Month: March 2019

Enlarge (credit: Mike Mozart / Flickr)

Our bodies are good at generating extremely specific antibodies, targeting a single pathogen among a dizzying mix of harmless bacteria and the proteins made by our own cells. But in some cases, like the flu virus, that specificity is limiting. Those antibodies will generally pick out a very specific strain of the flu virus, leaving us vulnerable to other strains and the new variants that evolve each season.

In recent years, however, it has become apparent that the immune system sometimes gets wildly lucky by generating a single antibody that can neutralize a huge range of viruses. These "broadly neutralizing antibodies" provide a significant protection against viruses that the immune system normally struggles against, like HIV, Ebola, and the flu virus. Mass production of these antibodies might provide a useful therapy, and the hope is that we can incorporate what they tell us into the design of future vaccines for these pathogens.

But some clever researchers have figured out how to use a broadly neutralizing antibody as a tool to design a drug that can block the activity of a large range of flu viruses.

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One of the greatest fears when Microsoft announced that it was ditching its EdgeHTML rendering engine and switching to Chromium—the open source engine that powers Google's Chrome, along with a range of others such as Vivaldi, Brave, and Opera—is that Web developers would increasingly take the easy way out and limit their support and testing to Chrome. That would leave Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and any other browsers, present or future, out of the fun.

This is, after all, substantially what we saw during Internet Explorer's heyday. Microsoft's browser grew to about 95 percent of the market, and wide swathes of the Web proudly announced that they were "best viewed in Internet Explorer," often to the point of not working at all in any other browser. IE's hegemony presented an enormous challenge for the upstart Firefox browser, which wa built to support Web standards rather than Microsoft's particular spin on those standards. Though Internet Explorer was eventually displaced—by Chrome—this arguably would have gone much quicker if developers had been less fixated on Microsoft's browser.

Last week, Microsoft made a major update to the Web version of its Skype client, bringing HD video calling, call recording, and other features already found on the other clients.

Enlarge / Daniel Ricciardo is one of the best drivers in F1, and he absolutely shines in Formula 1: Drive to Survive, a new 10-part documentary on Netflix. (credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

For much of this century, the sport of Formula 1 was trapped in amber. Its owners were more interested in sucking out profits than reinvesting them. As a result, the sport's management was able to ignore the Internet for as long as possible, a fad that would soon surely die. But in 2017 Liberty Media bought F1 from the vultures, with a promise to embrace the Internet, not ignore it. And it has. F1's YouTube content is great, and the sport got a bit more tolerant to people sharing their experiences on social media. Last year, Formula 1 launched a streaming platform in markets where TV contracts made that permissible. And now, F1 is on Netflix.

Formula 1: Drive to Survive is a 10-part series from the producer of the documentaries Senna and Amy. It's officially blessed, which means cameras got access to everything in a sport that has spent years redefining the art of keeping people out. The series follows F1 across the 2018 season, one that I think was better than most of the recent hybrid era what with two teams vying for the title. Don't expect to see much of that story, though. When Liberty asked all the teams to take part, Mercedes and Ferrari told them to pound sand.

That means no Lewis Hamilton trolling his haters or Vettel talking about pressure and unforced errors. Their loss is the rest of the sport's gain, and the show is better because of it. Daniel Ricciardo shines, swearing like a trooper along the way. As does Guenther Steiner, the similarly foul-mouthed team principal for Haas, the sole American team in the sport. The title makes plenty of sense: each episode, we get a new example of the pressure one can feel at the leading edge of motorsport.

Enlarge / John Oliver talking about FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. (credit: HBO)

Comedian John Oliver is taking aim at the Federal Communications Commission again, this time demanding action on robocalls while unleashing his own wave of robocalls against FCC commissioners.

In a 17-minute segment yesterday on HBO's Last Week Tonight, Oliver described the scourge of robocalls and blamed Pai for not doing more to stop them. Oliver ended the segment by announcing that he and his staff are sending robocalls every 90 minutes to all five FCC commissioners.

"Hi FCC, this is John from customer service," Oliver's recorded voice says on the call. "Congratulations, you've just won a chance to lower robocalls in America today... robocalls are incredibly annoying, and the person who can stop them is you! Talk to you again in 90 minutes—here's some bagpipe music."