Day: 05/18/2015

Meet the man whose blood may hold the secret to curing HIV

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Almost 30 years after diagnosis, he’s only just now starting to show symptoms.

Kai Brothers has been living with HIV for the past 30 years, having contracted the disease at 19 years-old in San Francisco. Had a blood bank not asked him to come in for a test, he wouldn’t have even known he was sick, let alone HIV positive, because oddly enough, he never developed any symptoms. He recalls thinking: “I’m defying the odds here. There must be something my body is able to do that is keeping me healthy.”

At his friend’s suggestion in 1999, Brothers went to see leading AIDS researcher, Jay Levy, at the University of California, who had discovered the HIV virus in 1983. It turns out that Brothers’s body was actually keeping the virus in check – specifically, his white blood cells were secreting an unidentified protein that somehow controls the most damanging aspects of the virus.


Levy suspects that being able to reproduce the effects of this protein could revolutionise HIV treatment. “We know what the protein does: It blocks the virus from replicating,” Levy told Daniel A. Gross at Nautilus Magazine. “It maintains the virus in a silent state, in some people forever. Eventually the infected cells will die. So you could imagine that if you could keep this virus under control for 20, 30 years, you might have a spontaneous cure.”

Levy has studied Brothers extensively, with Brothers crossing the US every six months to donate a total of 150 blood samples. “I think about all my friends every time I go. I just think, ‘This is for you. And I wish you were still here,'” he told Gross.

Kai Brothers

But now – 26 years since being diagnosed – Brothers’s health is becoming uncertain, with low white blood cells counts and a high amount of HIV present in his blood sample. He has to decide whether to take antiretroviral drugs, which will stop him producing this special protein, or continue on as he was, in the hopes that whatever was keeping him alive for so many years will continue doing so.

The problem is, despite looking for this substance for 30 years, scientists haven’t come up with a clear answer for what this protein might be. HIV functions by infiltrating the cell’s DNA and then, when the cell replicates, the genes of the virus will be inside the new cell. But, strangely enough, if the cell is an immune cell – known as a dendritic cell – and contains a protein called SAMHD1, the cell will not replicate with the HIV virus.

Nathaniel Landau, a microbiologist from New York University in the US, told MEDICA.de that this occurs via a process known as nucleotide pool depletion: “SAMHD1 essentially starves the virus. The virus enters the cell and then nothing happens. It has nothing to build and replicate with, so no DNA is made,” he sid.

While this is welcome knowledge, it only protects in one specific case – immune cells being infected with HIV. HIV can still replicate in other cells, and other viruses related to HIV, like HIV-2 and SIV, have developed a protein called viral protein X (VPX) that directly attacks SAMHD1.

So for Levy, with antiretroviral drugs being so advanced that they’re now “pretty remarkable,” many of his blood donors are jumping ship. Soon there might not be any “long-term survivors” to help him study this protein, he says. And, just as a virus evolves, so too does the human immune system. Without treatment, our bodies may evolve a way to combat the disease, but with the proliferation of HIV drugs, this won’t be possible. One AIDS researcher, Douglas Richman of the University of California, called it an “arms-race”.

Either way, it’s leaving Brothers in a quandry, telling Gross at Nautilus Magazine: “I don’t feel like I’ve given everything I can. I want to be there when they find something and leverage it for other people. (But) it’s my priority to be healthy and alive more than anything else.”

Is Hand Sanitizer Bad for You?

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Hand sanitizer can kill a lot of the good bacteria on your hands, but new research shows it can actually increase the amount of BPA entering your body.

Hand sanitizer is widely used as a quick way to clean your hands. Chances are, if you ask a bank teller, a cashier, or a teacher, they’ll swear by it. However, new research indicates that this convenience may carry some considerable costs for our health.

First, alcohol-based hand sanitizer work by killing bacteria on your skin with the active ingredient called triclosan. The catch, though, is the solution kills bacteria indiscriminately. We need certain types of “good bacteria” to maintain our overall health, but these get wiped out with the harmful ones. Perhaps more alarming is that a new study, published in PLOS One, suggests using hand sanitizer increases your absorption of Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that messes with the body’s endocrine system. Scientists have linked higher levels of BPA to all kinds of health problems, including heart disease, infertility, cancer, and diabetes. The paper used to print receipts contains high levels of BPA and new research from the University of Missouri suggests that handling receipts and then using hand sanitizer does indeed increase the body’s absorption of BPA.

Do you use hand sanitizer regularly? Does this affect your opinion? Let us know in the comments below.

15 Futuristic technologies you’ll see in your lifetime .

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From the possible colonisation of other worlds to clothes that will automatically clean themselves when you step into sunlight, we count 15 technological advances predicted by wise minds for the future of our species within the next 50 years or so.

Watch the video. URL: https://youtu.be/fJ4MXc5n8I8

An electronic memory cell has been created that mimics the human brain .

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Scientists have built a tiny, long-term memory cell that can both store and process information at the same time, just like the human brain. This is one of the first multi-state electronic memory cells, and it represents a crucial step towards building a bionic brain.

Not only does this new cell – which is 10,000 times thinner than a human hair – open up the potential to store and process way more data than ever before, scientists are even more excited about the fact that it has ‘memristive’ abilities. This means that it’s able to retain remember and be influenced by information that has previously been stored on it – something that our current storage devices aren’t capable of.


“This is the closest we have come to creating a brain-like system with memory that learns and stores analog information and is quick at retrieving this stored information,” project leader Sharath Sriram, from RMIT University in Australia said in a press release. “The human brain is an extremely complex analog computer … its evolution is based on its previous experiences, and up until now this functionality has not been able to be adequately reproduced with digital technology.”

The cell’s new abilities add another dimension beyond the on/off memory cells we currently use to store our data on conventional devices, such as USBs, which are only capable of storing one binary digit (either a 0 or a 1) at a time. The researchers are comparing this to the difference between a regular light switch, which either turns the light on or off, and a dimmer switch, which gives you access to all the shades of light in-between.

“It can give you much more flexibility in terms of what information you store and what functionality you get,” one of the researchers, Hussein Nili, told Jessica Kidd over at ABC News.

Publishing in Advanced Functional Materials, the researchers explain that the cells are made out of a functional oxide material in the form of an ultra-thin film. The team created the material last year, and demonstrated that it was highly stable and reliable. But they’ve now successfully introduced controlled defects into the film, which allow the cell to be influenced by previous events.

“We have now introduced controlled faults or defects in the oxide material along with the addition of metallic atoms, which unleashes the full potential of the ‘memristive’ effect – where the memory element’s behaviour is dependent on its past experiences,” Nili explained in the release.

All this means that the cells could one day be used to build an artificial system that mimics the extraordinary abilities of the human brain, which is extremely fast, requires very little energy input, and has almost limitless memory storage. While the benefits to artificial intelligence and computing are obvious, such a ‘bionic brain’ could also greatly help human health by allowing researchers to create and study diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s outside of the body.

“In terms of those diseases, there are two problems: it is very hard to read what is going on inside a live brain, and the ethical aspect – you cannot experiment on live subjects without repercussions,” Nili told Ariel Bogle from Mashable. “If you can have a bionic brain and you can replicate those kinds of [diseased] brains … it will make research much easier and accessible.”

We’re pretty excited to see what these little cells can do.

Gel filled with nanosponges cleans up MRSA infections

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Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego developed a gel filled with toxin-absorbing nanosponges that could lead to an effective treatment for skin and wound infections caused by MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), an antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This “nanosponge-hydrogel” minimized the growth of skin lesions on mice infected with MRSA – without the use of antibiotics. The researchers recently published their findings online in Advanced Materials.

To make the nanosponge-hydrogel, the team mixed nanosponges, which are nanoparticles that absorb dangerous toxins produced by MRSA, E. coli and other , into a hydrogel, which is a gel made of water and polymers. The hydrogel holds the nanosponges in place so that they can remove toxins at the infected spot.

“We combined the strengths of two different materials – nanosponges and hydrogels – to create a powerful formulation to treat local bacterial infections,” said Liangfang Zhang, nanoengineering professor in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, who led the team. “Nanosponges alone are difficult to use on local tissues because they diffuse away to other parts of the body very quickly. By integrating the nanosponges into a hydrogel, we can retain them at the site of infection.”

Since the nanosponge-hydrogel treatment does not involve antibiotics, the researchers say that it will not likely be affected by existing . Also, because antibiotics are not involved, the treatment will likely not cause bacteria to develop new resistance.

This work is a follow-up to a study that the team presented in Nature Nanotechnology in 2013. The previous study showed that nanosponges absorbed harmful bacterial toxins in the bloodstream and drew them away from their real targets: . In this new study, the team reports that removing bacterial toxins could potentially lead to clearing up antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.

“One way to treat these infections is to remove the toxins, which act as a weapon and a defense shield for the bacteria that produce them,” said Zhang. “We hypothesize that without the toxins, the bacteria become significantly weakened and exposed, allowing the body’s immune system to kill them more easily without the use of drugs.”

Nanosponge-hydrogel treatment

How does the nanosponge-hydrogel treatment work? Each nanosponge is a nanoparticle coated in a red blood cell membrane. This coating disguises the nanosponges as red, which are the real targets of the produced by MRSA. By masquerading as red blood cells, the nanosponges attract harmful toxins and remove them from the bloodstream. In order for the nanosponges to remove toxins from a specific spot, such as an infected skin wound, a lot of them need to be held at that spot. This is where the hydrogel plays a role; it can hold billions of nanosponges per milliliter in one spot. The hydrogel’s pores are also small enough to keep most of the nanosponges from escaping, but big enough so that toxins can easily get inside and attach to the nanosponges.

The researchers showed that the nanosponge-hydrogel treatment kept down the size of skin lesions caused by MRSA infections. In mice, the that were treated with the nanosponge-hydrogel were significantly smaller than those that were left untreated.

“After injecting the nanosponge-hydrogel at the infected spot, we observed that it absorbed the toxins secreted by the bacteria and prevented further damage to the local blood, skin and muscle tissues,” said Zhang.

The team also showed that the hydrogel was effective at holding the nanosponges in place within the body. Two days after the nanosponge-hydrogel was injected underneath the skin of a mouse, nearly 80 percent of the nanosponges were still found at the injection site. When nanosponges were injected without the hydrogel, only 20 percent of them remained at the injection site after two hours. Most of them diffused to the surrounding tissues.

Scientists burn a diamond in pure oxygen.

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When it comes to natural materials, it doesn’t get much harder than diamond. The carbon-based material can be used to cut through steel, wood and glass, and, under normal circumstances, it’s so hard that it can’t be burnt. But in this British Royal Institution experiment, scientist Peter Wothers shows that there is a pretty neat way to destroy diamond, and he plays a cool little prank on Nobel prize-winning chemist Sir Harry Kroto in the process.

In the set-up, Wothers recreates a pretty standard experiment for testing whether a material contains carbon, which involves burning it in a chamber with pure oxygen. But he then adds an interesting twist, by collecting the gas that’s released in a tube and running it through limewater. If the material being burnt contains carbon, the resulting smoke will contain carbon dioxide, and when this meets the limewater it’ll produce calcium carbonate and turn the whole thing milky white.

Wothers first demonstrates this with some graphite, but then takes things to the next level by performing the same experiment on a diamond taken from Kroto’s wife’s ring. Incredibly, the entire diamond sets alight, and, without producing any flames, glows like an mini-Sun. It’s beautiful, but pretty terrifying for Kroto.

You’ll have to watch the experiment above to see what happens next. We don’t want to spoil anything, but we will say that Kroto is an incredibly good sport.

Watch the video. URL:https://youtu.be/1QbHRLpYc-0

These genes may control whether you’re a morning or night person.

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Here’s some good (and bad) news for all you night owls desperately trying to get better at mornings – new research suggests that it’s not your fault that you can’t string a sentence together before 9am. You may simply be genetically predisposed to being more productive at night-time.

After investigating the genomes of fruit flies, researchers from the University of Leicester in the UK have identified nearly 80 genes that are linked to a preference for either ‘morningness’ or ‘eveningness’. And although that may sound pretty unrelated to your own body clock, the team showed that most of these genes are found in mammals, too.
Previous research has demonstrated that most people find they’re most productive either early in the day or late at night – a preference that’s known as a ‘chronotype’. And while a lot of studies have looked into the effects of this chronotype, there hasn’t been much investigation into what actually causes these differences, up until now.

“In this new study, we have used fruit flies [Drosophila melanogaster], whose gene clocks are very similar to [a] human’s, to get a first insight into the molecular basis of ‘morningness/eveningness’ preference,” explained team member Eran Tauber in a press release. “Because this genetic system is so similar between insects and human[s], there is a good chance that some of the genes that we have identified in flies, would be also important for diurnal preference in humans.”

As part of their research, the team identified two different fly strains that were at their most active either in the morning, or the evening, and they then compared and contrasted their genes. They found nearly 80 genes that appear to be linked to the flies’ chronotypes, but interestingly, these genes aren’t ones that are known to regulate our body clock. Instead, they’re involved in a range of molecular pathways.

“This changes our view of the body clock, from a pacemaker that drives rhythms to a time reference system that interacts with the environment,” said one of the lead researchers, Ezio Rosato, in the release.

Even more interesting was the fact that the molecular processes in the ‘night owl’ flies weren’t just delayed compared to the morning lovers – they were entirely different.

“I refer to this behaviour as the ‘pinball theory’,” said Tauber. “Once a gene expression is delayed (in larks), a completely different cascade of molecular events is carried, similar to the ball in a pinball machine that takes a different route in each run. The end point might be similar, but the different molecular routes result in a different journey time.”

The researchers have published their findings in the journal Frontiers in Neurology, and will now investigate where these genes are involved in similar processes in humans.

The ultimate goal is to find potential targets for treatments that could help people overcome their evening or morning chronotype. While that sounds a little extreme, it could help prevent a range of disorders, such as obesity and depression, which have been linked to a lifestyle that’s out of whack with your body clock.

“The rhythm of life is such that for many people the economic or social call to start a new day comes hours before the endogenous call from the body clock. This creates a clock dysfunction that is not only reflected in temporal disorientation and sleep problems, but also in conditions such as obesity, mental illness, cardiovascular disease and cancer,” said Taubler.

“Our study is the first stepping stone to identifying which genes are involved in this process. This will allow better diagnostics, and ultimately personal medicine, where larks and owls will receive their tailored therapies.”

While I’m not sure I’m ready for medication to help turn me into a morning person just yet, I kind of love the fact that researchers are finally revealing that, biologically, not everyone can function on a 9 to 5 schedule.