Surf's up! Playful dolphins put pros to shame as they ride the waves during prestigious surfing competition in South Africa

• Almost a dozen animals put on the show during the J-Bay Open earlier this month in Jeffreys Bay, South Africa

• The Eastern Cape is famous for its dolphins and for its surfing, but it's a lucky treat to see both happen at once
•  Photographer Stan Blumberg: 'I have surfed and scuba dived and I have never seen dolphins surf like this before'

By Dan Bloom

Published: 06:48 EST, 31 July 2014 | Updated: 06:53 EST, 31 July 2014

These playful dolphins stole the show when they gatecrashed one of the world's top surfing competitions to ride the waves themselves.

The animals turned up as global surfing legends descended on Jeffreys Bay, South Africa, for the latest stop on the Association of Surfing Professionals world tour.

The 12-day J-Bay Open saw surfers compete for dominance off the shores of the Eastern Cape, famous for its dramatic waves and large numbers of bottlenose dolphins. 

But things took a surprise twist when a school of almost a dozen dolphins set out to show they were the undisputed kings of the sea in these images captured by 62-year-old Stan Blumberg.

'Two surfers were in the water at the time when a few pods of dolphins swam past and a few surfed the waves as they usually do, without breaking the surface,' he said - then they broke through and put on their show.

He added: 'In my 62 years of living at the coast, I have surfed, scuba dived, been a member of a surf lifesaving club and can honestly say that I have never before seen dolphins surf like this before.'

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Surf's up! These dolphins gatecrashed one of the world's top surfing contests in Jeffreys Bay, South Africa, to put on an impressive wave-riding show of their own

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Awe: The Eastern Cape is famous for its prime surfing and schools of bottlenose dolphins, but it's a lucky treat to see both happening at the same time

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Breaking with convention: The dolphins swam close to the shore during the J-Bay Open, part of the Association of Surfing Professionals world championship tour

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Preparing for their big moment: Photographer Stan Blumberg said he had lived on the coast for 62 years and never seen such an impressive dolphin surfing display

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Build-up: Human surfers spend years honing their skills, but things came a little more naturally to these dolphins swimming off the coast of South Africa's Eastern Cape

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Catch them if you can! Dolphins are known for their playfulness in the wild, where they play games such as leaping as high as they can out of the water

Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Struck At Just The Wrong Time, New Study Suggests

 | By Alexandra Witze

Posted: 07/28/2014 8:54 am EDT Updated: 07/28/2014 12:10 pm EDT

Just before a large asteroid slammed into the Earth 66 million years ago, the diversity of plant-eating dinosaur species declined slightly, a new study suggests. That minor shift may have been enough to doom all dinosaurs when the space rock hit.
The scarcity of plant-eaters would have left them more vulnerable to starvation and population collapse after the impact, with consequences that rippled all the way up the food chain.

“The asteroid hit at a particularly bad time,” says Stephen Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. “If it had hit a few million years earlier or later, dinosaurs probably would have been much better equipped to survive.”

Brusatte and his colleagues describe this nuanced view of the famous extinction in Biological Reviews.

Palaeontologists have argued for decades about whether dinosaurs were doing well when the asteroid hit, or whether they were experiencing a worldwide drop in the number of species. To explore this question, the study pulled information from a database on global dinosaur diversity, including hundreds of fossils found in the past decade.
Localized decline

The scientists used analytical methods to account for the fact that some fossil-bearing rock formations are well-studied and others are not, which could distort the apparent number and distribution of dinosaur species. They found most dinosaurs thriving right up until the impact. “If we look at the global picture, we don't see evidence for a long-term decline,” says team member Richard Butler, a palaeontologist at the University of Birmingham, UK. “In no sense were dinosaurs doomed to extinction and the asteroid just kind of finished them off.”

But in North America, in the last 8 to 10 million years before the asteroid hit, two major groups of herbivores — duck-billed dinosaurs and the group of horned dinosaurs that included Triceratops — did decline slightly. In some places multiple species shrank to just one species. That may be because cooler climates changed the types of vegetation available to eat, says Michael Benton, a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol, UK. Plenty of dinosaur groups had recovered from such small population drops before, but not this time.

A 2012 study that modelled ancient food webs may help to explain why, says Butler. Computer simulations suggested that just a small change in dinosaur diversity made ecosystems much more likely to collapse after big environmental perturbations — such as widespread climate change brought on by an asteroid impact. Plants would have withered up; plant-eating dinosaurs would have starved; and meat-eating dinosaurs would have had little to prey on.

What if?

The latest study rounds up many of the discoveries of recent years, says David Archibald, a palaeontologist at San Diego State University in California. “From my reckoning much of it is pretty much spot on,” he says. “It is almost certainly the impact that kills off the dinosaurs.” But he disagrees with some of the data. In a review in press with the Geological Society of America, Archibald compares several rock formations from near the end of the time of dinosaurs, in Canada and the United States. He finds that the two-legged, primarily meat-eating dinosaurs known as theropods were also declining.

Brusatte says that the differences boil down to how researchers account for how well-studied or well-preserved various fossil-bearing rocks are. “It’s really only now with all these new dinosaur discoveries that people are able to even think about the nuances in any kind of detail,” he says.

The extinction set the stage for the modern world, Butler notes. Although one lineage of dinosaurs survived as modern birds, mammals began their rise only after the dinosaurs were out of the picture. ”That may never have happened if dinosaurs had never gone extinct,” says Butler. ”I think it's very likely that if the asteroid hadn't hit, we would still have dinosaurs around today.”
This story originally appeared in Nature News.

HIV establishes viral reservoirs with surprising speed

 http://www.latimes.com/science

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV particles infecting a human T cell. (NIAID / NIH)

By Monte Morin contact the reporter

 

Medical ResearchScientific ResearchHIV - AIDSHarvard Medical SchoolJohns Hopkins University

Early treatment may not be enough to prevent formation of HIV reservoirs, study says

Study suggests HIV virus can establish persistent reservoirs in just three days

In a sobering discovery, researchers say that rapid treatment of HIV-like infections in monkeys failed to prevent the establishment of persistent viral reservoirs in as little as three days.

Related story: Girl who was declared 'functionally cured' of HIV now has active virus

Monte Morin

The study, published Sunday in the journal Nature, comes on the heels of news that the so-called Mississippi Baby -- a child once considered functionally cured of HIV due to antiretroviral drug treatment hours after her birth -- had in fact been infected with the virus all along.
While researchers had begun to hope that there was a window in which the virus could be prevented from establishing a permanent foothold within its host, that possibility now seems much less likely.
"We show that the viral reservoir can be seeded substantially earlier than previously recognized," wrote lead study author and Harvard Medical School virologist James Whitney, and colleagues.

 

HIV attacks CD4 white blood cells -- critical components of the body's immune system. The virus then uses the cells to manufacture copies of itself, destroying the blood cell in the process and steadily eroding the body's internal defenses.
However, in some cases, the virus will lay dormant within a white blood cell, only to begin reproducing itself at a later date. The virus cannot be killed in this dormant state -- either by the body's immune system or by antiretroviral drugs -- and this latent reservoir of infection has proved to be the biggest obstacle to finding a cure.

Related story: HIV infection causes immune cells to self-destruct, study says

Monte Morin

In the latest study, researchers infected 20 adult rhesus monkeys with simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, the simian equivalent of HIV, the disease that causes AIDS.
Some of the monkeys were treated with a cocktail of antiretroviral drugs three days after infection, yet prior to when the virus could be detected in the monkeys' bloodstream. Other monkeys received the drug treatment at seven, 10 and 14 days after infection, when evidence of the illness could be detected.

In each case, antiretroviral therapy was stopped after 24 weeks. While researchers had hoped the virus would not reappear in the monkeys that were treated in three days, it in fact rebounded in all of the animals.
The researchers, however, did note that it took about three weeks for the virus to rebound in the monkeys that received drug treatment after three days, where it took only one or two weeks in the other monkeys.
In an accompanying News & Views article, Kai Deng and Dr. Robert Siliciano, both HIV researchers at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, noted that further research was needed to confirm the study's results.
"Substantial differences exist between SIV infection in rhesus macaques and HIV-1 infection in humans," the pair wrote.
Nonetheless, they called the paper's findings "striking," as they argued that still newer medical approaches are needed to eradicate HIV.

Warm Weather Stirs Up Brain-Eating Amoeba Warning

By KATIE MOISSE 12 hours ago Good Morning America

 

Kansas health officials are urging swimmers to take extra care in warm freshwater, which could be home to millions of microscopic killers.

A 9-year-old Johnson County girl is the latest victim of Naegleria fowleri, a brain-eating amoeba that lurks in warm, standing water. The girl died July 9 from primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, an extremely rare but almost invariably fatal brain infection.

“We are very saddened to learn of this unfortunate circumstance, and our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends during this difficult time,” state health officer Dr. Robert Moser said in a statement. “It is important for the public to know that infections like these are extremely rare and there are precautions one can take to lower their risk – such as nose plugs.”

Louisiana Water Flushed for Brain-Eating Amoeba

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Naegleria fowleri enters the body through the nose, causing a severe frontal headache, fever, nausea and vomiting, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Early symptoms give way to seizures, confusion and hallucinations as the amoeba migrates through the nasal cavity to the brain.
“After the start of symptoms, the disease progresses rapidly and usually causes death within about five days,” the CDC website reads.

Of 132 people infected with Naegleria fowleri in the United States between 1962 and 2013, only three have survived, according to the CDC. One survivor, a 12-year-old girl infected in 2013, was diagnosed early and treated with “therapeutic hypothermia” and the experimental drug miltefosine.

View gallery

 

Warm Weather Stirs Up Brain-Eating Amoeba Warning (ABC News)

 

“Her recovery has been attributed to early diagnosis and treatment,” the CDC website reads.

But spotting the signs of the infection is tricky, because tests to detect the rare infection are “available in only a few laboratories in the United States,” according to the CDC.

“Because of the rarity of the infection and difficulty in initial detection, about 75 percent of diagnoses are made after the death of the patient,” the agency’s website reads.

The infection is most common in 15 southern-tier states, “with more than half of all infections occurring in Texas and Florida,” the CDC’s website reads. Three-quarters of all U.S. cases have been linked to swimming in freshwater lakes and rivers, but infections have also been associated with slip-n-slides, bathtubs and neti pots, according to the agency.

The infection is not contagious and can’t be contracted from a properly chlorinated pool or saltwater, according to the CDC.

The agency recommends the following tips for summer swimmers:

- Avoid getting water up your nose by holding your nose shut, using nose clips or keeping your head above water when swimming or splashing in warm freshwater.

- Avoid submerging your head in hot springs and other untreated thermal waters.

- Avoid stirring up sediment in shallow, warm freshwater areas.

Ebola in Africa: Can we dodge a global pandemic?

By Chris Kilham

Published July 10, 2014

FoxNews.com

CDC/ Cynthia Goldsmith

Right now, a fight for survival is taking place in the West African nations of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Ebola, one of the most lethal diseases on the planet, is on a killing rampage.  In Guinea, 303 people have died. In Sierra Leone, 99 have perished, and in Guinea, 65 lives have been claimed.
Within a few days, these figures will be higher. And the disease appears to just be getting warmed up. Spread by contact with bodily fluids, Ebola is flourishing in West Africa, and could be coming soon to a place near you.
When the outbreak began in Guinea in April, the mortality rate was higher than it is now. But the virus is still an extreme hazard, and health workers must work in full bio-hazard suits in order to keep themselves from being infected by the patients they are serving. The protective suits are extremely hot in the sweltering West African climate. They are like little mobile sauna units, slowly cooking the doctors, nurses and aids working inside them.
Named after the Ebola River, the virus was first discovered in 1976 in what was then Zaire and is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. A viral disease, Ebola starts out like a bad flu, exhibiting initial symptoms of fever, weakness, headache and muscle pain – but that’s where the similarities end.
The more severe symptoms commence as early as two days after contact with the virus. Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever, meaning it causes the rupturing of blood vessels throughout the body.  Victims may bleed from the eyes, nose, mouth, ears, anus and genitals, as well as through skin ruptures. The liver, lungs, spleen and lymph nodes can be overcome by Ebola, leading to massive organ failure, and an agonizing death can follow.
There are five strains of Ebola: Zaire, Sudan, Reston, Cote d’Ivoire, and Bundibugyo. Of these, four are known to cause the disease in humans, whereas Reston does not appear to do so.  The disease is transmitted from animals to humans. Fruit bats, monkeys, and wild game may host the virus and spread it to humans, but bats in particular are on the radar of health officials. They are known as reservoir species, carrying the virus without becoming sick from the disease.
Despite urgent, high level attention from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Ebola has no specific treatment, no vaccine, and no effective medicines. Bed rest and remaining hydrated appear to be as effective as any course of treatment, with a disease whose mortality rate can be as high as 90 percent. In clinics, Ebola patients are kept isolated as much as possible, and any utensils used to diagnose them must be fastidiously sterilized. Health workers take a huge risk tending to the Ebola infected, and only bio-hazard suits afford enough protection. Still, even one accidental prick from a dirty needle can lead to infection. It is very risky business.
Now, we don’t have to worry, right? Ebola is, after all, over in Africa, far removed from us. Nothing could be further from the alarming truth.
Imagine this scenario: A health worker tends to Ebola patients in Guinea, and remains healthy due to good sanitation practices. Eventually, that health worker needs to travel to the United States or Europe, and he or she boards a plane. Unknowingly, they are infected but symptom-free so far. On the long flight home, they start to feel some aches and chills, and at one point, they sneeze, sending thousands of viruses into the air through the atomized mucus expelled from the nose. Other passengers breathe that air, taking in a few viruses here and there, and they become infected.
And a global pandemic starts to roll.
This is neither a far-off scenario nor science fiction. It is a real possibility. And this is why health officials are so gravely concerned about the current Ebola outbreak. Unlike previous smaller outbreaks which have occurred in rural locations, this one is happening in hot, humid cities where crowds are dense and sanitation is sketchy; where basic hygiene is often hard to manage and many people eat wild game that might be infected. It is a perfect recipe for a massive, uncontrolled outbreak. Infecting another person is as easy as a sneeze, a kiss, cleaning up after someone, making contact with mucus, urine or feces.
The question, then, is what can you do? Except for staying away from anyone infected, you can’t do much. Right now it’s up to the health workers laboring in excessively hot bio-hazard suits, and to officials who are working hard on containment. This situation in West Africa could in fact be the start of a global disaster, or it may be another near-miss. The threat is real, and the disease is on the move. Will we dodge the Ebola bullet? Right now, all we can do is watch and wait.
Chris Kilham is a medicine hunter who researches natural remedies all over the world, from the Amazon to Siberia. He teaches ethnobotany at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is Explorer In Residence. Chris advises herbal, cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies and is a regular guest on radio and TV programs worldwide. His field research is largely sponsored by Naturex of Avignon, France. Read more at MedicineHunter.com.

US-based scientist makes potent version of H1N1 flu

H1N1 virus. Credit: C. S. Goldsmith and A. Balish, CDC

A US-based Japanese scientist said Wednesday he has succeeded in engineering a version of the so-called swine flu virus that would be able to evade the human immune system.

The research on the 2009 H1N1 virus at a high-security lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison has not yet been published, but was first made public July 1 by the Independent newspaper in London.
The article described virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, as "controversial" and said "some scientists who are aware of (the experiment) are horrified."
Kawaoka confirmed to AFP that he has been able to make changes in a particular protein that would enable the 2009 H1N1 virus to escape immune protection.
"Through selection of immune escape viruses in the laboratory under appropriate containment conditions, we were able to identify the key regions would enable 2009 H1N1 viruses to escape immunity," he said in an email.
However, he described the Independent's story—which called his research "provocative" because it sought to create a deadly flu from which humans could not escape—as "sensational."
"It is unfortunate that online news outlets choose to manipulate the message in this way to attract readers, with sensational headlines, especially in regard to science and public health matters," he said.
Kawaoka said the reason for the research was to find out how the flu virus might mutate in nature and help scientists devise better vaccines against it.
He also said he has presented his initial findings to a World Health Organization committee and it "was well received."
Controversy erupted in 2011 and 2012 over research on the H5N1 bird flu, after a Dutch and a US team of scientists each found ways to engineer a virus that could pass easily among mammals.
Concerns were raised over the potential to create a deadly pandemic like the Spanish flu of 1918-1919 that killed 50 million people.
A key worry was that bioterrorists could find a way to recreate and release such a virus, or that it could accidently escape from a research lab.
Scientists stopped their work for a time but the details of the experiments were eventually published in major scientific journals.