Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Rich Condit, Alan Dove, Dickson Despommier, Jeremy Luban, and Gabriel Victora
A large TWiV panel remembers Ralph Steinman, and considers a new innate sensor of retroviral capsids.
Photograph of a dendritic cell (green) interacting with T cells (cyan) near a blood vessel by Gabriel Victora.
Click the arrow above to play, or right-click to download TWiV 157 (90 MB .mp3, 125 minutes).
Subscribe (free): iTunes, RSS, email.
Links for this episode:
- HG Khorana obituary
- DC discovery: four seminal papers (one, two, three, four)
- Ralph Steinman videos from Lasker Award
- TRIM5 is an innate immune retroviral sensor (Nature)
- TWiV on Facebook
- Letters read on TWiV 157
Weekly Science Picks
Dickson – Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss
Rich – Battlestar Galactica
Alan – Coleman LED quad lantern
Gabriel – A History of Immunology by Arthur M. Silverstein
Jeremy – Principles of Virology by Flint, Enquist, Racaniello, Skalka
Vincent – Principles of Molecular Virology by AJ Cann
Listener Pick of the Week
David – Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot (YouTube)
Send your virology questions and comments to twiv@microbe.tv.
I like Alan’s Coleman lantern which leads to thoughts about Joule Thieves or Thief, a thread on the net about pulsed power from “defunct” batteries to run led’s and even Compact Fluorescent Lights. One YouTube video shows use of a high voltage coil from a car, in a circuit that can be tuned, and several CFL’s being run from a used 1.5v battery, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zacait0vgCM , and here’s a small packaged version, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrHA8jefiYc&feature=related . I think the joule thief concept has gone viral. Some proponents are suggesting this is perpetual energy and even couple solar cells to joule-thief-lit led’s to charge the battery that’s powering the led…..! So, anyway, this concept apparently produces very long-running lights even for led devices that are useful in power-deprived areas, like New England – hah. We recently used our garden solar power led’s to save generator fuel in the evening during a power outage of several days! If you could run duplicate lighting circuits for led’s in your house, you could probably light the whole place for a week or two off a car’s 12v battery. And that leads me to suggest The Third Industrial Revolution book by Jeremy Rifkin as a science pick, or you can listen to an interview where he talks about lateral power production at http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail5059.html .
Jim
Smithfield, VA
Vaccines in older people: I’m 70 and the flu vaccine this year and last did not cause a local reaction as it always has in years past. Until this podcast I attributed the reduced reaction to a declining immune system, but it may instead be due to the lower concentration of virus as you guys stated. I think my wife may have seen a reduced reaction, also; I can’t give her age, but she’s 3 years younger!