Thursday, 9 June 2011

Viagra: The Thrill That Was

The First Clown In Space Shares His Photos With The World

HIV patient Timothy Brown is the boy who lived

To many of the nation's million people living with a diagnosis of HIV/AIDS, Timothy Brown is the Harry Potter of the disease: Like the young wizard who survived Lord Voldemort's wrath, he is the boy who lived.
Today, almost 20 years after he became infected, Brown is, essentially, cured.
Brown, now 45, is known in medical-journal circles as "The Berlin Patient," a moniker assigned him by a February 2009 case study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In a "Brief Report," oncologist Gero Huetter and his colleagues at Berlin's University Hospital described the unique stem-cell transplant of an HIV-infected patient — Brown — who had acute myeloid leukemia, and the remarkable result: Twenty months after the procedure, the virus had not reappeared in Brown's body, even though he was no longer taking antiretroviral drugs.
The bone marrow Brown received in a time-tested treatment for leukemia had given him an extraordinary gift. It had also transferred to Brown's immune system an uncommon genetic variation — present in an estimated 10% of northern Europeans — that rendered it resistant to HIV.
It's been a winding road to medical fame, Brown said in an interview last week. Raised in Seattle, he came out as gay at 18 and soon began a restless journey across Europe. He settled briefly in Barcelona, where he believes he became infected, and finally in Berlin, where he lived for almost 20 years.
When he learned he was HIV-positive in 1995, a friend told him gravely that he probably had two years to live.
"I didn't know who to be angry at," Brown said.
Ten years later, he was alive and taking antiretroviral medications. Then, in 2006, a bout of exhaustion sent him to the doctor, who diagnosed leukemia and proposed the customary treatment: Wipe out Brown's immune system with radiation and rebuild it with the bone marrow of a healthy donor.
Here was the crucial trick: From the 230 possible matches found for Brown, Huetter deliberately picked a donor who carried genetic resistance to HIV, hoping they might lick both diseases in a single shot.
Now living in San Francisco, Brown has found himself a bit of a celebrity at AIDS functions around the city. Two weeks ago, he spoke at an event titled "Cure — Still a Four-Letter Word?" organized by the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Afterward, he says, "everybody wanted to get their picture.
taken with me."
It was as if, he said, he had become the living, breathing embodiment of hope for an end to AIDS.
For much of the AIDS pandemic's first 30 years, talk of a cure was indeed a four-letter word, widely dismissed as fanciful and detracting from the real job of prevention and treatment — and a dangerous spur to false hopes and complacency.
But as Brown's fame has grown, the "cure" word has lost its taboo.
Last week, the nation's chief scientists in the fight against HIV/AIDS — Drs. Carl W. Dieffenbach and Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — also abandoned their reluctance to talk about a cure for the pandemic that has killed nearly 30 million people.
Certainly, the treatment Brown received could not be applied to the millions of people infected with HIV — it is far too risky and expensive for that. But its results offer proof that there are ways to turbo-charge the immune system to prevent and even fight off established infection without taking a cocktail of pills everyday, the officials wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Brown sustained a brain injury in a 2009 mugging in Berlin, and walks and speaks with some difficulty But he sees himself as lucky and says he's glad to be a "catalyst" to the development of a more practical AIDS cure.
"It's an incredible feeling — like a miracle," he said. "I had two lethal diseases and was able to get rid of both of them."
Melissa Healy @'LA Times'

Alexey Navalny: Russia's Julian Assange?

Alexey Navalny is decidedly not a journalist; the young corporate lawyer has dabbled in property development, the stock market, and politics (in the late 1990s he joined the liberal opposition party Yabloko and in 2005, he founded a kind of youth movement with Maria Gaidar, the daughter of one of Yeltsin's top economic advisers, called Da! or Yes!). He has a master's degree in finance and currently runs his own law firm from a small office in the center of Moscow. His résumé reads like an ambitious Russian entrepreneur's. Except that Navalny has also become the country's leading anti-corruption crusader, described variously as "a one-man WikiLeaks" and "a kind of Russian Julian Assange or Lincoln Steffens."
His public interest work, which he undertook on his blog several years ago, largely focuses on issues of transparency, corruption, and shareholder rights. (Navalny got his start as a muckraking blogger by purchasing a small number of shares in several state-owned enterprises to get an insider's view of how they operate and by exposing the fraud he discovered.) Early this year Navalny launched a new site, RosPil, designed to harness the power of the web and his devoted readers. It relies on simple crowd sourcing methods whereby registered users and a group of experts review public documents for wrongdoing and post their findings. Anyone can submit a government request for tender (a bid for services) to the site and, if it looks dubious enough, it is promoted to the main page. This has become far easier for the average citizen to do under President Medvedev who, two years ago, announced that all government requests for tender would be posted online. Once the documents have been published on RosPil, registered members evaluate the complaint and decide whether it should be pursued. If they vote yes, Navalny showcases the alleged fraud on his blog.
Two remarkable things have happened since Navalny started RosPil: after an appeal for contributions to the site in February this year, Navalny raised more than $120,000 in a week, highly unusual in Russia for a journalism website (it broke fundraising records according to Yandex, Russia's leading search engine); more remarkably yet, according to the site, RosPil has caused the annulment of about $12 million in requests for tender, as well as the resignations and public shaming of several government officials. Revelations range from the absurd (the Interior Ministry ordering a gilded bed for its suburban residence) to far more serious allegations of fraud and embezzlement...

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Adam Federman @'The Investigative Fund'

Life sized stained glass AK 47 with a poppy in the barrel for remembrance

the end of the revolution
by shanti1971
Via

♪♫ The Stems - For Always

♪♫ Bruce Springsteen - Seeds

Info

Wednesday, 8 June 2011

Domus Mixtape Live #6: THE SOUND OF LONDON by Scanner + Allard van Hoorn, Beatrice Galilee

Mystery surrounds death of Aryan Brotherhood boss

HUGE explosion on the Sun on June 7, 2011

The Sun let loose with an enormous explosion on the morning of June 7, 2011. The entire eruption was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The animation here is from the ultraviolet camera, colored orange to make it viewable.
Here's my blog post with details and more video: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-...

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Recognizing the Human Potential

At the beginning of 1991—almost ten years after the cause of AIDS had been identified—researchers thought they might have a vaccine. Evidence from several laboratories suggested that it was possible to develop a vaccine against HIV by inoculating individuals with a crippled version of the virus that could not replicate—a time-tested strategy similar to that used to produce effective measles, mumps, and polio vaccines. In animal experiments, researchers used an HIV-like virus called simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) which infects rhesus macaque monkeys. Over time, infected monkeys developed AIDS-like symptoms, much like humans. Researchers inactivated SIV, injected it into monkeys, and tested whether the animals were protected against live SIV infection. Most vaccinated monkeys were indeed protected, encouraging AIDS researchers to believe that an effective human AIDS vaccine would soon follow. However, in October 1991, a brief article was published that sent AIDS vaccine research into a tailspin.¹ Like other labs,²^,³ E. James Stott’s laboratory had immunized macaques with inactivated SIV, which protected them against subsequent infection with live virus. However, the Stott laboratory included a negative control that was missing from the earlier studies: a second group of monkeys was immunized with just the human host cells that had been used to grow the inactivated SIV, but in this case, with no trace of the virus.¹ The purpose of this negative control was to ensure that the immune reaction that had successfully protected the monkeys was specific to SIV antigens, and not induced by something else. Surprisingly, the “negative control” produced protective immunity against SIV infection. Equally surprising was the fact that protection in the vaccine group was not associated with antibodies that recognized SIV antigens.
The finding was viewed by most in the field as an artifact and in the years that followed, researchers continued to focus on developing vaccines against HIV that specifically targeted proteins on the surface of the virus. However, HIV proved to be a moving target, avoiding vaccine-induced immune responses by rapidly mutating its surface proteins, and thereby thwarting this type of virus-specific vaccine effort...