The Hanging Gardens

For the first time, a child born HIV positive was cured with antiretroviral treatment in the first days of life. They hypothesize that the prompt, aggressive regimen prevented the virus from establishing reservoirs in the body before it was eradicated.

Clinical researchers are already designing studies to try and replicate the results. This is actually happening in our generation, you guys.

The brains of shy or introverted individuals might actually process the world differently than their more extroverted counterparts, a new study suggests.

"Individuals with this highly sensitive trait prefer to take longer to make decisions, are more conscientious, need more time to themselves in order to reflect, and are more easily bored with small talk, research suggests.

Previous work has also shown that compared with others those with a highly sensitive temperament are more bothered by noise and crowds, more affected by caffeine, and more easily startled. That is, the trait seems to confer sensitivity all around."

Well. Not to make this all about me, but that sounds familiar. It might be a bit early to go straight to "obviously an inborn trait," seeing as they didn't do any control for the environment people were raised in (or at least so far as I can tell from the blurb without access to the actual article), and I am automatically leery of fMRI data unless analyses of it were rigorously controlled*, but still!

* And I have been ever since I read this one study where they put a dead fish in the fMRI and showed it pictures with different emotional salience. If they didn't use this incredibly stringent control for the statistical analysis - a control that not everybody submitting papers uses - then they found, or "found", that areas in the fish's decomposing brain activated in response to emotionally fraught images. And then there was that other study showing that science students were more likely to trust a paper's findings and overlook glaring methodological flaws if the paper included brain imaging data.

I was sitting there in the RKC (shiny new science building) when I overheard this tidbit a Biology professor was sharing with a senior planning her project:

"Oh, you can have viruses in the lab, even if they're human infecting. It's not like they're going to jump out and infect someone on their own. Now let's see what's available...hmm, polio, probably don't want that. Ebola, definitely don't want that..."

People, if you hear in the next few months that Bard has become a quarantine area, know that it started here.

One amphibian has evolved a bizarre and gruesome defence mechanism to protect itself against predators. When attacked, the Spanish ribbed newt pushes out its ribs until they pierce through its body, exposing a row of bones that act like poisonous barbs. The bones must break through the newt's body wall every time the amphibian evokes the defence response.