Beating HIV with stem cells
An unnamed man in London has become only the second HIV patient ever to be declared free of the virus, after undergoing a bone marrow transplant. The man, who also had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, received bone marrow transplants in 2016 as part of his cancer treatment. They came from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that made his or her CCR5 gene—which allows HIV to enter cells—resistant to the virus. Since the man came off his anti-retroviral pills 18 months ago, the virus hasn’t returned. The first “cured” patient, Timothy Brown, underwent the same procedure about a decade ago. The treatment wouldn’t work for most people with HIV because stem cell transplants carry high risks: They require a patient’s immune system to be wiped out with powerful drugs or radiation and then reconstituted, reports NPR.org. But these new findings suggest “there exists a proof of concept that HIV is curable,” says Anton Pozniak, president of the International AIDS Society. “The hope is that this will eventually lead to a safe, cost-effective, and easy strategy to achieve these results using gene technology or antibody techniques.”
conclusion of a new study by scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder, which says such catch-ups may even put people at risk of excess weight gain. The researchers enlisted 36 healthy adults ages 18 to 39 and had them stay in a lab for two weeks where they monitored the participants’ food intake, light exposure, and sleep. The test subjects were split into three groups, reports NBCNews.com. The first had nine hours’ sleep a night for 10 consecutive days; the second had only five hours a night over the same period; the third had five nights of five hours sleep, two “weekend” nights of unlimited sleep, and then three more nights of restricted sleep. The two sleep-deprived groups snacked more and gained weight. But while the group that consistently had only five hours sleep a night saw a 13 percent reduction in insulin sensitivity, a marker for diabetes risk, the catch-up group’s reduction was 27 percent. “Sleep isn’t a math game—you can’t balance it out,” says Azizi Seixas, from New York University School of Medicine, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Your body needs a schedule for a reason.”
the Sea of Japan, which saw stocks plummet by about 35 percent. Globally, the drop was 4.1 percent. The researchers say overfishing and poor fisheries management played a part, but that the bigger factor was fish being driven out of their natural habitats by rising temperatures. “Fish are like Goldilocks: They don’t like their water too hot or too cold,” co-author Malin L. Pinsky, from Rutgers University, tells The New York Times. The research follows a recent study that found that ocean temperatures are warming much faster than previously thought.