Scientists from Weill Cornell Medical College have developed a new treatment for the Nipah and Hendra viruses — a virus commonly found in South Asia — which cause mortality in 70 to 80 percent of cases, says researchers. The viruses are potential agents of bioterror attacks, but research on them may provide the clue to improving vaccinations for measles, mumps and ebola.

The leaves are falling, the temperature is dropping, and the days are becoming shorter. Flu season has arrived in Ithaca. Prof. Susan Daniel, chemical and biomolecular engineering, researches cell membrane mimics and novel devices for the study of transmembrane species interactions. Such interactions are important for the study of flu viruses, the study of how viruses affect host cells. and subsequently, the study of vaccines.

This is a follow-up to a sun article that ran on Sept. 8, entitled, “The Mysterious Collapse of the American Honeybee.” It’s based on a story reported in the NY Times.

Each year for the past four years, 20 to 40 percent of US honeybee colonies simply disappeared – a phenomenon that became known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). In a major breakthrough, Army scientists in Maryland and bee entomologists in Montana jointly discovered a perfect correlation between diseased colonies and the presence of a virus and the fungus, Nosema ceranae.

Visitors who searched for the term “Cornell University Library” on Google may have been surprised yesterday to find advertisements for anxiety pills rather than the familiar reference and collection lists.

The top search result read, “Order Xanax for next-day express delivery and free consultation by a U.S. licensed medical doctor.”

Further inspection revealed that the Human Ecology Historical Photographs site, hosted on the Cornell University Library's server, displayed a listing for an online drugstore selling Cialis, an erectile dysfunction medicine. Visitors were directed to a site that allowed them to purchase the medicine as well as read testimonials about the product’s “benefits.”

The Information Technologies sent out an alert yesterday advising all individuals on campus to exercise caution when using University computers. In the statement, sent out by Tom Young of I.T. Security, there are three “immediate threats to our computers and networks” — fake video software, hijacked network connections and a work called Conficker that is expected to undergo changes today.

“The I.T. Security Office has noted a large number of computers that became infected with [malicious software] when fake video software was installed,” the I.T. special bulletin read.

In an earlier blog about antivirus programs, I briefly mentioned a malicious program called a rootkit. Make no mistake, rootkits are not something to be taken lightly. If your machine is infected with a rootkit, a hacker can access your computer remotely without your knowledge. And before all the Mac users shout in triumph about how Windows is vulnerable to every kind of exploits on the net, I would just like to make it clear that Macs has been equally susceptible to rootkits for a long time.

When I was a kid, every boy had cooties. Didn’t matter who he was or if we were friends. If a kid had a pee-pee, that kid had cooties. You couldn’t see cooties, and there was no cootie-indicator — it was just that boys had cooties, and girls didn’t, or vice versa. Cooties were a family of germs: microscopic, contagious and dangerous. Worse yet, you only had to touch someone to get them. (Thankfully cooties, at least in my neighborhood, were not airborne pathogens.)

If there are any words that nobody ever wants to hear, they‘re that “you have a virus on your computer”. Just thinking about the word virus sends chills down someone’s spine. While there are genuinely benign viruses that annoy you (the ambulance virus comes to mind), other viruses, such as Trojans that allow others to access your computer, are not so friendly.

So obviously, antivirus programs are a big market that is expected to reach over 9 billion dollars by 2009. However, not all them are the same, and not all of them pack quite the same punch against the nasty little buggers floating around the Internet.