"Junk Gene" that Fights HIV Can Be Turned Back On

Darwin's Radio: Prehistoric Gene Reawakens to Battle HIV -A Galaxy Classic

Greg Bear writes:

About 95% of the human genome has once been designated as "junk" DNA. While much of this sequence may be an evolutionary artifact that serves no present-day purpose, some junk DNA may function in ways that are not currently understood. The conservation of some junk DNA over many millions of years of evolution may imply an essential function that has been "turned off." Now scientists say there's a junk gene that fights HIV. And they've discovered how to turn it back on.

What these scientists have done could give us the first bulletproof HIV vaccine. They have re-awakened the human genome's latent potential to make us all into HIV-resistant creatures; they published their ground-breaking research in PLoS Biology.

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Climate Change: Volunteers Sought to Pose Nude on Retreating Swiss Glacier

Praying (and Stripping) for Ice - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

Andrew C. Revkin writes:

The Associated Press has a story from the Swiss Alps providing an update on a situation I wrote about in 1993 in Conde Nast Traveler (two years before I came to The Times). At the peak of the “Little Ice Age,” villagers there prayed for the Aletsch glacier to stop advancing. Now they have switched to praying for the ice to stop retreating. (The photo above is of the nearby Rhone glacier.) The article says they are planning to seek formal approval from Pope Benedict XVI to update the 19th-century vow, which still focuses on avoiding catastrophes related to too much ice, to call for the glacier’s return. Given trajectories for ice loss in the Alps, and for global emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, divine intervention may be worth a try. In 2007 the photographer Spencer Tunik tried another approach on the Aletsch, inviting several hundred volunteers to pose nude on the melting ice (nudity alert) to get the world’s attention.

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How Bad is the Recession? Send Out your Dead: Unclaimed Corpses Accumulate in Morgues

Unclaimed dead stack up in Wayne County morgue | detnews.com | The Detroit News

His corpse lies at the bottom of a pile of other bodies unclaimed at the Wayne County morgue. But Grandpa -- whose name has been withheld to avoid embarrassing his family -- is a special case. He has been in the cooler for the past two years as his kinfolk -- too broke to bury him -- wait for a ship to come in.

"There is destitution," says Dr. Carl J. Schmidt, the chief medical examiner of this, the nation's poorest big city. "But when you're so destitute that nobody has claimed you, that's a whole different level of being destitute."

Peering into the small glass window of the cooler door, Schmidt counts 52 unclaimed bodies stacked like cordwood -- in some cases four to a shelf; always two to a gurney.

Generally, the economic well-being of a municipality is measured by unemployment rates and quarterly earnings reports. But Schmidt's cooler may say as much about metropolitan Detroit's financial health as any statistics released by the Federal Reserve.

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China: Plague Transmitted by Fleas

Raw Story » Dead dog’s fleas suspected of spreading China plague

A dog is suspected to be the origin of an outbreak of pneumonic plague in northwest China that has killed three people and left 10,000 under strict quarantine, state media reported.

Ziketan, a remote town in a Tibetan area of Qinghai province, has been locked down since Saturday in an effort to contain the spread of the highly virulent disease.

One patient was in critical condition and eight others were infected, most of them relatives of the first fatality, a 32-year-old herdsman, or local doctors, Xinhua news agency said.

Initial tests had shown that the herdsman’s dead dog was the likely origin of the outbreak, Xinhua reported late Wednesday, quoting professor Wang Hu, director of the Qinghai disease control bureau.

Wang said it was likely that the dog died after eating a plague-infected marmot and that the man became infected when he was bitten by fleas while burying the dead dog. He died three days later.

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Homophobia in Israel

Raw Story » Almost half of Israelis consider gays deviants: poll

Almost half the Israeli population considers homosexuals to be deviants, according to an opinion poll published on Thursday, five days after an attack at a Tel Aviv gay centre killed two people.

Forty-six percent of the 498 people interviewed answered yes to the question “do you see homosexuality as a perversion?” and 42 percent said no, the Haaretz newspaper said.

Among ultra-Orthodox Jews, 71 percent said yes, as did 64 percent of Arab Israelis, and 24 percent of people who described themselves as secular.

Camil Fuchs, who conducted the poll, said it showed a certain decline in homophobia in Israel, but said this could be tied to Saturday’s attack by a gunmen who killed two people and another 15 wounded.

“It is possible that what we have here is a reaction to the trauma and also that hate-filled people think this is not the moment to admit it,” Haaretz quoted him as saying.

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Asia-Africa Relations: Confucius Institutes

Asia Times Online :: China News, China Business News, Taiwan and Hong Kong News and Business.

A features writer for the Economist once insisted that the Mandarin character for Africa means "wrong continent". This is perhaps because there is a perception that the teachers have frequently been wrong-headed about Africa, and have tended to get it wrong whenever they have moved out of their comfort zones in trading and infrastructure development.

Such a view is not entirely right, and China has in recent years taken great pains to show the world that it is a well-rounded emerging power with a complete strategy for engagement in places like Africa.

Its Confucius institutes are an interesting feature in this show of sophistication. The Hanban - the Chinese National Office for teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language - began spreading them from 2004 when it set up the first one in the South Korean capital of Seoul.

Top Chinese officials have made no effort to disguise the propaganda value they perceive in the spread of the institutes, but so far very little in the way of a coherent strategy has emerged as to how they can be integrated into the mainstream of Chinese foreign policy, which nowadays is driven, as everyone knows, by a mercantilist view of global politics and economics. Africa has not been spared this ambiguity.

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Kurds Press Maliki on Kirkuk

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's recent visit to Iraqi Kurdistan was aimed to test the waters on how loudly and aggressively the Kurds are willing to push their claim for the oil-rich Kirkuk region.

Maliki received a uniform answer from all his interlocutors, that the Kurds want to go until "the curtain falls", which makes dialogue, let alone solutions, between the camps virtually impossible.

Maliki will now have to accustom himself to a confrontation - be it words or bullets - with his compatriots in Iraq. Or he will have to cede Kirkuk. A third option does not exist. And if the Kurds do decide to go full-on with their demands, they will probably work on dethroning the prime minister, by refusing to support his cabinet, or working against him in the parliamentary elections scheduled for early 2010.

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RIP Bix Beiderbecke, Who Died on This Day in 1931

This is arguably Bix's most famous recording, "Singin' the Blues." The C-melody saxophone solo by Frank Trumbauer is the first of its kind, and powerfully influenced all the sax players of the time, including most notably Lester Young.