It baffles me that 182 people have upvoted this. I must really be out-of-touch with a large portion of the HN audience because not a word of this report makes sense to me. What's the deal? And what introductory books (or blogs) would HN suggest so this actually makes my brain go "oh, that's neat"?
Search for 'What is a viral infection?', read down from there to '1. Attachment' and make sure to expand the help tip on that one.
From a 30 sec scan of the article, this is about a specific virus' preferential binding to a site that is expressed in many cancer tumors (anthrax toxin receptor 1, ANTXR1).
This would allow viral-driven targeting of those cells (and few others), one of the hardest problems in oncology. You can't hit what you can't find, or you have to soak the entire body in enough toxic chemicals (chemo) to ensure it reaches the tumor cells.
As with many things in microbiology, it seems we knew this virus could preferentially target cancerous tumors. But we didn't know precisely why (aka "the mechanism") or how. This paper is proposing an answer to that question.
Microbiology is essentially the study of how to build 3d puzzles with chemistry and physics. Doing that is hard.
I'd highly recommend learning the basics of biology at the microbiology and biochemical levels. It's a fascinating world, helps explain everyday macro-medicine (read: what a doctor tells you), and I've found a surprising number of useful parallels in computing systems design.
(Correct me if I'm off on anything, it's been a while since microbiology)
HN crowd is more diverse in skills and professions that it would seem at first glance, and even more diverse in interests. Personally, I frequently upvote things I don't understand well, just to keep them on the front page longer, to maximize the chance that someone with the necessary knowledge posts a comment with an explanation or tangent that I can understand.
