Researchers are announcing that a 53-year-old man in Germany has been cured of HIV.
Referred to as “the Dusseldorf patient” to protect his privacy, researchers said he is the fifth confirmed case of an HIV cure. Although the details of his successful treatment were first announced at a conference in 2019, researchers could not confirm he had been officially cured at that time.
Today, researchers announced the Dusseldorf patient still has no detectable virus in his body, even after stopping his HIV medication four years ago.
MORE: Man apparently cured of HIV
“It’s really cure, and not just, you know, long term remission,” said Dr. Bjorn-Erik Ole Jensen, who presented details of the case in a new publication in “Nature Medicine.”
“This obviously positive symbol makes hope, but there’s a lot of work to do,” Jensen said
For most people, HIV is a lifelong infection, and the virus is never fully eradicated. Thanks to modern medication, people with HIV can live long and healthy lives.
The Dusseldorf patient joins a small group of people who have been cured under extreme circumstances after a stem cell transplant, typically only performed in cancer patients who don’t have any other options. A stem cell transplant is a high-risk procedure that effectively replaces a person’s immune system. The primary goal is to cure someone’s cancer, but the procedure has also led to an HIV cure in a handful of cases.
Blood samples are seen in a lab.
STOCK PHOTO/ Manuel Romaris/Getty Images
HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, enters and destroys the cells of the immune system. Without treatment, the continued damage can lead to AIDS, or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, where a person cannot fight even a small infection.
With about 38.4 million people globally living with HIV, treatments have come a long way. Modern medication can keep the virus at bay, and studies looking into preventing HIV infection with a vaccine are also underway.
The first person with HIV cure was Timothy Ray Brown. Researchers published his case as the Berlin patient in 2009. That was followed by the London patient published in 2019. Most recently, The City of Hope and New York patients were published in 2022.
“I think we can get a lot of insights from this patient and from these similar cases of HIV cure,” Jensen said. “These insights give us some hints where we could go to make the strategy safer.”
MORE: Breakthrough treatment cures woman of HIV
All four of these patients had undergone stem cell transplants for their blood cancer treatment. Their donors also had the same HIV-resistant mutation that deletes a protein called CCR5, which HIV normally uses to enter the cell. Only 1% of the total population carries this genetic mutation that makes them resistant to HIV.
“When you hear about these HIV cure, it’s obviously, you know, incredible, given how challenging it’s been. But, it still remains the exception to the rule,” said Dr. Todd Ellerin, director of infectious disease at South Shore Health.
The stem cell transplantation is a complicated procedure that comes with many risks, and it is too risky to offer it as a cure for everyone with HIV.
However, scientists are hopeful. Each time they cure a new patient, they gain valuable research insights that help them understand what it would take to find a cure for everyone.
“It is obviously a step forward in advancing the science and having us sort of understanding, in some ways, what it takes to cure HIV,” Ellerin said.
Kaviya Sathyakumar, M.D., M.B.A., is a family medicine resident physician at Ocala Regional Medical Center in Florida and member of ABC News Medical Unit.
Greater pipefish, Syngnathus acus 54, and Sargassum pipefish, Syngnathus pelagicus 55,56. Handcolored copperplate engraving from Gottlieb Tobias Wilhelm’s Encyclopedia of Natural History: Fish, Augsburg, 1804. Wilhelm (1758-1811) was a Bavarian clergyman and naturalist known as the German Buffon. (Photo by: Florilegius/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
A new study out of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand has called into question traditional perceptions of mating.
“In most species, males compete to attract females. But with pipefish, the males carry and protect the embryos,” says PhD student Nicole Tosto, who led the research.
“Pipefish are unique because they don’t follow the usual ‘rules’ of evolution.”
The research highlights how biological differences in male and female pipefish influence their survival and mating habits.
While females have genes to support egg production, males activate genes to strengthen their immune system.
This is a key adaptation that allows the males to nurture and care for embryos in their bodies.
The study, published in Molecular Ecology, also uncovered how this switch in activated genes impacts mating selection.
In most species, females prefer larger, dominant males as mates because it often increases their chance of having healthy offspring, as the strong male can provide security and defence from predators.
Instead, the study found that female pipefish swim against this trend and tend to choose smaller males with high fitness levels.
Tosto suggests that this selection is based on efficiency as smaller males may need fewer resources.
Robust Ghost Pipefish, Solenostomus cyanopterus, Bali, Indonesia (Photo by Reinhard Dirscherl\ullstein bild via Getty Images)
She also believes smaller males could be better suited for the synchronised water movements that are a part of the species’ courtship rituals.
In many animals, males and females of the same species can have physical features that are different between the sexes and are often used to attract mates. These visible traits are known as sex-specific ornaments.
However, the pipefish species involved in the study were monomorphic, meaning that male and female pipefish looked almost identical and had no visible differences.
“Nicole’s research has brought up important questions for evolutionary biologists when it comes to current vs past selection,” says her doctoral supervisor, Dr Sarah Flanagan, a senior lecturer in Biological Science at the University of Canterbury.
Natural selection is a process where individuals with traits that help them survive become more likely to reproduce and therefore pass on those traits to their offspring. Overtime these advantageous traits become more commonly inherited among the species.
“For example, whether the existence of sex-specific ornamentation is evidence that selection is currently acting strongly on those sex-specific traits or whether ornaments are evidence of selection having happened in the past.”
Pipefish don’t have sex chromosomes meaning both sexes share the same genetic blueprint, they just use the genes in different ways.
For example, females focus on producing egg-enhancing proteins, whereas males produce immune-boosting proteins for pregnancy.
“Knowing how these pressures shape mating systems helps us better understand how species survive and adapt to their environments,” says Tosto.
While there is no current extinction concern for dusky pipefish (Syngnathus floridae), the species of pipefish investigated in the study, other pipefish species such as the estuarine pipefish are critically endangered.
The weather outside is frightful, but The Twilight Zoneis… well, also pretty frightful on occasion. But we can’t think of a better way to ring in 2025 than with SYFY‘s annual New Year’s marathon featuring three uninterrupted days of back-to-back episodes from Rod Serling‘s classic and groundbreaking anthology series between December 31 and January 2.
“It’s interesting, because The Twilight Zone has never been off [the air]. It’s always been there. It’s never died,” Rod’s elder daughter, Jodi Serling, told SYFY WIRE while speaking about her father’s lasting impact. “It’s because the message that he’s sending is so apparent today. Everything that he predictively wrote about is coming back to us. It’s just an honor to know that his legacy will continue to live on forever. He was such a humble kind of guy, I don’t think he realized what an impact that he was going to make on our society.”
“When the original Star Trek debuted, when I was 10, I recorded it on reel-to-reel audio tape in case it never aired again. You couldn’t watch a show whenever you wanted to. There was no way to revisit the shows you loved unless they were in syndication and then they’d be cut up,” adds Marc Scott Zicree, author of TheTwilight Zone Companion, during a separate conversation. “We live in a blessed age where you can watch anything you want, anytime you want. I really love these marathons, because I’ve heard from so many people that they just leave the TV on and glance over. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the one with Talky Tina! That’s The Howling Man!’ The great thing about Twilight Zone, is that it’s also a family show. You can literally sit down with your kids, and it may scare them, but you know that they’re not going to see something inappropriate. They know what they’re signing up for. I really love the fact that there are Twilight Zone marathons. I think it’s terrific.”
This is a must watch video. It totally destroys the anti-vaccine groups and the Idea that vaccines cause autism. This is a medial Scientist researcher with the greatest knowledge in the field of study and he has an autistic daughter. He knocks down and shows proof of the lies of the anti-vaccine people. He explains how it all became a political issue and power, and how it is killing people. Hugs
Human-made materials – the “technosphere” – are a deep store of fossil carbon – and possibly a ticking time bomb.
That’s according to a fascinating new study published in Cell Reports Sustainability.
“We have no idea of how much carbon has been accumulated in the technosphere, how long it stays and what might happen to it once it is released,” says co-author Professor Klaus Hubaeck, a researcher at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.
The researchers found that the technosphere accumulated 8.4 billion tonnes of fossil carbon from 1995-2019.
Were all this carbon to be burned and sent into the atmosphere, it would be equivalent to 30 billion tonnes of CO2. The world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere over that period were roughly 770 billion tonnes.
“Carbon is used as a feedstock everywhere in our daily items, even the laptop I type on, and we were wondering if there is a potential time bomb of all that carbon contributing further to climate heating as it gets released to the atmosphere,” Hubaeck tells Cosmos over email.
Human-made materials are often made from fossil carbon sources like oil and gas. Plastics, for instance, are 74% fossil carbon on average. When these items reach end of life, the carbon makes its way back into the environment via dumping – or into the atmosphere via combustion.
The researchers calculated the amount of fossil carbon stored in the technosphere in the year 2011, using economic data to judge how much was flowing in and out of various industries.
They found that most of this carbon was going into rubber and plastic (30%), while 24% was put in bitumen, and 16% in machinery and equipment.
They found that 9% of extracted fossil carbon was stored in the technosphere in 2011, or about 0.4 billion tonnes of fossil carbon.
The team extrapolated these findings to a 25-year time period (1995-2019), which told them that 8.4 billion tonnes of fossil carbon had been accumulated.
Hubaeck says that the technosphere is nearing the stage where it stores more carbon than the natural world.
“We are not far from that turning point. Indeed, the accumulated fossil carbon is in the same order of magnitude, and indeed already higher than that stored in animals.”
What happens to all of this carbon? The researchers estimate that 3.7 billion tonnes of fossil carbon was disposed of over this time period: 1.2 billion tonnes sent to landfill, 1.2 billion tonnes incinerated and sent into the atmosphere, 1.1 billion tonnes recycled, and the rest littered.
“On the one hand, you can consider it as a form of carbon sequestration if this fossil carbon ends up sequestered in landfill, but on the other hand, it poses an environmental hazard, and if you burn it, you increase carbon emissions,” says co-author Dr Franco Ruzzenenti, also from the University of Groningen.
This means it is very important to make sure the waste is being processed properly, according to the researchers. They say that product lifetimes and recycling rates need to increase, and landfill and waste discharges need to be minimised.
“It’s best to avoid or reduce the throughput in the first place,” says Hubaeck.
“Certainly in rich countries, we have too much stuff (whereas the Global South still needs to catch up), we should question the amount of durable products and (inefficient) infrastructure we produce.
“Shifting to bio-based carbon also has environmental impacts, land requirements, biodiversity, and impacts on food prices.”
The researchers say that circular economy strategies are important for reducing the amount of waste as well, alongside managing waste better after disposal.
and just got home. I decided to eat one of the donuts I bought while out (there was a sale! As the shoppe will be closed until 1/5. Yay…) Anyway, the 1st page I open online every day is the NASA APOD, and here is what they put up today. Such a wonderful thing to see when I sit down to break my fast with a forbidden food and tea!! and relax a little reading blogs. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
(I don’t get why WP won’t accept these photos. I thought it was my puter, but I have a new one, and the pic is still not here. It’s a quick click, and a really nice page today, so please go see it. After all, SPACE-X’s photos are likely to be poor, if they even do this for us.)
The tropical cyclones Seroja and Odette came together in the Indian Ocean north-west of Australia in April 2021. After the two cyclones merged, TC Seroja abruptly changed course by 90 degrees. Credit: Provided by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), JAXA P-Tree System
In April 2021, tropical cyclones Seroja and Odette clashed in the southeastern Indian Ocean, just north-west of Australia, before finally merging completely.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology describes this interaction as rare: “Seroja produc[ed] torrential rainfall and devastating floods in parts of Indonesia and Timor Leste. Later, it interacted with Tropical Cyclone Odette via the Fujiwara effect, a phenomenon rarely observed in the Australian region. Finally, it strengthened into a category 3 tropical cyclone producing a severe impact in the Mid-West region of Western Australia, unusually far south for a coastal crossing of a Severe Tropical Cyclone.”
These types of convergences are one of the most extreme interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere on Earth. But with the number and intensity of tropical cyclones increasing because of global warming, understanding their impacts has become more important than ever.
“Seroja first of all stalled the smaller cyclone Odette and then merged with it 3 days later,” says Oliver Wurl of the University of Oldenburg in Germany. After the cyclones merged, Seroja abruptly changed course by 90 degrees.
The whole encounter lasted for about a week.
“This chain of events not only influenced weather patterns but also triggered a previously unobserved interaction with the ocean underneath,” says Wurl.
In a new report in in the journal Tellus A: Dynamic Meteorology and Oceanography, Wurl and colleague Jens Meyerjürgens analysed the encounter between the 2 relatively weak tropical cyclones and found effects that have only been observed with much stronger systems.
They did this by combining satellite data, measurements of the upper ocean, such as salinity and water temperatures obtained from ARGO floats and autonomous drifters, and numerical modelling.
The researchers found that sea-surface temperatures dropped by 3°C in the aftermath of the merge due to cold water upwelling towards the sea surface from depths of 200m.
Given cyclones’ intensity as a Category 1 on the Hurricane Scale, this cooling effect and depth of upwelling was “exceptionally high” – on the scale observed in Category 4 or 5 hurricanes.
“As a result of the interactions of a cyclone with the ocean and the upwelling of cold, deep water, the ocean absorbs additional heat from the air and then transports it to higher latitudes – a crucial process that influences the climate worldwide,” explains Wurl.
The researchers conclude that the simultaneous formation and interaction between tropical cyclones could increase in the future with global warming and, with it, the extreme thermodynamic responses of the upper ocean.
The Ultramarine project – focussing on research and innovation in our marine environments – is supported by Minderoo Foundation.
Some western observers don’t quite understand why General Igor Kirillov was a legitimate military target (see: what is a “general”?) or understand that lying war criminals are actually bad. Kirillov was behind the dumb propaganda that there were US/Ukrainian biolabs about to threaten the RU/UKR border. I always thought this was a little bit of a backhand at the US for claiming mobile biolabs in Iraq before 2003. But it is totally not the case and never was. And the fuckers who play games with the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant have no business talking up Ukrainian “dirty” nuclear bomb threats anyway.
Which brings me to Elon Musk, incoming US president in fact if not in name, who is goofing with a government shutdown even before his old-age addled proxy is sworn in, threatening the GOP Speaker (presumptive) of the next Congress and also lying his dumb goofy pale face off. He says this on his dumb loss-leader propaganda site:
Remember me just recently pointing out Liz Churchill to you? Well, this is her, boosting hypnotically cult-like speaking pro RU and pro-Assad Trump DNI hopeful Tulsi Gabbard: (snip-embedded tweet on the page, also see some ‘shtuff’ from this blog’s nemesis, Libs Of TikTok)
Greater pipefish, Syngnathus acus 54, and Sargassum pipefish, Syngnathus pelagicus 55,56. Handcolored copperplate engraving from Gottlieb Tobias Wilhelm’s Encyclopedia of Natural History: Fish, Augsburg, 1804. Wilhelm (1758-1811) was a Bavarian clergyman and naturalist known as the German Buffon. (Photo by: Florilegius/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
