Month: November 2021

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  John Cho is perfection as bounty hunter Spike Spiegel. [credit: Netflix ]

It's a daunting task to create a live action series out of one of the most trailblazing, influential anime series of the last 25 years. That would be Cowboy Bebop, a stylish, genre-busting neo-noir space western that earned universal acclaim when it debuted in 1998. Count yours truly among its many admirers. So I had some reservations about Netflix's decision to adapt the original into a live-action streaming series—why mess with perfection?

Diehard purists likely won't be happy; the new series is a different beast. But I found that Netflix's Cowboy Bebop mostly struck a balance between preserving the most beloved elements of the anime and remixing them in fresh, intriguing ways for a new dramatic format. Is it flawless? Hardly. But it's still pretty darn entertaining.

(Spoilers for the 1998 anime series below. Some spoilers for the live-action series, but no major reveals—except for one smallish one at the very end. We'll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Black Friday has become more and more of a misnomer. As we noted when we first started seeing "early Black Friday" sales pop up earlier this month, what started out as a weekend of sales to help people get ahead of their holiday shopping has turned into a weeks-long barrage of breathless promotions.

Nevertheless, with the actual Black Friday arriving this week, various retailers appear to have set many of their Black Friday deals live in earnest. Target, Best Buy, and many more have started explicitly advertising their sales as such, with Amazon and others price-matching many of the better offers.

As usual, though, much of these sales aren't worth your time. Sometimes, a price isn't really a discount; other times, a product is just mediocre. So, to help those who want to get a jump start on their gift-getting, we're poring over every Black Friday sale we can find ("early" or not) and compiling the deals we consider genuinely good, based on price histories, our own testing, and user feedback from around the web.

Enlarge / Herpes viruses getting ready to infect new cells. (credit: Thierry Work, USGS)

One of the defining features of viruses is that they rely on host proteins in order to reproduce. A host cell will often copy viral genes into RNAs and then translate those RNAs into proteins, for example. Typically, a mature virus that's ready to spread to another cell has little more than viral proteins, the virus's genetic material, and maybe some of the host's membrane. It doesn't need much else; all the proteins it needs to reproduce further should be present in the next cell it infects.

But some data released this week may have found an exception to this pattern. Members of the herpesvirus family appear to latch on to a protein in the first cell they infect and then carry this protein along with them to the next cell. This behavior might be helpful because of the normal targets of herpesviruses—neurons, which have a very unusual cell structure.

A long way to the nucleus

Like other viruses, herpesviruses start off by infecting cells that are exposed to the environment. But from there, they move on to nerve cells, where they take up residency, persisting even when there's no overt indications of infection. These infected cells then serve as a launching point for re-establishing active infections, causing lifetime problems for anyone unfortunate enough to have been infected.