Researchers have named a now two-and-a-half year old child the first infant “functionally cured” of HIV following rapid antiretroviral treatment after birth. Deborah Persaud, lead author of the report and a virologist at the Hopkins Children’s Center, made the announcement along with her two co-investigators in Atlanta on Sunday at the 20th Conference of Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.
While humans continue to bicker about the legal drinking age, fruit flies have developed their own unique policy: alcohol before birth. A new study out of Emory University has shown that fruit flies lay their eggs in an alcoholic environment, essentially feeding their unhatched young booze, to protect them from parasitic wasps. This new spin on parenting is a creative defense tactic that can actually save the lives of fruit fly larvae.
In view of the economy, how far should countries go to strengthen their public health system?
Walking through Brody or MSE on any given day, almost anyone could overhear the typical student bemoaning how much work they have or how stressed they feel. Even though stress is practically programmed into the college experience, different students handle pressure differently and responses can vary.
Surgeon Andrew Lee describes: challenge, action, result
Between Androids, iPhones and BlackBerrys, the smartphone market has certainly diversified in recent years and HTC, a Taiwanese company, has been one seller leading the pack.
Revenge against emphysema, a deadly and overbearing disease, has been strategically plotted in order to defend and protect the lives of the more than 20 million Americans engaged in a battle with the disease. Thankfully, researchers have discovered ways to ameliorate symptoms that are presented in emphysema patients.
“Don’t travel the way where there is path. Travel instead where there is no path, and leave a trail for the others,” Alfredo Quinones said at a fundraising event held on Monday.
For New Year’s resolution-ists, new eating and exercise plans have either proven their worth or fizzled out by now. The desperate search for the perfect path to health continues for many, be they a competitive athlete reaching for a personal record, or just someone looking to cut back on their daily frappuccinos from Starbucks.
It’s easy for many of us to correct nearsightedness — we go to the eye doctor, pick out a pair of glasses or fill a prescription for contact lenses, and voilà, we greatly improved vision. Thus, nearsightedness, also known as myopia, is something that we may not consider much as a public health concern. However, researchers at Hopkins and across the world believe there to be a better treatment for this prevalent condition that can be derived through genomic studying.
Though widely publicized as the quintessential college experience, underage drinking takes a toll on American youth. Every year alcohol causes an average 4,700 deaths in the U.S. among youth under the legal drinking age of 21, according to the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The person Skyping in the library may not be worried about anyone snooping on his conversation, since everyone else is busy studying. Besides, conversations on Skype are encrypted, so no one should be able to listen in on them.
Those who nostalgically look back on our early school-years of science fairs and baking-soda volcanoes might remember learning a little bit about the abundant and ambiguous theories provided to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. Among these theories you may racall the giant, killer asteroid that impacted the Earth.
The Next Big Thing?: Scientists are constantly seeking love from the government — a love that comes in the form of generous funding. Before the Human Genome Project, physicists were mostly happy with the big bucks they got to spend for splitting atoms open and traveling the depths of space. Envy in the field of biology soon dwindled away as the government shifted their attention towards genome studies. However, as the Human Genome Project came to a close almost ten years ago, the next big field of science has long been a mystery. Lately, it seems that the Brain Activity Map is lassoing the love of the government. Scientists are attempting to trace every highway of electrical impulse and intersection in synaptic clefts in the human brain within ten years. The endeavor is predicted to have an annual cost of 300 million dollars, and companies like Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm already plan to partake in the project.
The best way to archive data might not be to preserve it electronically, but to store information inside DNA. This idea occurred to Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute when they were trying to decide what to do with the large amount of data they generate in their research. As the amount of data that needs to be archived increases, the capacity of the hard drives that need to hold it must naturally grow as well. An immediate consequence of this is the rise in cost of data storage. Faced with this problem, Goldman and Birney, in their research published in Nature, speculated that the easiest way to store the data might be to input data within strands of DNA.
When the life of a loved one is in jeopardy, there are almost no limits to what people will do or try in order to save them. When an unnamed friend of James Eshleman, Associate Director of Johns Hopkins Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory and researcher for the Departments of Oncology and Pathology, was stricken with an ultra-rare form of cancer, his friend’s uncle, who happened to be Vice President of a major pharmaceutical company, asked Eshleman to provide him with a personalized cell line on which he could test every drug his company owned. Eshleman willingly complied with the request to save his friend.
The majority of the recent debate over unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs), more commonly called drones by the media, has focused on the political, ethical and legal questions regarding their use in war. Technology, though, plays a huge role in the utilization of drones for military applications.
As senior Hannah Weinberg-Wolf was enjoying an exhibition at the nearby Walters Art Museum last year about how touch and Renaissance sculpture are interlinked, she realized it would be more interesting to add another element: publishable scientific data.
Through contact with automobiles and everyday electronics, we’re almost all familiar with the lead waste industry. Every car made today, even hybrid and electric cars, contains about 27 pounds of lead, neatly held inside the battery.
Theta Tau, Hopkins’s Professional Engineering Fraternity, held its sixth annual Tower of Power competition last Monday, Feb. 18. The event was a kickoff party for the Whiting School of Engineering’s E-Week, which is part of its 20-month-long celebration of 100 years of engineering at Hopkins. Since the School of Engineering’s first year was from fall 1912 to spring 1913, Hopkins decided to start celebrating at the beginning of 2012 and keep celebrating throughout 2013.
