A therapeutic vaccine has stopped HIV in its tracks.

The vaccine is made from a patient's own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient's own blood. Dendritic cells are crucial to the immune response. They grab foreign bodies in the blood and present them to other immune cells to trigger powerful immune system responses to destroy the foreign invaders.

HIV infection normally turns these important immune system responses off. But animal studies show that when dendritic cells are "loaded" with whole, killed AIDS viruses, they can trigger effective immune responses that keep infected animals from dying of AIDS.

Wei Lu, Jean-Marie Andrieu, and colleagues at the University of Paris in France and Pernambuco Federal University in Recife, Brazil, tested the vaccine on 18 Brazilian patients. All had HIV infection for at least a year. Their T-cell counts -- a crucial measure of AIDS progression -- were dropping, meaning their disease was worsening. None was taking anti-HIV medications.

After getting three under-the-skin injections of the tailor-made vaccine, the amount of HIV in the patients' blood (called the viral load) dropped by 80%. After a year, eight of the 18 patients still had a 90% drop in HIV levels. All patients' T-cell counts stopped dropping.

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Regardless of how they shed pounds in the first place, big losers stayed that way by limiting fat rather than carbohydrates, according to new research that could add fuel to the backlash against low-carb diets.

Dieters already have been turning away from Atkins-style plans as a long-term weight-control strategy, and the new study gives them more reason: Low-fat plans seem to work better at keeping weight off.

"People who started eating more fat ... regained the most weight over time," said Suzanne Phelan, a Brown Medical School psychologist who presented results of the study Monday at a meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity.

The study used the National Weight Control Registry, a decade-old effort to learn the secrets of success from people who had lost at least 30 pounds and kept them off for at least a year. The registry run by doctors from the University of Colorado in Denver, the University of Pittsburgh and Brown University in Providence, R.I.

They studied 2,700 people who entered the registry from 1995 through 2003. Their average age was 47, most were women, and they had lost an average of 72 pounds initially. Doctors compared their diets to see whether one type or another made a difference in how much weight they had lost and how much they had regained a year later.

All reported eating only about 1,400 calories a day, but the portion that came from fat rose — from 24 percent in 1995 to more than 29 percent in 2003 — while the part from carbohydrates fell, from 56 percent to 49 percent.

The number who were on low-carb diets (less than 90 grams a day) rose from 6 percent to 17 percent during the same period.

The type of diet — low-fat, low-carb or in between — made no difference in how people lost weight initially.

But those who increased their fat intake over a year regained the most weight. That meant they ate less carbohydrates, because the amount of protein in their diets stayed the same, Phelan said.

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Using novel electronic aids, vision can be represented on the skin, tongue or through the ears. If the sense of touch is gone from one part of the body, it can be routed to an area where touch sensations are intact. Pilots confused by foggy conditions, in which the horizon disappears, can right their aircraft by monitoring sensations on the tongue or trunk. Surgeons can feel on their tongues the tip of a probe inside a patient's body, enabling precise movements.

Original Article Here

Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printer there that could be used to trace the document back to you.

According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.

Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.

"It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says.

The dots' minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED light--say, from a keychain laser flashlight--on your page and use a magnifier.

Full story available at Yahoo news

Internet pornography is the new crack cocaine, leading to addiction, misogyny, pedophilia, boob jobs and erectile dysfunction, according to clinicians and researchers testifying before a U.S. Senate committee Thursday.

Witnesses before the Senate Commerce Committee's Science, Technology and Space Subcommittee spared no superlative in their description of the negative effects of pornography.

Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Therapy, called porn the "most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today."

"The internet is a perfect drug delivery system because you are anonymous, aroused and have role models for these behaviors," Layden said. "To have drug pumped into your house 24/7, free, and children know how to use it better than grown-ups know how to use it -- it's a perfect delivery system if we want to have a whole generation of young addicts who will never have the drug out of their mind."

Pornography addicts have a more difficult time recovering from their addiction than cocaine addicts, since coke users can get the drug out of their system, but pornographic images stay in the brain forever, Layden said.

Jeffrey Satinover, a psychiatrist and advisor to the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality echoed Layden's concern about the internet and the somatic effects of pornography.

"Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance," Satinover said. "That is, it causes masturbation, which causes release of the naturally occurring opioids. It does what heroin can't do, in effect."


The full article is available here at Wired

There is methane on Mars, scientists have concluded from the latest data. And one group of researchers argue there may be a lot more methane being produced than previously thought.

Methane is of great interest because on Earth, almost all of it comes from living things - everything from rotting plants to bovine flatulence. But there are other possible sources of methane on Mars.

While one researcher, Vladimir Krasnopolsky at Catholic University of America, argued that those other sources are so unlikely that the methane must be biologically produced, most scientists at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, said they are concentrating on the non-biological mechanisms.


Full NewScientist article here

Vegetable soup seems like a healthy meal, and a new study provides even more compelling evidence that it is. Scientists at Tufts University in Boston report that volunteers eating a type of vegetable soup twice a day had lower amounts of stress-related molecules in their blood after just 7 days. The researchers say the beneficial effect was due at least in part to an increase in vitamin C intake.

The results point to other important functions of vitamin C at the molecular level. These functions include a major role in preventing the formation of compounds involved in abnormal inflammation and a biochemical process called oxidative stress, both of which can alter cells in ways that set the stage for chronic diseases.

Full article at sciencenews.org

Fans of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday have launched an advertising blitz pushing for a constitutional change to allow foreign-born citizens to become United States (US) president.

A group dubbed "Amend For Arnold," put together by a supporter of the Austrian-born movie star who helped bankroll his rise to power in California one year ago, launched a series of television ads in the Golden State.

"You cannot choose the land of your birth. You can choose the land you love," said mutual fund manager Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones in the advertisement, which aired on California cable TV stations beginning Monday.

Full iol.co.za article here.

A device that automatically moves electrodes through the brain to seek out the strongest signals is taking the idea of neural implants to a new level. Scary as this sounds, its developers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena say devices like this will be essential if brain implants are ever going to work.

Full article: Moving brain implant seeks out signals

Two teams of scientists have entangled light and matter inside a solid for the first time.