Science

The New York Times reports: For just the second time since the global epidemic began, a patient appears to have been cured of infection with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. The news comes nearly 12 years to the day after the first patient known to be cured, a feat that researchers have long tried, and failed, to duplicate. The …

The Associated Press reports: A sleek American-built capsule with just a test dummy aboard docked smoothly with the International Space Station on Sunday in a big step toward putting the U.S. back in the business of launching astronauts. The white Dragon capsule, developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company under contract to NASA, closed in on the orbiting station nearly 260 …

The Hill reports: An Arizona state lawmaker said this week that state-mandated vaccines are a “communist” value. State Rep. Kelly Townsend (R), in a lengthy Facebook post on Thursday, warned that measles outbreaks are going to result in Arizonans having to “give up our liberty, the very sovereignty of our body.” “I read yesterday that the idea is being floated …

The Texas Observer reports: Texas state Representative Bill Zedler doesn’t understand the fuss over the resurgence of infectious diseases. “When I grew up, I had a lot of these illnesses,” he said, listing measles, mumps and chickenpox. “They wanted me to stay at home. But as far as being sick in bed, it wasn’t anything like that,” said Zedler, an …

The Guardian reports: Scepticism about the use of vaccines for children has risen across Europe in line with votes for populists, according to a study, which proposes that public health officials should track populist parties in opinion polls as a proxy signal for vaccine hesitancy. Big surges in the number of measles cases and deaths map to countries where populist …

Buzzfeed News reports: YouTube on Friday said it would prevent channels that promote anti-vax content from running advertising, saying explicitly that such videos fall under its policy prohibiting the monetization of videos with “dangerous and harmful” content. The move comes after advertisers on YouTube pulled their ads from these videos, following inquiries from BuzzFeed News. “We have strict policies that …

Engadget reports: Virgin Galactic sent its first test passenger into sub-space today. The company’s chief astronaut instructor Beth Moses accompanied two pilots on a flight 55.85 miles above the Earth, just a few miles below the internationally recognized space boundary, 62 miles. This will likely come as good news to the more than 600 people from 58 countries who have …

The Independent reports: NASA’s Opportunity rover is officially dead, the space agency has said, after it disappeared in a dust storm on Mars. Clearly emotional NASA staff, standing in front of a life-sized replica of the rover, said they had not heard back from the rover and that the mission would come to an end. “I am standing here with …

The Guardian reports: The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems,” according to the first global scientific review. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total …

The Associated Press reports: Anti-vaccine activists packed an Olympia, Washington public hearing Friday to oppose a bill that would make it harder for families to opt out of vaccination requirements for measles, mumps and rubella amid the state’s worst measles outbreak in more than two decades. An estimated 700 people, most of them opposed to stricter requirements, lined up before …

A joint report from NOAA and NASA: Earth’s long-term warming trend continued in 2018 as persistent warmth across large swaths of land and ocean resulted in the globe’s fourth hottest year in NOAA’s 139-year climate record. The year ranks just behind 2016 (warmest), 2015 (second warmest) and 2017 (third warmest). In separate analyses of global temperatures, scientists from NASA, the …

Science Daily reports: In a study with significant implications for human organ transplantation, researchers have successfully grown functional mouse kidneys inside rats from just a few donor stem cells. The results of the study, led by researchers from the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Japan, will be published in an upcoming issue of Nature Communications. For patients with end-stage …

The Guardian reports: At least a third of the huge ice fields in Asia’s towering mountain chain are doomed to melt due to climate change, according to a landmark report, with serious consequences for almost 2 billion people. Even if carbon emissions are dramatically and rapidly cut and succeed in limiting global warming to 1.5C, 36% of the glaciers along …

The New York Times reports: It has been one of the most pressing unanswered questions in public health: Do e-cigarettes actually help smokers quit? Now, the first, large rigorous assessment offers an unequivocal answer: yes. The study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that e-cigarettes were nearly twice as effective as conventional nicotine replacement products, like …

National Geographic reports: A new study warns that Greenland’s ice is melting faster than scientists previously thought. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that most of this ice loss is from the land-fast ice sheet itself, not Greenland’s glaciers. The new study, published January 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the largest sustained ice …

The Associated Press reports: Here comes a total lunar eclipse and supermoon, all wrapped into one. The moon, Earth and sun will line up this weekend for the only total lunar eclipse this year and next. At the same time, the moon will be ever so closer to Earth and appear slightly bigger and brighter than usual — a supermoon. …

Newsweek reports: The World Health Organization (WHO) has listed vaccine hesitancy—the delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite their availability—as one of its top 10 health threats facing the world in 2019. The phenomenon has taken hold in a number of countries around the world in recent times, and notably in the U.S. as well. Data from the Centers …

Nature Magazine reports: Something strange is going on at the top of the world. Earth’s north magnetic pole has been skittering away from Canada and towards Siberia, driven by liquid iron sloshing within the planet’s core. The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move. On 15 January, they are …

Science News reports: Astronomers have spotted a second repeating fast radio burst, and it looks a lot like the first. The existence of a second repeating burst suggests there could be many more of the mysterious signals in the cosmos. The burst, called FRB 180814.J0422+73, is one of 13 newly discovered fast radio bursts, or FRBs — brief, bright signals …

Science News reports: NASA’s Juno orbiter has captured images of a volcanic plume on Jupiter’s moon Io during the mission’s 17th flyby of the giant planet. Four instruments onboard Juno — a camera called JunoCam, the Stellar Reference Unit, the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph — observed Io for over an hour, providing a glimpse of …