An international study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET suggests that prognosis for patients with HIV/AIDS might be more reliably determined six months after initiation of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), rather than before the start of treatment.

HAART became widespread in more-developed countries from 1996 onwards, and has improved the prognosis of HIV-1 infection. However, not enough is known about how to predict the prognosis of people with HIV-1 infection starting HAART.

Puberty blues: goby fish choose their sex to find a mate

Research on the Great Barrier Reef has revealed that some young reef fish can choose when they mature and which sex they want to be when they grow up.

Research conducted by JP Hobbs, an honours student at James Cook University, Townsville, focused on a colourful goby that lives in bushy corals. The research may win him a British Council sponsored study tour of the UK.

Announcing his research results at Fresh Sc

Harry Green comments on a paper in Nature

In a commentary in the Aug. 21 issue of Nature, Harry Green, Distinguished Professor of Geology and Geophysics in the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and the department of earth sciences at UC Riverside, explains that two large, deep earthquakes (depth > 300 km below the surface of the earth) that occurred in Aug. 2002 in the Tonga subduction zone were causally related.

The Tonga subduction zone is approximately beneath

A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicist, in collaboration with an international team of researchers, has developed an experimental method that allows scientists to investigate the behavior of proteins under non-equilibrium conditions one molecule at a time, to better understand a fundamental biological process of protein folding that is important for many diseases.

The work, presented in the Aug. 29 edition of Science, marks the first time protein-folding kinetics has been monitor

A PET (positron emission tomography) scanner sensitive enough to use on laboratory mice has been developed by biomedical engineers at UC Davis. The device is already being used for studies on prostate cancer.

“We think it’s the highest resolution scanner in existence. We can see things we couldn’t see before,” said Simon Cherry, professor of biomedical engineering at UC Davis, who leads the research group.

PET scanners have become widely used in medical imaging, alongside

Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have discovered how Streptococcus pyogenes (S. pyogenes), the bacterium responsible for “flesh-eating” infections, gains a foothold in the body by subverting a key immune system cell.

“The ability of this very common bug, which causes strep throat and other infections, to modulate the gene activity of an immune system cell is remarkable and has never before been