Researchers at the University of Leeds report that kissing plays an important role in human reproduction. It's not just that kissing can eventually lead to the reproductive act; it's the germs that come with that comes with swapping spit. Perhaps most importantly, when a man kisses a female partner, he passes a small amount of his cytomegalovirus to her. If the cytomegalovirus is introduced into a woman's system during pregnancy, it can damage or even potentially kill the fetus. But, if a woman kisses the same partner repeatedly, she eventually develops an immunity to his particular cytomegalovirus, decreasing the chances of infection during pregnancy. The study authors say that six months of kissing should yield optimum immunity.

It's just as well, then, that the whole cootie shot thing was a sham.

[Daily Mail via Popular Science]

New Scientist reports on new research carried out by a team at Budapest's Eötvös Loránd University, which crossreferenced the love lives of ducks with outbreaks of bird flu, and found something surprising:

When the researchers compared data on the prevalence of low-pathogenic bird flu strains in different duck species with what is known about the anatomy of duck reproductive parts and mating behaviour, they found that ducks with the smallest penises and tamest sex lives had the highest flu levels.

"This is intriguing and a bit counter-intuitive because a long phallus prolongs copulation, and forced copulations characteristic to species with a large phallus should further promote virus transfer," says [head researcher Gergely] Hegyi.

The reason behind this may come from the evolutionary process of female ducks, according to Hegyi:

Long and elaborate vaginas may hinder unwanted fertilisation but may also make it difficult for viruses acquired during copulation to reach the site of egg formation.

With this new information known, two new questions arise: Will this help scientists track the progress of avian flu, and perhaps more immediately, how quickly will someone come up with a joke about birdfucking?

First evidence that bird flu is spread sexually [New Scientist]

The Strain began life as a television pitch, but when Guillermo del Toro delivered his idea for a realistic story of vampire pandemic, complete with long, complex character arcs and anal parasites, Fox execs wanted a show that was more Buffy than an undead version of The Wire. When they asked him to turn his idea into a comedy, del Toro teamed up with author Chuck Hogan to rework The Strain as a trilogy of novels.

But now, a The Strain television series is back on the table. Variety reports that Grady Twins Productions, a production company started by Marti Noxon and Dawn Parouse Olmstead, is working with del Toro and Hogan to develop a three season series, which they plan to shop early next year.

It's perhaps ironic, given that Noxon was a writer and executive producer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was the sort of vampire dramedy Fox likely had in mind, not to mention a show we ourselves have accused of defanging the vampire genre. But Noxon, whose writing and production credits include the slow-burning Mad Men, is certainly no stranger to smart writing and gradually developing character arcs, and can hopefully deliver the over-the-top mania and horror del Toro's work demands.

[Variety]

Because Marburg has such a short incubation period, it's unlikely last year's exposures could lead to an outbreak. Anyone exposed to the virus would most likely have gotten sick last year when the patient was treated.

via Seattle Times

Donald Sutherland tries to convince an alien intelligence he's the "dominant lifeform," and gets turned into a hulking half-robot for his pains. Jamie Lee Curtis learns that in the battle between cyborgs and wooden chairs, cyborgs will always win.

Gale Ann Hurd (Terminator, Aliens, Armageddon) produced this somewhat muddled alien scavenger-at-sea tale, and you can definitely see the trademark Hurd horror in all the scenes of people's brains getting carved out and bodies getting turned into extra machine junctions. It's directed by John Bruno, who's not surprisingly a special effects expert who won an Oscar for his work on The Abyss. [IMDB]

Vampirism as a Virus

Given that conditions like tuberculosis and porphyria are likely inspirations for the vampire myth, it’s not surprising that the most common way writers introduce vamps into science fiction is through disease. Books like Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps carefully plot the nature of the vampiric germ, whose cannibalistic victims wreak havoc on the populace, and action flop Ultraviolet centers around a government-created supersoldier virus that escapes into the civilian population.

But does it work? It can, but results often fall to one genre or the other. Both Matheson and Westerfeld take great pains to describe how disease could cause the classic vampiric traits – even suggesting psychological explanations for the bloodsuckers’ aversion to religious symbols. And Matheson’s book succeeds as both an apocalyptic narrative – humanity decimated and transformed by pathogen – and an inversion of the vampire myth. But Westerfeld’s bloodthirsty peeps, despite their similar grounding in science, occupy an otherwise typical urban fantasy of monsters and the agents who hunt them. Conversely, Ultraviolet is set in a technologically advanced future, but its hemophagic affliction is simply a pretense for giving Milla Jovovich superpowers.

Vampires as Aliens

When you encounter life on a distant planet, you don’t expect humans to be its favorite food. But it happens all the time. Robert Darvel, the engineer hero of Gustave Le Rouge’s Mars series, finds the Red Planet inhabited by bat-winged beings hungry for his blood. And a trip through the Stargate brings the Atlantis expedition face-to-face with the Wraith, creatures so dependent on human energy for sustenance that they maintain breeding farms.

But does it work? Actually, it works quite well. Despite substituting extraterrestrials for the undead, these stories capture a key essence of the vampire myth: that nagging feeling that we may not be on top of the food chain. And, while we hope first contact will bring us to a benevolent and enlightened race, these stories play neatly to our fear of ending up in a warming tray at some intergalactic buffet.

Vampires in the Future

What if vampires exist, but they’re lying in wait? A nuclear holocaust, a few world-shattering wars, and they’ll rise up to snatch global supremacy from the human race. Dystopian futures are bad enough without having to worry that someone’s going to take a chunk out your neck.

But does it work? Perhaps. The post-apocalyptic world of the Vampire Hunter D films is alternately so gothic and so alien that, despite its cybernetic horses, rocket ships, and atomic mutants, it is ultimately fantastical rather than speculative. But Fray, Joss Whedon’s futuristic expansion of the Buffyverse, has a sci-fi edge: it takes place in universe its audience already knows, a world much like our own, but with demons and better dialogue. Vampires retain their mystical elements, but technology has advanced even as hellspawn threaten to overrun the Earth. Fantasy and science fiction operate in tandem, so that Melaka Fray battles the undead as well as the biologically enhanced living, and is as handy with a scythe as with her retro ray gun.

Vampiric Technology

But to be truly successful sci-fi, vampires shouldn’t merely exist alongside superweapons and flying cars; they should use technology to suit their own uniquely vampiric needs. The Ina of Octavia Butler’s The Fledgling experiment with genetic manipulation, introducing African human genes to increase their resistance to sunlight. And in True Blood, humanity learns of the existence of vampires only when perfected synthetic blood frees vamps from their dependence on warm bodies.

But does it work? It turns out that fangs and tech can mix. Butler uses her biological vampires in much the same way she uses aliens and time travel – to explore themes of race, intimacy, and domination. But beyond that, her vampires present an allegory for the possible benefits and social consequences of altering our DNA. And while the synthetic blood beverage will likely be the major technological advance of True Blood, it does serve as an object lesson in the ways that technology reveals surprising truths about the world in which we live.

We love a good science fiction story, but sometimes reality is just as strange. While we may have seen 2001 come and go without an actual space odyssey, the last eight years have been full of events that - had they not actually happened - could easily pass for science fiction. Here are five real life events that still seem like they've come straight from the set-up of a big budget summer blockbuster.

Estonian Cyberwar: It may not have been the biggest cyber attack ever, but it's probably the strangest. Last year, Russian hackers got so ticked off when the tiny nation of Estonia digs up the remains of Soviet war heroes that they shut down Estonian newspapers, banks, and practically the entire government by using denial of service attacks on a huge scale. It's still unknown whether the culprits had help from the Kremlin as some have suggested, but given Russia's staggeringly large population of hackers it's not impossible that the crippling shutdown of an entire country was perpetrated by independent citizens. And you thought Live Free Or Die Hard was far-fetched.

CERN: You need only look at pictures from inside the Large Hadron Collider to realize the incredible, science fictional scale of the apparatus. The story of this machine has all the makings of a hard SF story: particles accelerating to truly dangerous energies as they swoop under the border of France and Switzerland, scientists eager to confirm their various theories and discover new, ever more ephemeral particles, and of course the ever present worries that the European research organization’s experiments will blow up the world! All we need to complete the set-up is some rogue scientist who plans to use the invention to hold the world to ransom and a sexy spy out to stop them.

Space Tourism: Movies and television have long promised that space travel will eventually be available to private citizens, but the real-life development of space tourism had been agonizingly slow until recently. Now, however, aspiring astronauts can book a weeklong stay at the International Space Station for around $20 million, or take advantage of offers to shoot you around the moon for a mere $100 million. Plus, it always helps to have an eccentric billionaire like Sir Richard Branson in the mix. Maybe he can work on bringing the price down for those of us who don't have a few million lying around.

SARS, bird flu, and the other near-pandemics: Outbreaks of crazy viruses have long been an SF favorite, and even though this century has conspicuously zombie-free - so far - we have had some pretty worrying scares. It isn’t hard to imagine race-the-clock medical thrillers hidden amongst the investigations, all those mysterious men in yellow hazmat suits, the mass slaughtering of potentially infected poultry, et al. We just see the headlines, of course; there could be dozens of extraordinarily science fictional stories hidden in the 21st century, and we might never know. Who's to say that A&E's The Andromeda Strain wasn't just a particularly well-lit documentary?

9/11: Yes, I know, but hear me out: Though the reality of it is all to apparent now, before 2001 the idea of nineteen guys armed with little more than box cutters and a plan causing so much destruction and changing the world so easily would have seemed a bit unbelievable even as the stuff of Hollywood. Science fiction tends to imagine and speculate about things that have never happened before, changes the world has never seen. 9/11 was, for most of us, precisely that sort of unexpected in the most horrific way possible.

Based on a popular Spanish horror film, Quarantine looks like it's loaded with stir-crazy residents willing to face a hail of government gun fire over being stuck in a building with a vampire virus. While the fake reporter video could get old, I'm always excited for a virus that changes the human form and most importantly doesn't omit kids or animals from its infectious path. Did you see the creepy half-naked vampire kid? Shudders. Quarantine will be out October 17, 2008.

According to a release about the new study:

[Medical researcher Dr. Stephen] Barr's team finds the results very exciting because it shows our bodies have a gene that is capable of stopping the spread of HIV. They are now trying to figure out why this gene does not work in people infected with HIV and if there is a way to turn this gene on in those individuals. "We hope that our research will lead to the design of new drugs and/or vaccines that can halt the person-to-person transmission of HIV and the spread of the virus in the body, thereby blocking the onset of AIDS."

There are always newly emerging drug-resistant strains of HIV so the push has been to develop more natural means of blocking the virus. The discovery of this gene, which is natural in our cells, might provide a different avenue. The gene prevents the assembly of the virus so in the future the idea would be to develop drugs or vaccines that can mimic the effects of this gene.

Researchers discover gene that blocks HIV [Eurekalert and Scienceblogs]

Apparently the Earth's plants begin rebelling against mankind, and start releasing neurotoxins that cause everyone to go wacky and turn into lemmings. So all of that animal love and peace and harmony that vegetarians have been preaching to us for years will come back to bite them on the ass. Marky Mark takes his family on the run, runs into Zooey Deschanel while avoiding suicidal drivers, and there's undoubtedly some big twist at the end, like plants are sentient and have been screaming at us to stop eating salad for years. We just haven't heard them.

In the case of this new study, published recently in Nature, scientists were able to deliver tiny snippets of RNA to brain cells that "interfered" with genes that were malfunctioning and forming tumors. Virus shell drug delivery is particularly cool because the shells can go beyond the blood-brain barrier right into the cell. Most conventional drugs rely on blood vessels to get to the right spot, which is a problem if you're trying to reach an area that isn't easily accessed by blood vessels, or is only served by extremely tiny ones that may not be big enough to admit drug molecules.

Using rabies to deliver drugs to the brain [BoingBoing]

I Am Legend concept art from Warner Bros.

So much of the look of I Am Legend was outdoors. How much of that was designed in advance?

We illustrated it or key-framed it. It was an illustration of the area that we were dressing. We conceptualized how much we could visually do practically, and how it was going to be augmented in the computer.

Some of the concept art sketches look very painterly, especially the evacuation scenes.

Some of the early concepts were ... entirely created as an illustration, and then as we found the practical location, we took a picture of the location and augmented the location, and added what we needed to add to it. And altered the sky and added a grainier texture to the look.

Did you watch Omega Man?

A little bit. There was the original, with Vincent Price, and then Omega Man. It was kind of a take on both of them. But also the director Francis Lawrence wanted to make it feel like it was three years later, but it was not an apocalyptic environment. But nature takes over.

Some of the original concept art looks really bombed out. There are buildings that are just skeletons of metal.

As I came on... it was [decided] not to look so apocalyptic. It was kind of a mixture, [with] a hint of what happened in the midst of the chaos, and then nature taking over. It's been three years since the virus and the town has been blocked out. So rather than having it like Omega Man, with the streets littered with trash and stuff... things are biodegradable. Nature takes over, cleans and moves things around.

Parts of it are quite idyllic and beautiful. What was the reason for deciding to make it look less post-apocalyptic?

Not to look like all the others, and also it's a combination of rather than being him in this post-apocalyptic world, it's the natural world taking over. Nature's evolving.

Did you have anything to do with designing the mutants?

A little bit. Originally the concept was to do it live action, and there was a lot of pre-concept work done early on. And then as it didn't quite play out [as] they wanted it to. It became part of the digital world. So I was involved in some of the meetings [about] how to make the creatures or monsters still human, but a little more defined in its body structure and a little more elongated.

Did the original production designer leave because of the decision to make the film look less post-apocalyptic?

Oh no. No, not at all. It just had to do with personal family stuff.

So what are you working on now?

I'm working on Fast And The Furious 4.

• Planet of the Apes: Probably the most famous image from this film is ol' Chuck Heston riding up the beach and finding the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand, which means New York City is buried under a ton of coastline. "You blew it all up. You really did it. Damn you... goddamn you all to hell!" Sorry, Charlie.
• Escape From New York: While there's still a few people kicking it around New York, Manhattan has been turned into a maximum security prison, and of course they haven't been kind to the Statue of Liberty either. Director John Carpenter shot the film in St. Louis, Missouri and was able to convince city officials to turn off the power to ten city blocks each night to simulate the desolate city.
• Independence Day: New York City is bustling and full of life... until a giant flying saucer comes and zaps the place to hell. As expected, the Statue of Liberty buys it in this one, although it just looks like she might be taking a nap in the Hudson River, but the city didn't look fare quite so well.
• Deep Impact: New York City gets taken out by chunks of a comet that has been split in two in this 1998 movie. Several other U.S. cities supposedly get decimated as well, but it's Manhattan that we see getting blasted. A tidal wave created by the impact also takes out the Statue of Liberty, and pushes her head through the streets like a giant pinball.
• Armageddon: Two months after Deep Impact, Armageddon slammed into theaters, taking a good sized chunk of New York City with it. While the Statue of Liberty's plight isn't shown, we do get to witness the top of the Empire State Building coming off and slamming into the streets and bringing the observation level down to the ground floor. What a view.
• Artificial Intelligence: A.I.: Even the combined might of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg couldn't manage to put any intelligence into this film about artificial intelligence, nor could they save New York City from being flooded and smashed up like some child's Lego toyset. Although bonus points for having the Statue of Liberty survive, even though she's buried underwater up to her torch.
• Vanilla Sky: Tom Cruise wakes up to a bad day where he's the last person in New York City, resulting in a pretty spectacular shot in a desolate Times Square. The production was given unprecedented access to the location for filming, and the city let them shut everything down and empty it out one early Sunday morning just for this scene.
• The Day After Tomorrow: Director Roland Emmerich wasn't satisfied with blowing New York City to smithereens in Independence Day, so he decided to give the place a good going over in this film. New York gets battered by tidal waves, flooded, and then frozen to absolute zero in order to show you the dangers of global warming. Even the Statue of Liberty gets iced with sideways icicles.
• Cloverfield: All we know about this J.J. Abrams-produced movie is that some sort of giant creature starts tearing the city apart, and the Army tries to fight back. Plus, the thing whacks the heads off of Lady Liberty, and it goes sliding down a city street taking out cabs. For a thing built in 1886, she sure is pretty damned resilient.

Apparently star Andre Braugher isn't a big fan of the novel, "Crichton's book doesn't hold up to the test of time and so not much happens. When you go back to 1968 and read that book it's anti-climactic, period, so this is a re-telling of the story with the same premise." Let's hope fans of the novel aren't rankled too much by that. As long as he's nitpicking, he might as well say that the 1971 film based on the same novel doesn't hold up that well either. What's going to make their version so much better?

He's very stingy with the details, and basically only tells us that he's playing the military man who is brought in to deal with the situation, while Benjamin Bratt plays the "hot-headed scientist" who is trying to track down the virus. Does Benjamin Bratt have any roles where he isn't hot-headed? According to Braugher, the film will have some elements of Sphere in it (please dear god, let him mean the novel and not the awful movie version), and promises that the virus won't be benign as it is in the novel, but will be "malignant and on the loose."

Hear that folks? It's another "rampant virus on the loose" sci fi tale. Steel yourselves, and think about investing in a hazmat suit.

Braugher on Strain [Bloody Disgusting]