Earlier HIV therapy protects against virus spread (AP)

WASHINGTON ? Treating HIV right away, before patients are too sick, dramatically lowers their chances of spreading the AIDS virus to a sexual partner, says a major international study that may convince more doctors to offer medication sooner.

The nine-nation study offers convincing evidence of what scientists have long believed ? that HIV medicines don't just benefit the patient, but may act as a preventive by making those people less infectious. Earlier treatment in the study meant patients were 96 percent less likely to spread the virus to their uninfected partners, according to preliminary results announced Thursday by the National Institutes of Health, which oversaw the research.

Those findings were striking enough that the NIH said it was stopping the study four years ahead of schedule to get the word out.

When HIV patients should start taking antiviral drugs is an important question. The pills are lifesaving but also expensive ? up to $15,000 a year in the U.S. ? and carry a range of side effects from diarrhea to liver damage.

NIH's Dr. Anthony Fauci said the new study promises to change practice worldwide. In developing countries, where the drugs cost a few hundred dollars a year, patients tend to be far sicker before getting medication. Even in the U.S., where therapy starts sooner, doctors don't always treat as early as was done in this study.

"It has less to do with a decision about what's good for you from a personal health standpoint than what is the extra added benefit from starting earlier, i.e., transmission, especially if you have a partner who's uninfected," said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Condoms remain crucial for protection ? the medications don't change that longtime recommendation. All 1,763 couples in the study, where one partner had HIV and the other didn't, were urged to use them.

"HIV-positive people cannot assume they are not infectious simply because they are already on treatment medications," warned Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Previous research has suggested that HIV patients who use the medications are less likely to spread infection. But the $73 million study announced Thursday is the first to rigorously test that.

The couples, most of whom were heterosexual, were randomly divided. Among half, the HIV-infected partner started medication immediately after diagnosis. Among the other half, the infected partner delayed using the drugs until his or her level of CD4 cells ? a way to measure the strength of the immune system ? dropped below 250 or symptoms appeared.

In 28 couples, the uninfected person became infected by their partner. Only one of those infections occurred among the couples where the infected person was treated early, Fauci said.

The other 27 cases in which HIV spread involved couples that delayed drug treatment.

Importantly, more than half of those infections occurred when the patient's CD4 count remained greater than 350, Fauci noted. That number indicates only moderate immune damage. Most developing countries don't offer treatment until CD4 levels dip lower than that.

U.S. guidelines recently were changed to recommend that treatment begin when that immune system number is below 500, although many doctors haven't yet begun following that advice, said Dr. Michael Horberg of the HIV Medicine Association and HIV/AIDS director for Kaiser Permanente. Some experts would treat even sooner.

The earlier treatment also helped reduce some complications ? such as a form of tuberculosis ? in the original patients, but there was no significant difference in deaths between the two groups.

The study included couples from Botswana, Brazil, India, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Thailand, Zimbabwe, as well as a few from the United States.

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Online:

NIH: http://www.niaid.nih.gov

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Study: It's not teacher, but method that matters (AP)

WASHINGTON ? Who's better at teaching difficult physics to a class of more than 250 college students: the highly rated veteran professor using time-tested lecturing, or the inexperienced graduate students interacting with kids via devices that look like TV remotes? The answer could rattle ivy on college walls.

A study by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, now a science adviser to President Barack Obama, suggests that how you teach is more important than who does the teaching.

He found that in nearly identical classes, Canadian college students learned a lot more from teaching assistants using interactive tools than they did from a veteran professor giving a traditional lecture. The students who had to engage interactively using the TV remote-like devices scored about twice as high on a test compared to those who heard the normal lecture, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The interactive method had almost no lecturing. It involved short, small-group discussions, in-class "clicker" quizzes, demonstrations and question-answer sessions. The teachers got real-time graphic feedback on what the students were learning and what they weren't getting.

"It's really what's going on in the students' minds rather than who is instructing them," said lead researcher Carl Wieman of the University of British Columbia, who shared a Nobel physics prize in 2001. "This is clearly more effective learning. Everybody should be doing this. ... You're practicing bad teaching if you are not doing this."

The study compared just two sections of physics classes for just one week, but Wieman said the technique would work for other sciences as well, and even for history.

Previous research has produced similar results. But this study, appearing in a major scientific journal and written by a Nobel laureate, can make a big difference in the field of teaching science, said Robert Beichner, a physicist and professor of science education at North Carolina State University. Beichner, who was named the 2010 U.S. undergraduate science professor of the year by the Society for College Science Teachers, wasn't part of the study but praised Wieman's work.

"He's got the scientific chops" to make other professors consider retooling their approaches, Beichner said.

Wieman heads the science education programs at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Colorado. He's also associate director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Lloyd Armstrong, a former provost at the University of Southern California and professor of physics and education, agreed that the study shows "it's not the professor, it's not even the technology, it's the approach."

Beichner, who uses the more hands-on method himself, likened it to the difference between being told how to ride a bike vs. getting on and riding it.

A prominent proponent of the traditional physics teaching method declined to talk about the study. Walter Lewin of MIT wrote in an email, "I have a rather unique lecture style which they could not cover in their tests."

In the spring 2010 experiment, Wieman and his colleagues followed two nearly identical physics classes of more than 250 students that were taught the usual way three hours a week for 11 weeks. In the 12th week, one class stuck with the long-tenured and well-regarded professor in lecture mode. The second class was taught by two of Wieman's grad students using the interactive method.

The classes' test scores were nearly identical before the interactive sessions, but there was an obvious difference after the students took a 12-question quiz on what they were taught during the experimental week of instruction. Students in the interactive class got an average of 74 percent of the questions right, while those taught using traditional method scored only 41 percent.

The best scores in the traditional class were below average for the interactive class, Wieman said. In addition, student attendance and attention were higher in the interactive class.

The professor who lectured students had been sure his method would work better, and it took a while for him to get over the results, said Louis Deslauriers, one of the graduate students who taught the interactive class. But now the professor is striving to adopt the new method.

The two graduate students are co-authors of the study and knew that what they were doing was part of the research, meaning this wasn't the usual blind scientific experiment. But Wieman said that didn't affect the results of the study. Independent people monitored the students and teachers' actions in the classroom. Wieman declined to identify the veteran professor, who was a willing participant.

Wieman said the need for a more hands-on teaching approach isn't an indictment of a generation raised on video games. It has more to do with the way the brain learns, he said. This method has long worked well in individual tutoring; it's just now being applied on a grander scale, he said.

As far as professorial brilliance, there's "nothing magical about a particular person," he said.

"Lectures have been equally ineffective for centuries," the Nobelist said. "Now we have figured out ways to do it better."

___

Online: http://www.sciencemag.org

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The World's Biggest Consumer 3-D TV Costs a Thousand Dollars an Inch

Bang & Olufsen 4-85 B&O

Our sister publication, the AV wizards (it's not a club, really) over at Sound & Vision, got a glimpse of B&O's newest, record-breaking, ludicrously-priced 4-85 TV. At 85 inches, it's the world's biggest consumer 3-D TV, and at $85,000, one of the most expensive. It displays 3-D in full 1080p and even has a stand into which the screen retracts. Biggest and most expensive doesn't always mean best, but S&V seemed quite pleased with the quality of the set. Check out their writeup for more information (and, of course, some pretty pictures). [S&V]

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Biologists Announce Discovery of an Entirely New Branch of Life

Maybe it's fungus, maybe it's not

In further proof that we never know just how much we don?t know, a paper published in Nature suggests that biologists in the UK have discovered an entirely new and unique branch in the tree of life. A group of mysterious microscopic organisms related to fungus are actually so different that they make up their own kind of fungal group. Another way to say that: there are so many of these distinctly different kinds of organisms living in so many diverse places, that the biodiversity among this new group might be as vast as the entire known fungal kingdom. In fact, they might not actually be fungi at all.

The scientists who have discovered this new clade--a clade is like a branch on the tree of life that consists of an organism and all of its descendants--have named it cryptomycota, which loosely means ?hidden from the kingdom Fungi? so we?re told. And indeed the cryptomycota have remained hidden from sight even though it turns out they are everywhere, living in many different environments, including freshwater lakes and sediments, as well as pond water.

While biologists estimate that they?ve only categorized and cataloged about 10 percent of all fungi in the world, they were pretty sure that they?d discovered all the major groups. Cryptomycota is so new and biologically different than other fungi that scientists have yet to characterized its life cycle precisely--which is reasonable considering this is the first time researchers have ever knowingly studied them as a completely different clade.

As such, there are a lot of questions surrounding cryptomycota. How did they evolve to survive in so many diverse environments? Does their life cycle involve developing a cell wall, or do they acquire a cell wall parasitically? And, possibly, are cryptomycota fundamentally fungi at all, or are they something completely different?

Answering questions like those is going to take a lot of time, a lot of research, a lot of papers, and likely a lot of argument in the global biological community. If an entirely new taxonomical kingdom is established and it turns out everything you learned in high school was significantly incomplete, we?ll certainly let you know.

[Ars Technica, NPR]

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Task Force Reports No Major Safety Issues at U.S. Nuclear Plants After Month of Study (ContributorNetwork)

According to Reuters, a government-assigned task force in charge of assessing the current state of nuclear energy in the country has reported that, after a month of work, it has not found any major problems with any of the country's 104 nuclear power plants.

The federal task force went into action following the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster that occurred in March following an 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked Japan. The goal of the panel of experts is to look at where things failed at Fukushima and see if there are any similar risks at U.S. nuclear power plants. According to CNN, the task force was designed to complete a three-month study; so far, it is one month in. At the end of the three-month period, the task force will present its findings and any recommended changes or problems it might have with nuclear power plants in the U.S.

The CNN article also included a statement from task force leader Charles Miller, who spoke with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Thursday. Miller said:

"As we stand today, the task force has not identified any issues that we think would undermine our confidence in the continued safety and emergency planning for nuclear plants in this country. That said, we do expect that we're likely to have findings and recommendations that will further enhance the safety of the nuclear plants in this country."

According to Dow Jones Newswires, the meeting Thursday between the task force, which consists of five experts, and theNuclear Regulatory Commission was the first in a series of meetings set to take place. Additionally, the task force has made its findings so far available to the public and noted it will most likely have recommendations on how to enhance safety preparation for nuclear power plants once the study is completed. After the panel releases safety recommendations, U.S. officials could take swift action to make sure the precautions are implemented in the country's 104 nuclear reactors.

After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, in which the power plant's cooling system failed, many states that utilize nuclear energy began looking at their safety plans and disaster preparations. Some states also put their plans to build more reactors on hold until nuclear energy was completely reassessed in the country and their individual state.

Rachel Krech provides an in-depth look at current environmental issues and local Chicago news stories. As a college student from the Chicago suburbs pursuing two science degrees, she applies her knowledge and passion to both topics to garner further public awareness.

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Video: Ranger Robot Sets New Distance Record, Walking 40 Miles on a Single Charge

Ranger Extends Its Range

Cornell?s Ranger Robot, world record holder for the longest walk by a robot on a single charge, has smashed its own personal best by logging 40.5 miles without stopping, recharging, or even being touched. Over the course of almost 31 hours, Ranger ambled along at a not-so-blazing 1.3 miles per hour for 397.75 laps around a running track, but managed to make the whole trek using just a nickel?s worth of electricity.

The robot?s previous record, set in July of last year, was just 14.3 miles. Ranger?s handlers at Cornell were able to squeeze more mileage out of their robot by improving its efficiency through better overall control. Ranger gets by on far less power than most legged robots because, for the most part, its legs swing freely, catching the robot as it falls forward and pushing it into its next step.

So while watching Ranger go may not be the most exciting thing going in robotics right now, the waist-tall little ?bot is something of a feat in consistency and efficiency. After all, it made 186,076 steps while covering more than 40 miles in this latest attempt, and never missed a step. That?s better than most humans can say.

Cue the Chariots of Fire and watch Ranger go in the video below. Of particular anti-climactic interest: the big finish, at the 3:40 mark.

[PhysOrg]

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Kan. boy clawed by leopard leaves hospital (AP)

WICHITA, Kan. ? A 7-year-old Kansas boy who was clawed by a leopard last week during a school field trip to a zoo in Wichita is out of the hospital.

The first-grader went home Monday, three days after his run-in with the big cat at the Sedgwick County Zoo.

Zoo officials say the boy climbed over a 4-foot railing around the leopard exhibit, crossed an 8-foot safety zone and stood next to the metal mesh fence. The leopard was able to get its paws through the mesh and clawed the boy on the neck and face.

KAKE-TV reports the boy's family issued a statement Monday thanking bystanders who rushed to help after the attack.

___

Information from: KAKE-TV, http://

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Task Force Reports No Major Safety Issues at U.S. Nuclear Plants After Month of Study (ContributorNetwork)

According to Reuters, a government-assigned task force in charge of assessing the current state of nuclear energy in the country has reported that, after a month of work, it has not found any major problems with any of the country's 104 nuclear power plants.

The federal task force went into action following the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster that occurred in March following an 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked Japan. The goal of the panel of experts is to look at where things failed at Fukushima and see if there are any similar risks at U.S. nuclear power plants. According to CNN, the task force was designed to complete a three-month study; so far, it is one month in. At the end of the three-month period, the task force will present its findings and any recommended changes or problems it might have with nuclear power plants in the U.S.

The CNN article also included a statement from task force leader Charles Miller, who spoke with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Thursday. Miller said:

"As we stand today, the task force has not identified any issues that we think would undermine our confidence in the continued safety and emergency planning for nuclear plants in this country. That said, we do expect that we're likely to have findings and recommendations that will further enhance the safety of the nuclear plants in this country."

According to Dow Jones Newswires, the meeting Thursday between the task force, which consists of five experts, and theNuclear Regulatory Commission was the first in a series of meetings set to take place. Additionally, the task force has made its findings so far available to the public and noted it will most likely have recommendations on how to enhance safety preparation for nuclear power plants once the study is completed. After the panel releases safety recommendations, U.S. officials could take swift action to make sure the precautions are implemented in the country's 104 nuclear reactors.

After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, in which the power plant's cooling system failed, many states that utilize nuclear energy began looking at their safety plans and disaster preparations. Some states also put their plans to build more reactors on hold until nuclear energy was completely reassessed in the country and their individual state.

Rachel Krech provides an in-depth look at current environmental issues and local Chicago news stories. As a college student from the Chicago suburbs pursuing two science degrees, she applies her knowledge and passion to both topics to garner further public awareness.

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Teen Discovers Promising Cystic Fibrosis Treatment (LiveScience.com)

A 16-year-old from the Toronto area used a supercomputer system to find a new drug combination that shows potential in treating the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis, and won top honors for his work.

Marshall Zhang, an 11th-grade student at Richmond Hill's Bayview Secondary School, received first place Tuesday (May 10) in the 2011 Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge, a contest in which students conduct their own research projects with the help of mentors.

Cystic fibrosis is a potentially fatal condition caused by a genetic mutation, or error. It causes thick, sticky mucus to build up in the lungs and elsewhere. Cystic fibrosis occurs most among white people of northern European ancestry, in about 1 out of 3,000 live births. In the past, most people with cystic fibrosis died in their teens, according to the Mayo Clinic. It has no cure. [10 Worst Hereditary Conditions]

At his mentor's lab, Zhang used the Canadian SCINET supercomputing network to investigate how two promising new compounds acted against the defective protein responsible for the condition. Using computer simulations, he figured out how each of these drugs acted against the protein and discovered they acted on the protein in different spots, raising the possibility they could be used simultaneously without interfering with each other.

Zhang then tested his theory in living cells, and the results exceeded his expectations.

"They actually worked together in creating an effect that was greater than the sum of its parts," he told LiveScience.

Zhang is realistic about the future for his discovery; once tested in the human body, promising treatments can turn out to be toxic or ineffective, he said. But even if this combination of compounds doesn't ultimately help treat cystic fibrosis, he believes his research has laid important groundwork for other discoveries.

"I have identified certain chemical structures that are key in the corrective effects of these molecules, as well as identified two molecular targets on the protein for future therapeutics," he said.

His mentor, Dr. Christine Bear, a researcher at the Hospital for Sick Children's Research Institute in Toronto, has invited him back to her lab to continue his work, he said.

After taking Advanced Placement Biology last year, in Grade 10, Zhang decided he wanted to do what real scientists do and began contacting professors to see if he could work in their labs.

"Most of them said 'no' because I didn't have the experience I needed," he said. "I emailed the entire list of faculty in biochemistry at the University of Toronto." The last one, Dr. Bear, said yes.

Now Zhang and a trio of Montreal students who took second place for their technique for making sorbet without gelatin move on to compete against U.S. and Australian teams at the International BioGENEius Challenge in Washington, D.C., June 27.

You can follow LiveScience writer Wynne Parry on Twitter @Wynne_Parry.�Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience�and on Facebook.

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Astronauts back for next-to-last shuttle flight (AP)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. ? The astronauts for NASA's next-to-last space shuttle flight returned to Florida on Thursday for another try at launching to the International Space Station.

The six crewmen ? led by the husband of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords ? arrived at Kennedy Space Center a day before the countdown clocks begin ticking again.

Shuttle Endeavour is due to blast off Monday morning. The first launch attempt on April 29 was halted by electrical trouble. A switch box was replaced, and new wiring installed.

In brief remarks after the crew's arrival, commander Mark Kelly said the launch director has assured him that Endeavour is "in great condition."

Aboard Endeavour is a $2 billion particle physics detector that will be attached to the space station. The 16-day flight also will feature the delivery of station spare parts, as well as four spacewalks that will be the last for the 30-year shuttle program. Atlantis closes out the shuttle era with a flight in July.

Kelly's wife was critically wounded in the head four months ago at a Tucson, Ariz., political event. The Arizona congresswoman recovered well enough to travel from Houston for her husband's first launch effort. She will return to Kennedy later this week, along with the other astronauts' families.

Her staff said she will return to Houston to continue rehab, shortly after liftoff. She is a member of the House committee on science, space and technology.

Astronaut Gregory Chamitoff commended Kelly for giving the mission his all, and called him "truly an amazing commander."

"We all know Mark's been through a lot the past few months," Chamitoff told journalists. "All of us feel really, really lucky to have him guide us through this complex mission."

"Appreciate that," Kelly said. "We are really excited to be here, excited to launch hopefully on Monday if the weather holds."

Forecasters put the odds of acceptable conditions at 70 percent. Launch time is 8:56 a.m.

Pilot Gregory Johnson celebrated his 49th birthday Thursday.

"I can't think of a more perfect way to spend my birthday" than get ready for the flight, Johnson said.

Endeavour is the youngest shuttle in the fleet. It was built to replace the shuttle Challenger, destroyed in a 1986 launch accident, and first flew in 1992. This will be its 25th flight and the 134th overall for the shuttle program.

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Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

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