The natural genetic instability of HIV is this organism’s best weapon. By generating mutations and increasing its diversity, the virus is able to fool its host’s immune system and has made the formulation of a vaccine so far impossible. However, US researchers have come up with a new computer algorithm that will soon allow the production of efficient HIV vaccines.

This new method elucidates and analyzes the variation found in different strains of the virus by describing the molecules able to elicit an immune response (immunogens) that have several forms of variable elements of the virus. The antigens then condense the variation found in many HIV strains into molecules long enough to serve as vaccine immunogens.

These immunogens reflect the diversity of HIV mutants and should be able to produce immune responses from the host against most forms of the virus, thus generating new hope for the millions of HIV-infected patients worldwide.

Source: Public Library of Science

The brainiacs over Texas A&M University (Remember the movie “Drumline”?) has made a huge breakthrough in affordable DNA scanning technology that rivals the accuracy of larger lab machines.

The device has no moving parts and costs just $10 to make. It runs polymerase chain reactions (PCRs), to generate billions of identical copies of a DNA strand, in as little as 20 minutes. This is much faster than the machines currently in use, which take several hours.

Source: New Scientist

A recent study from scientists at Stanford University, California, USA, reveals that younger people are more afraid of losing than the older generations. Could this simply confirm that wisdom of age is a reality? In any case, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and self-reported tests led to the conclusion that seniors don’t seem to mind losing, regardless of the game – as long as it’s not strip poker, let’s hope!

Losing at the races or bingo may not be such a problem for older people, since those over 65 are less upset by loss than twenty-somethings. But they are just as glad of a win, new brain scans suggest.

Source: New Scientist

Black holes are collapsed stars with a gravitational pull such that nothing – not even light – can escape once a certain threshold, known as the event horizon, has been passed. They can only be observed indirectly by the swirling matter around them, and they are thought to emit an extremely weak flow of particles and photons called the Hawking radiation. Now some of these black holes are thought to be wormholes, gateways to other universes.

Two physicists from France and Germany are studying the possibility to distinguish both astrophysical anomalies despite the technical difficulties that currently prevent them from doing so. They have theorized that the detection of both Hawking radiation and an event horizon would identify the object as a black hole, whereas the absence of both would classify it as a wormhole.

Future particle accelerator experiments should enable scientists to create microscopic black holes and test this theory. If small-size wormholes can be produced, we may see one day the fiction of Stargate become a reality. This could also revolutionize long-distance travel, like in Stephen King’s short story “The Jaunt.”

Source: New Scientist

For those who saw the 1959 movie Voyage To The Center Of The Earth, with the scene where the protagonists take a walk in a forest of 7-foot tall mushrooms, this will not come as a big surprise. However, scientists had been debating for over a century about the true nature of what was quite possibly the largest organism of the Devonian era. Neither a plant, nor a lichen, this fungus went extinct some 350 million years ago, most probably because of its slow growth and inability to recover from regular disturbances.

Scientists at the University of Chicago and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., have produced new evidence to finally resolve the mysterious identity of what they regard as one of the weirdest organisms that ever lived.

Source: NewsWise