People have different ways of dealing with a common cold. Some take over the counter medicines such as aspirin while others try popular home remedies( 治疗 ) like herbal tea or chicken soup.Yet here is the tough truth about the common cold : nothing really cures it. So why do people sometimes believe that their remedies work? According to James Taylor , professor at the University of Washington , colds usually go away on their own in about a week , improving a little each day after symptoms peak , so it's easy to believe it's medicine rather than time that deserves the credit , USA Today reported. It still seems hard to believe that we can deal with more serious diseases yet are powerless against something so common as a cold. Recently , scientists came closer to figure out why. To understand it, you first need to know how antiviral drugs work.They attack the virus by attaching to and changing the suce structures of the virus.To do that , the drug must fit and lock into the virus like the right piece of a jigsaw( 拼图 ) , which means scientists have to identify the virus and build a 3D model to study its suce before they can design an antiviral drug that is effective enough. The two cold viruses that scientists had long known about were rhinovirus( 鼻病毒 ) A and B. But they didn't find out about the existence of a third virus , rhinovirus C , until 2006. All three of them contribute to the common cold , but drugs that work well against rhinovirus A and B have little effect when used against rhinovirus C. “This explains most of the previous failures of drug trials against rhinoviruses , ”study leader Professor Ann C . Palmenberg at the University of Wiscons in­ Madison , US , told Science Daily. Now , more than 10 years after the discovery of rhinovirus C , scientists have finally built a highly detailed 3D model of the virus , showing that the suce of the virus is , as expected , different from that of other cold viruses. With the model in hand , hopefully a real cure for a common cold is on its way. Soon , we may no longer have to waste our money on medicines that don't really work.