Even the best drugs currently available cannot weed out HIV from all of its hiding places within the body, according to a new study of HIV patients in the United States. The discovery seems to confirm doctors’ suspicions that once the virus gains a foothold, it can never be fully eradicated from the body, according to LiveScience.
After years of aggressive drug treatment, the virus still hides out in significant reservoirs, particularly in tissues surrounding the gut lining, the researchers report. Cells in these tissues, a part of the immune system called ’gut-associated lymphoid tissue’, remain infected with the virus even though the patient may be leading an apparently healthy life.
Many HIV patients can manage their infection with a cocktail of drugs called antiretroviral therapies (ARTs). These can reduce their ’viral load’--the amount of virus circulating in the blood plasma--to undetectable levels.
But the new study shows that even in such ’non-infectious’ patients the virus is still lurking in gut tissues, and still infecting other immune cells in the blood.
“It might not ever be possible to completely eradicate the virus from the body, even though people are doing well,“ says Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, who led the research. He adds, however, that this doesn’t mean that patients will be more likely than previously thought to pass on the virus to others.
The finding underlines HIV’s status as an ’incurable’ infection, although in many cases doctors are able to stave off the onset of full-blown AIDS by giving patients sustained courses of drugs.
Indeed, so effective are current drugs that most say HIV should now be seen as a chronic disease requiring lifelong management, in the same way as diabetes or chronic hypertension. “It’s not a death sentence,“ says Deenan Pillay of University College London, an expert on antiviral treatments.

The sQuba travels on land and, when chased by bad guys in a helicopter, plunged into the water and became an airtight submarine.

OK, so the Swiss have invented a car that runs on land and underwater. But did they really have to make it a convertible?
It’s called the “sQuba,“ and conjures up memories of James Bond’s amphibious Lotus Esprit from “The Spy Who Loved Me.“
That fictional vehicle traveled on land and, when chased by bad guys in a helicopter, plunged into the water and became an airtight submarine--complete with “torpedoes“ and “depth charges,“ AP reported.
But “Q“ isn’t responsible for this one.
The concept car--which unlike Bond’s is not armed--was developed by Swiss designer Rinspeed Inc. and is set to make a splash at the Geneva Auto Show next month.
Company CEO Frank Rinderknecht, a self-professed Bond fan, said he has been waiting 30 years to recreate the car he saw Roger Moore use to drive off of a dock.
The sQuba can plow through the water at a depth of 30 feet and has electrical motors to turn the underwater screw.
You’ll have to break out the wetsuit, however.
The car has an open top, meaning that the two passengers are exposed to the elements.
“For safety reasons, we have built the vehicle as an open car so that the occupants can get out quickly in an emergency,“ said Rinderknecht, 52.
Passengers will be able to keep breathing underwater through an integrated tank of compressed air similar to what is used in scuba diving.
The sQuba’s top speed on land is about 77 mph, but it slows down to 3 mph on the surface of the water, and 1.8 mph underwater.
Working with engineering specialists, Rinspeed removed the combustion engine from a sports car and replaced it with several electrical motors. Three are located in the rear with one providing propulsion on land and the other two driving the screw for underwater driving.
The company calls the sQuba the first real submersible car. Unlike military amphibious vehicles, which can only drive slowly on a lakebed, the sQuba travels like a submarine--either on the surface or submerged.
The interior is resistant to salt water, allowing the skipper to drive into a lake or the sea.

Gene sleuths have identified more than 10 new genetic links to prostate cancer, two of which would be included in a new diagnostic test aimed at spotting men at risk from this disease.
Prostate cancer is the commonest cancer afflicting men in developed countries and heredity is known to play a key but poorly understood role in it, AFP said.
Working separately, scientists gathered in three international consortia crunched through genetic data garnered from blood samples provided by thousands of volunteers.
Men with prostate cancer had a strong tendency to have telltale variants in locations on chromosomes 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11 and 19 and the X chromosome for gender, they reported in the latest issue of Nature Genetics.
One of the group of investigators worked in Iceland, trawling over a local DNA treasure trove.
Two of the genetic variants, on the X chromosome and chromosome 2, would be included in a new lab test for prostate cancer, they said.
The new diagnostic tool, called deCODE PrCa, would look for a total of eight such signatures, said deCODE genetics, a biopharmaceutical company that is looking through the Icelandic DNA data in the search for new medical products.
Researcher Gilles Thomas, who took part in a study by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), said that, individually, the genetic variants “play a low-key part“ in prostate cancer, but became more dangerous when they accumulated.
“It’s being able to spot several variants at one time that we can start helping people who are at high risk,“ he told AFP.
Men with close relatives who have had prostate cancer are twice as likely to develop the disease as counterparts with no recent family history of this ailment.
But, until now, only a few genes have been associated with the disease, and they account for only a small percentage of potential cases.

Eyes are turning to the developing world where the mobile wallet is not just a convenience but a necessity.

Moves beyond 3G and driving mobile uptake worldwide are on the agenda at the opening of Mobile World Congress. “We have 2.5 billion connected but how do we connect the next three or four billion and deliver services to the lowest income groups,“ said a spokesman for the GSM Association.
A raft of new handsets and services are also expected to be unveiled.
Analysts predict more tie-ups between mobile firms and companies like YouTube and MySpace, BBC said.
Mobile entertainment--the combination of mobile phone, social networking and location-based services--is being touted as the killer application for the future.
Nokia believes that GPS (Global Positioning System) chips will become as ubiquitous in mobile phones as cameras and its $6 billion investment in mapping company NavTeq indicates that it is putting its money where its mouth is.
The move to web applications is likely to continue although the tricky part will be finding a way of translating the economics of the mobile world--where data comes with a charge--to the free net-based applications it wants to mimic, thinks analyst Margaret Rice-Jones, chief executive of mobile consultancy AIRCOM,
Location-based social networking, allowing you to find out the exact location of your buddies, could be one way that mobile can offers something over and above web-based applications.
At the start of the conference LG announced a new smartphone with built-in GPS, the LG-KT610, to take advantage of location-based services.
Sony Ericsson has unveiled its first handset powered by Windows Mobile, the Xperia, and it too comes with GPS.
Gypsii, a social networking service offering location-based search for people, places, content and events will be launched on the first day of the conference.
“The real time location-based element of GyPSii adds a new dimension to the social networking phenomenon,“ said Dan Harple, founder and CEO.
“Rather than sitting indoors chatting to friends on an pc-based service--you can be out and about seeing who is nearby, what they are doing and where you could go - all in real time,“ he added.
For years the mobile world has talked about the possibility of the phone as a replacement for all the plastic we carry around in our purses and wallets.
The tail-end of last year saw a tie-up between Transport for London’s Oyster card, O2, Nokia and Visa in a trial allowing commuters to pay for their tube tickets via mobile and make small purchases in a range of shops.
But increasingly eyes are turning to the developing world where the mobile wallet is not just a convenience but a necessity.

Experts say the findings 'tightened the noose' on hopes of life on Mars.

The Red Planet was too salty to sustain life for much of its history, according to the latest evidence gathered by one of the US rovers on Mars’ surface.
High concentration of minerals in water on early Mars would have made it inhospitable to even the toughest microbes, a leading Nasa expert says, BBC wrote.
Clues preserved in rocks that were once awash with water suggest the environment was both acidic and briny.
The observations were made by the US space agency’s Opportunity rover.
It has spent months examining rocks on an ancient Martian plain.
Dr Andrew Knoll, a member of the rover science team, and a biologist at Harvard University, Cambridge, US, said the finding “tightens the noose on the possibility of life“.
Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, he said conditions on Mars in the past four billion years would have been very challenging for life.
“It was really salty--in fact, it was salty enough that only a handful of known terrestrial organisms would have a ghost of a chance of surviving there when conditions were at their best,“ he explained.
The US Mars rovers--Opportunity and its twin, Spirit--have now spent more than 1,400 days on the Martian surface.
As their work comes to an end, Nasa has its hopes set on the Phoenix lander, which is due to reach Mars on 25 May.
The Phoenix mission will land near the planet’s north pole, and aim to dig under the frozen surface in search of signs of microbial life, past or present.
The next-generation rover, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), is set to leave Earth in 2009, and land in 2010.
Twice as long and three times as heavy as Spirit and Opportunity, it will collect Martian soil and rock samples, and analyze them for organic compounds.

Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers have taken a major step toward eventually being able to reprogram adult cells to an embryonic stem cell-like state without the use of viruses or cancer-causing genes.
In a paper released online by the journal Cell Stem Cell, Konrad Hochedlinger and colleagues report that they have discovered how long adult cells need to be exposed to reprogramming factors before they convert to an embryonic-like state, and have “defined the sequence of events that occur during reprogramming.“
According to ScienceDaily, this work on adult mouse skin cells should help researchers narrow the field of candidate chemicals and proteins that might be used to safely turn these processes on and off. This is particularly important because at this stage in the study of these induced pluripotent (iPS) cells, researchers are using cancer-causing genes to initiate the process, and are using retroviruses, which can activate cancer genes, to insert the genes into the target cells. As long as the work involves the use of either oncogenes or retroviruses, it would not be possible to use these converted cells in patients.
Up to this point, the reprogramming process has been a virtual black box - scientists have been able to turn back the developmental clock on adult skin cells by introducing four genes into the cells, but they have not known what steps were occurring during the process.
Harvard Stem Cell Institute Co-Director Doug Melton called the work “an impressive and thoughtful study“ that “marks an important first step in finding ways to create pluripotent stem cells from adult cells without the need for viruses or oncogenes.“
Hochedlinger, an assistant professor in Harvard’s new inter-school Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, and a leader in the study of iPS cells, is, like others, converting adult cells to an embryonic-like state, using four genes to bring about the conversion.
In this new Cell Stem Cell paper, he and his colleagues at MGH’s Cancer Center and Center for Regenerative Medicine “have engineered new viral systems to introduce this into skin cells. With this new viral system we were able to control the behavior of these four genes.“
When working with adult skin cells, he explains, “skin cell markers are turned off very early, in the first two or three days, and after eight or nine days,“ the point at which the cells become independent of the viruses used to insert the genes now used for reprogramming, “other pluripotency genes are activated. This is the first framework for zooming in on this process, and will allow us to ask what’s happening at day five, day six, and so on.“

With a sheet of electrodes placed over the brain, people can quickly learn to move a cursor around a computer screen using their thoughts. Early trials suggest that this new procedure could overtake more established brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).
According to New Scientist, the two established techniques involve inserting electrodes into the brain or attaching them onto the scalp. These approaches have let people control robotic limbs, steer wheelchairs, type messages and walk in virtual worlds using thought alone.
BCIs will one day transform the lives of people with disabilities and neurological disorders affecting their ability to move or communicate, says neuroscientist Gerwin Schalk at the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, US.
But which method will be best at doing that is still an open question, he says. “The two established sensor methods have fundamental problems that I think will be difficult to overcome.“
Electrodes on the scalp can only detect electrical waves that have passed through the skull, producing a weak signal susceptible to interference from mains electricity and other sources.
Electrodes implanted directly into the brain produce much clearer signals, but are not well tolerated by the body. “The brain tries to get rid of [the electrodes] by covering them with a sheet of tissue,“ explains Schalk. “The signal degrades over time.“
Schalk and colleagues at Albany Medical College, Washington University in St Louis, University of Washington, Seattle, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, all US, think a third approach will face fewer hurdles.
They cover part of the brain’s surface with a polymer sheet containing a grid of electrodes 2 millimetres in diameter and spaced 10 mm apart, a method called electrocorticography (ECOG). Such electrode grids are often placed in people with severe epilepsy to identify the focus of seizures within the brain.
In recent experiments, five patients learned to control a computer cursor in two dimensions on a computer screen using their brain signals.
All five acquired this skill in less than 30 minutes, a performance similar to those achieved using electrodes implanted directly into the brain, says Schalk. Learning to control a cursor like this using a scalp-recorded methods takes weeks or months, he adds.