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The way you react to stress influences are much you’ll resist or succumb to disease, including HIV, and shy people are more susceptible to infection than outgoing people.UCLA’s Steve Cole says, “Since ancient Greece, physicians have noticed that persons with a ‘melancholic temperament’ are more vulnerable to viral infections.”

“During the AIDS epidemic, researchers found that introverted people got sick and died sooner than extroverted people,” says Bruce Naliboff. “Our study pinpoints the biological mechanism that connects personality and disease.”
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This Christmas, as with every holiday season, we’re bombarded with ads and find ourselves succumbing and buying things we didn’t think we wanted. Now the organization Commercial Alert says universities are using their medical equipment and research funds in neuromarketing experiments, to figure out how to push consumers’ “buy buttons.”

They accuse Emory university of using their MRIs “to identify patterns of brain activity that reveal how a consumer is actually evaluating a product, object or advertisement?and then apply this knowledge to help marketers better create products and services and to design more effective marketing campaigns.”
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An Australian researcher has discovered that all snakes have poisonous venom, including pet snakes that are considered harmless. Bryan Fry says, “We even isolated from a rat snake, a snake common in pet stores, a typical cobra-style neurotoxin, one that is as potent as comparative toxins found in close relatives of the cobra.”

Fry discovered this by studying the evolutionary history of venomous snakes. He wanted to find out when snakes developed this means of protection and found that it only developed once, about 60 million years ago, which is millions of years earlier than scientists previously thought. This was before the snakes we think of as non-venomous arrived on the scene, meaning that all snakes actually contain dangerous venom.
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Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) spreads so quickly and is so hard to treat, despite being related to the common cold, because it’s formed from a rare combination of mammalian and avian viruses. That makes it unrecognizable by human immune systems.

Geneticist David Guttman found that the proteins on the left side of the virus comes from mammals, such as cats, cows and mice, while the proteins on the right come from birds, such as chickens and ducks. The middle part of the virus is a mix of both.

Our immune systems would usually recognize a coronavirus of bird origin, as most flu is, and start fighting it immediately. However, the part of it that originated with mammals allows it to sneak past our immune systems.
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