What If?

Carl Zimmer says that children who aren’t exposed to rhinoviruses have more immune disorders as adults. It’s possible that these mild infections serve to train and calibrate our immune systems.

On the other hand, colds suck. And in addition to being unpleasant, some research says infections by these viruses also weaken our immune systems directly and can open us up to further infections.

All in all, I wouldn’t stand in the middle of a desert for five weeks to rid myself of colds forever. But if they ever come up with a rhinovirus vaccine, I’ll be first in line.

These viruses take over the cells in your nose and throat and use them to produce more viruses. After a few days, your immune system notices and destroys it,3 but not before you infect, on average, one other person.4 After you fight off the infection, you are immune to that particular rhinovirus strain—an immunity that lasts for years.

If Sarah put us all in quarantine, the cold viruses we carry would have no fresh hosts to run to.

“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”

Horned lizards shoot jets of blood from their eyes for distances of up to 5 feet. I don’t know why they do this because whenever I reach the phrase “shoot jets of blood from their eyes” in an article I just stop there and stare at it until I need to lie down.

While researching this answer, I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests. The ban-appeal form asked me to explain what task I was performing that necessitated so many queries. I wrote, “Calculating how many rental helium tanks you’d have to carry with you in order to inflate a balloon large enough to act as a parachute and slow your fall from a jet aircraft.”
Sorry, Wolfram.

Avoiding a high-speed landing is, unsurprisingly, the key to survival. As one medical paper put it . . .
It is, of course, obvious that speed, or height of fall, is not in itself injurious . . . but a high rate of change of velocity, such as occurs after a 10 story fall onto concrete, is another matter.
. . . which is just a wordy version of the old saying “It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.”

Reentering spacecraft heat up because they’re compressing the air in front of them (not, as is commonly believed, because of air friction).

n most people, rhinoviruses are fully cleared from the body within about ten days. The story is different for those with severely weakened immune systems. In transplant patients, for example, whose immune systems have been artificially suppressed, common infections—including rhinoviruses—can linger for weeks, months, or conceivably years.

This small group of immunocompromised people would serve as safe havens for rhinoviruses. The hope of eradicating them is slim; they would need to survive in only a few hosts in order to sweep out and retake the world.

Unfortunately, there’s one catch, and it’s enough to unravel the whole plan: We don’t all have healthy immune systems.

If rhinoviruses don’t have enough humans to move between, they die out.