(photo courtesy hivresearch.org)

Rare Encouraging News in HIV and Parkinson’s Disease

HIV/AIDS and Parkinson’s Disease are two areas of medical research where good news is hard to come by, as researchers encounter countless setbacks in trying to translate promising laboratory findings into clinical practice. Both diseases have seen progress in the past decade in ex post facto treatments - preventing the maturity of HIV into AIDS with antiretroviral treatment or reducing the motor symptoms associated with Parkinson’s. But drugs that seemed to offer a cure for either disease, or in the case of Parkinson’s a mere brake to the progression of symptoms, have consistently disappointed in human trials.

That changed - slightly - this week, as two highly-publicized studies were published offering faint glimmers of hope on both disease fronts. Grabbing the most headlines was the first-ever demonstration of a successful HIV vaccine in a study conducted in Thailand but funded by the U.S. Army and the National Institutes of Health. The caveats are flying hot and heavy - the researchers saw only a 31% decrease in the number of HIV cases after treatment with a vaccine and a booster drug, one of the HIV strains protected against is specific to southeast Asia, and mystery lingers over why this particular combination of drugs was protective where so many others have failed. The two drugs used in the Thai trial - one a “primer” and one a “booster” - had themselves failed in previous large clinical trials. But the first small success in protecting against the deadly virus nevertheless encouraged many HIV/AIDS researchers; Dan Barouch, an immunologist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, told Nature “It’s the largest step forward that’s ever occurred in the HIV-vaccine field, but there’s a tremendous amount of more work that will need to be done.”

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A three-dimensional image of a "BK" cellular ion channel (Yale University/Futurity)

I apologize for the lack of a Linkage post last Friday - instead of blogging, your editors were learning about Chicago’s downtown architecture as we floated along the green if not Green Chicago River on one of summer’s final days. But like the reversed flow of that waterway, the science never stops, and last week saw the official launch of a new source for science news: Futurity.

Disclosure alert: the University of Chicago is one of the contributors to Futurity’s content, and our esteemed paleontologist Paul Sereno’s new “punk-size” T-Rex spent much of last week as the site’s featured story. But as both producers and consumers of science writing, we’re genuinely excited about the site, which will aggregate articles from an initial pool of 39 universities in an attempt to the gap left by shrinking science and medicine staffs at newspapers and television stations. With reduced space and time for science stories in the mainstream media, the news offices of these universities have taken it upon themselves to bring their science to the public directly, sometimes by employing refugees from those very same shrinking science staffs.

Yes, that largely means publishing press releases, though it must be said that many press releases are now themselves written and laid out like a news article, with an eye-catching lead, quotes from researchers and outside sources, historical perspective and photo or graphic art. Sites like ScienceDaily and Eurekalert are well-known depositories for these releases, but can be sensory overload for the casual reader with hundreds of new releases posted to the site each day. Futurity looks like it will filter out some of the noise and present the most exciting research in an aesthetically pleasing manner, with the hope that general audience readers, not just other science journalists and news office personnel, will find it entertaining and informative.

The site had a soft launch in the spring and went full-on live last Tuesday, so there’s already been a bit of attention paid to it by sites such as Inside Higher Ed, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Columbia Journalism Review. Skeptics note, appropriately, that there is a certain preaching-to-the-niche quality, where only people actively seeking out science news will be exposed to science news. But through deals with wider-audience news aggregators like Google and Yahoo!, the hope is that a casual reader will be distracted by interesting science news on their way to sports scores or celebrity gossip, just like they used to do in a newspaper.

Here are a few of the Futurity stories that caught our eye in the website’s opening week:

• Scientists cure color blindness in monkeys with a human gene (University of Washington)
• Using Legos to model nanobiology (Johns Hopkins)
• Thin, overeating friends can inspire unhealthy eating behavior (Duke; with a slick YouTube video that makes us very envious)
• Using trees to generate electricity (University of Washington)
• An “open-source” camera with a brilliant name: Frankencamera (Stanford)

Our weekly roundup of science news from around the world that doesn’t easily fit anywhere else.

A cuscus. Crazy. (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Wild Kingdom Gets Weirder

If you’re a fan of weird animal stories, this was a week for you. First, there was the discovery of a never-before-seen giant rat and about 40 other unidentified species by a group of British and American scientists in a volcano crater on the island of Papua New Guinea (they also stumbled upon Doria’s tree kangaroos and cuscuses while they were at it; adorable photo gallery here). Christened the Bosavi woolly rat, it’s 32 inches long and 3.5 pounds, and was completely friendly to humans, having never really seen them before.

Then a report came out in Biology Letters about a group of birds called tits in Hungary that were forced to add an unusual menu item when food became scarce: bats. These cute little birds apparently get on a real mean streak when they’re hungry, attacking hibernating bats (small ones - only 4cm) and dragging them out of their caves for dinner. The paper’s authors found that the tits (okay, stop giggling) would only go for bat meals when other food wasn’t available, which they proved by satiating the carnivorous birds with…bacon. I’d provide some more links on this story, but it’s not exactly the kind of topic you want to be caught Googling at work.

Finally, in a study that will probably end up on some politician’s pork-barrel list, NASA revealed this week they can now make mice float with magnets. The superconducting magnet is powerful enough to use a mouse’s natural water content to cause its entire body to float, an unusual sensation that the mice apparently get used to fairly quickly (3-4 hours). Why levitate mice? To study the effects of microgravity on astronauts, of course, though Switched points out rightly that NASA has already been bringing rodents for ride-alongs into space for decades. Alas, there is nary a video of levitating mice to be found, and the article is accompanied only by terrible overhead pictures. C’mon, NASA. read more

Our weekly roundup of interesting science from around the web:

"All the physicists in the house say yeah-yuh!" (courtesy Fermilab)

Where the Higgs At? A Particle Accelerator Rap Battle

CERN’s gigantic new Large Hadron Collider had a somewhat tough week, with New York Times reporter James Glantz comparing the $4 billion particle accelerator to an unfinished Mayan pyramid, “another grandiose structure with cosmic aspirations and earthbound problems that could thwart its ambitions.” Then, stateside particle accelerator owners Fermilab went and commissioned a rap response to the famously viral “Large Hadron Rap” performed by CERN employee Katherine McAlpine. Penned by science “rapbassador” Funky49, the Fermilab rap is not available for listening yet (Funky49 was in Batavia, IL recording the video this week, the Fermilab website reported), but you can use your imagination with the help of the lyrics. CERN and Fermilab hold fast to their status as friendly rivals (much to the annoyance of conflict-seeking science writers around the world), so Funky49’s rebuttal is hardly the particle physics version of Jay-Z laying the verbal smackdown on Nas.

A Gene for Morning People

Many people who wish there were more hours in the day to get things done forget that almost a third of one’s time (if you’re lucky) is spent sleeping. But a select few lucky souls with a rare genetic mutation don’t need a full 8 hours to feel rested, a study published in Science this week revealed. When Univeristy of California-San Francisco researchers looked through their menagerie of people with odd sleeping habits, they stumbled upon a mother and daughter who require only 6 hours of sleep a night to wake up refreshed and shared a mutation in a gene called DEC2. When that mutation was replicated in mice and fruit-flies, those animals stayed awake for longer relative to compatriots with unchanged genes. Those extra couple of hours of wakefulness could be the slim difference between normalcy and greatness, according to one British article, which speculates that luminaries like Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill may have sported such a genetic advantage. Never has being called a “mutant” been such a compliment.

Psychoanalyzing the World with the Web

With the vast amount of data being thrown around the globe through the Internet every second of every day, it was only a matter of time before tech-savvy scientists began finding ways to harness that information for their own research. Last year, Google Flu Trends launched as a unique way of monitoring public health, pinpointing potential outbreaks based on surges in people searching for flu-like symptoms (never mind that it didn’t work so well during the spring H1N1 outbreak). Now, a team from the University of Vermont is looking to take the temperature of the nation’s mood by monitoring song lyrics, blogs and Twitter messages. The good news is that blogger happiness has increased since 2005, according to one graphic from the researchers’ upcoming paper in, yes, The Journal of Happiness Studies. That measuring method, which they’re calling a hedonimeter, will be publicly available soon at their website.

(now seems a good time to plug that the ScienceLife Twitter account has gone live; follow @ScienceLife)

Finally…

Math vs. Zombies, how oxytocin might improve your social life, and why Les Paul was probably the greatest musician-scientist of the 20th century.