK's don't have sentience, whatever is going on to trigger their reactions has got to be purely chemical.  If we go messing abouts with the guts of our cells, what the hell is this gonna do?  Shit, man, this could be a whole new breed of suicide.  Or the vaccine will give us cancer.  Just like everything else.  Full article here.

The BEST. MEME. EVER.
Yes, my dear nerdy-pants, I will admit that I keep up with the meme-world.  Don't hate.  I'm not on 4chan or Reddit (yet).  I find most memes stupid, barely amusing.  The last I really enjoyed was almost a half a year ago, which were the Inception comics.  But there is a new player in this game of brain-jelly, and his name is CHEMISTRY CAT.  Behold this beautiful, shining product of the interwebz:

Do you know what I have to say about this?  Bring on the science puns.  We need more of them in this world.  I think the beauty of Chem Cat is that the jokes are so accessible.  Some of them are quite advanced, though, like "What do neutrinos and I have in common?  We've both penetrated your mom."  (Click here for an explanation of neutrinos, which are pretty dang cool.)  However, most of these gags are quirky puns based on the Periodic Table, even some simple inorganic concepts that most students have been exposed to.  I'm in full support of this.

I Love My Facebook Friends (view full size)

Science: Giving Me Nightmares Since 1991
Within the last month or two, there was yet another expedition down to the nether-regions of the Mariana Trench.  And of course, instead of funding the cure for cancer, we fund discoveries of weird-ass shit that will give me nightmares.  The horror this time around?  HUGE-ASS AMOEBAS.
This thing is quite literally the size of a mango, and it's only one cell.  Isn't that fucking insane?!  One cell!  I mean...it looks like a head of lettuce, granted, but I am getting flashbacks to The Blob with this thing.  I'm having horrible images of this thing swallowing puppies whole and having them disintegrate alive within its acidic jelly-like contents.  Movie producers, that was me telling you what your next blockbuster hit is going to be about.  Everyone else, I think I just told you why I'm going to hell.  Full article and video here.

Blog-Whoring: Agraphia Medical Tragicomedy

Lastly, I have to give a shout-out to a blog that I StumbledUpon recently.  This is all about stories from the ER told from an ER doc's perspective, and there is some funny shit there.  If you like my humor, you will like his.  He also gives an endearingly honest account of what it is like to work in a hospital as a resident med student.  You will, however, essentially learn the same thing from both magical portals of ultimate knowledge: there will never EVER be a shortage of stupid-ass people who will be available to do things to themselves in novel, HILARIOUS ways for us to make fun of.

Until next time, dweebs <3