Summarize this article:

The world's first "three parent baby" was born five months ago to Jordanian parents. The treatment, which seeks to avoid mothers passing defective mitochondrial DNA to their offspring, was performed in Mexico.

 The news, revealed by the New Scientist, is already hailed as revolutionary advance in the field of reproductive medicine. The procedure - based on a new In vitro fertilisation technique that incorporates DNA from three parents - was necessary because the baby's mother carries mitochondrial DNA mutations for Leigh syndrome, a fatal neurological disorder.

 Because of this, she and her husband had already lost two children, so they asked a US-based team of scientists – at New Hope Fertility Center in New York City – for their help. The doctors, led by John Zhang, designed a new "three-parent" technique.

 The traditional way to do this is to use a method known as pronuclear transfer, which involves fertilising both the mother's egg and a donor's egg with the father's sperm. When both eggs start dividing into early-stage embryos, scientists remove the nucleus. The nucleus from the donor's egg is discarded, and the one from the mother is inserted in its place. This is the technique that was legally approved in the UK in 2015.

 However, the couple rejected this technique for religious reasons – they didn't want an embryo to be discarded. Thus, another "three parent" technique, known as spindle nuclear transfer, was used: the nucleus was first removed from the mother's egg and inserted into a donor's egg, after removing its own nucleus. Only then was the resulting egg fertilised with the father's sperm.

 The complete findings will be presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's Scientific Congress in Salt Lake City in October, but already it represents a huge step forward for a technique that has often attracted a lot of heated debates.

 The idea of three parent babies previously sparked criticism from some groups, which claimed it could pave the way for "designer babies". At the time of its approval in the UK, England's chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies commented: "The intention in making these regulations is to ensure that mothers who carry faulty mitochondria can have healthy children free from devastating and often deadly conditions caused by serious mitochondrial disease.

 "It is important to remember that mitochondrial DNA represents less than 0.054 per cent of the total DNA, and is not part of the nuclear DNA, which determines our personal characteristics and traits such as personality, hair and eye colour." ||||| Leigh syndrome can be caused by mutations in one of more than 75 different genes. In humans, most genes are found in DNA in the cell's , called nuclear DNA. However, some genes are found in DNA in specialized structures in the cell called . This type of DNA is known as mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). While most people with Leigh syndrome have a mutation in nuclear DNA, about 20 percent have a mutation in mtDNA.

 Most genes associated with Leigh syndrome are involved in the process of energy production in mitochondria. Mitochondria use oxygen to convert the energy from food into a form cells can use through a process called . Five protein complexes, made up of several proteins each, are involved in this process. The complexes are named complex I, complex II, complex III, complex IV, and complex V. During oxidative phosphorylation, the protein complexes drive the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the cell's main energy source, through a step-by-step transfer of negatively charged particles called electrons. Many of the gene mutations associated with Leigh syndrome affect proteins in these complexes or disrupt their assembly. These mutations reduce or eliminate the activity of one or more of these complexes, which can lead to Leigh syndrome.

 Disruption of complex I, also called NADH:ubiquinone oxidoreductase, is the most common cause of Leigh syndrome, accounting for nearly one third of cases of the condition. At least 25 genes involved in the formation of complex I, found in either nuclear or mitochondrial DNA, have been associated with Leigh syndrome.

 Disruption of complex IV, also called cytochrome c oxidase or COX, is also a common cause of Leigh syndrome, underlying approximately 15 percent of cases. One of the most frequently mutated genes in Leigh syndrome is SURF1. This gene, which is found in nuclear DNA, provides instructions for making a protein that helps assemble the COX protein complex (complex IV). This complex, which is involved in the last step of electron transfer in oxidative phosphorylation, provides the energy that will be used in the next step of the process to generate ATP. Mutations in the SURF1 gene typically lead to an abnormally short SURF1 protein that is broken down in cells, resulting in the absence of functional SURF1 protein. The loss of this protein reduces the formation of normal COX complexes, which impairs mitochondrial energy production.

 The most common mtDNA mutation in Leigh syndrome affects the MT-ATP6 gene, which provides instructions for making a piece of complex V, also known as the . Using the energy provided by the other protein complexes, the ATP synthase complex generates ATP. MT-ATP6 gene mutations, found in approximately 10 percent of people with Leigh syndrome, block the generation of ATP. Other mtDNA mutations associated with Leigh syndrome decrease the activity of other oxidative phosphorylation protein complexes or lead to reduced formation of mitochondrial proteins, all of which impair mitochondrial energy production.

 Other gene mutations associated with Leigh syndrome decrease the activity of one or more oxidative phosphorylation protein complexes or affect additional steps related to energy production. For example, Leigh syndrome can be caused by mutations in genes that form the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex or coenzyme Q10, both of which are involved in mitochondrial energy production. Mutations in genes that direct the replication of mtDNA or the production of mitochondrial proteins can also disrupt mitochondrial energy production.

 Although the exact mechanism is unclear, researchers believe that impaired oxidative phosphorylation can lead to cell death because of decreased energy available in the cell. Certain tissues that require large amounts of energy, such as the brain, muscles, and heart, seem especially sensitive to decreases in cellular energy. Cell death in the brain likely causes the characteristic lesions seen in Leigh syndrome, which contribute to the signs and symptoms of the condition. Cell death in other sensitive tissues may also contribute to the features of Leigh syndrome. ||||| Blackout Concepts/Alamy

 It’s a boy! A five-month-old boy is the first baby to be born using a new technique that incorporates DNA from three people, New Scientist can reveal. “This is great news and a huge deal,” says Dusko Ilic at King’s College London, who wasn’t involved in the work. “It’s revolutionary.”

 The controversial technique, which allows parents with rare genetic mutations to have healthy babies, has only been legally approved in the UK. But the birth of the child, whose Jordanian parents were treated by a US-based team in Mexico, should fast-forward progress around the world, say embryologists.

 The boy’s mother carries genes for Leigh syndrome, a fatal disorder that affects the developing nervous system. Genes for the disease reside in DNA in the mitochondria, which provide energy for our cells and carry just 37 genes that are passed down to us from our mothers. This is separate from the majority of our DNA, which is housed in each cell’s nucleus.

 Advertisement

 Around a quarter of her mitochondria have the disease-causing mutation. While she is healthy, Leigh syndrome was responsible for the deaths of her first two children. The couple sought out the help of John Zhang and his team at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City.

 Zhang has been working on a way to avoid mitochondrial disease using a so-called “three-parent” technique. In theory, there are a few ways of doing this. The method approved in the UK is called pronuclear transfer and involves fertilising both the mother’s egg and a donor egg with the father’s sperm. Before the fertilised eggs start dividing into early-stage embryos, each nucleus is removed. The nucleus from the donor’s fertilised egg is discarded and replaced by that from the mother’s fertilised egg.

 Meet your mitochondria: The powerful aliens that lurk within you

 But this technique wasn’t appropriate for the couple – as Muslims, they were opposed to the destruction of two embryos. So Zhang took a different approach, called spindle nuclear transfer. He removed the nucleus from one of the mother’s eggs and inserted it into a donor egg that had had its own nucleus removed. The resulting egg – with nuclear DNA from the mother and mitochondrial DNA from a donor – was then fertilised with the father’s sperm.

 Gene editing: A guide to the genetic revolution on our doorstep

 Zhang’s team used this approach to create five embryos, only one of which developed normally. This embryo was implanted in the mother and the child was born nine months later. “It’s exciting news,” says Bert Smeets at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The team will describe the findings at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s Scientific Congress in Salt Lake City in October.

 Neither method has been approved in the US, so Zhang went to Mexico instead, where he says “there are no rules”. He is adamant that he made the right choice. “To save lives is the ethical thing to do,” he says.

 The team seems to have taken an ethical approach with their technique, says Sian Harding, who reviewed the ethics of the UK procedure. The team avoided destroying embryos, and used a male embryo, so that the resulting child wouldn’t pass on any inherited mitochondrial DNA. “It’s as good as or better than what we’ll do in the UK,” says Harding.

 A remaining concern is safety. Last time embryologists tried to create a baby using DNA from three people was in the 1990s, when they injected mitochondrial DNA from a donor into another woman’s egg, along with sperm from her partner. Two of the fetuses developed genetic disorders, and the technique was halted by the US Food and Drug Administration. The problem may have arisen from the fetuses having mitochondria from two sources.

 When Zhang and his colleagues tested the boy’s mitochondria, they found that less than 1 per cent carry the mutation. Hopefully, this is too low to cause any problems; generally it is thought to take around 18 per cent of mitochondria to be affected before problems start. “It’s very good,” says Ilic.

 Smeets agrees, but cautions that the team should monitor the child to make sure the levels stay low. There’s a chance that faulty mitochondria could be better at replicating, and gradually increase in number, he says. “We need to wait for more births, and to carefully judge them,” says Smeets.

 Two women, one man and a baby A Jordanian couple has been trying to start a family for almost 20 years. Ten years after they married, she became pregnant, but it ended in the first of four miscarriages. In 2005, the couple gave birth to a baby girl. It was then that they discovered the probable cause of their fertility problems: a genetic mutation in the mother’s mitochondria. Their daughter was born with Leigh syndrome, which affects the brain, muscles and nerves of developing infants. Sadly, she died aged six. The couple’s second child had the same disorder, and lived for 8 months. Using a controversial “three-parent baby” technique (see main story), the boy was born on 6 April 2016. He is showing no signs of disease.

 At the clinic’s request we have removed the names of the family The story has been updated to clarify that it was fetuses that developed genetic disorders in the 1990s ||||| Alana Saarinen loves playing golf and the piano, listening to music and hanging out with friends. In those respects, she's like many teenagers around the world. Except she's not, because every cell in Alana's body isn't like mine and yours - Alana is one of a few people in the world who have DNA from three people.

 "A lot of people say I have facial features from my mum, my eyes look like my dad… I have some traits from them and my personality is the same too," says Alana.

 "I also have DNA from a third lady. But I wouldn't consider her a third parent, I just have some of her mitochondria."

 Mitochondria are often called the cell's factories. They are the bits that create the energy all of our cells need to work, and keep the body functioning. But they also contain a little bit of DNA.

 Alana Saarinen is one of only 30 to 50 people in the world who have some mitochondria, and therefore a bit of DNA, from a third person. She was conceived through a pioneering infertility treatment in the USA which was later banned.

 But soon there could be more people like Alana, with three genetic parents, because the UK is looking to legalise a new, similar technique which would use a donor's mitochondria to try to eliminate debilitating genetic diseases. It is called mitochondrial replacement and if Parliament votes to let this happen, the UK would become the only country in the world to allow children with three people's DNA to be born.

 The structure of a cell

 Nucleus: Where the majority of our DNA is held - this determines how we look and our personality

 Mitochondria: Often described as the cell's factories, these create the energy to make the cell function

 Cytoplasm: The jelly like substance that contains the nucleus and mitochondria

 Alana was born through an infertility treatment called cytoplasmic transfer.

 Her mum, Sharon Saarinen, had been trying to have a baby for 10 years through numerous IVF procedures.

 "I felt worthless. I felt guilty that I couldn't give my husband a child. When you want a biological child but you can't have one, you're distraught. You can't sleep, it's 24-7, constantly on your mind," she says.

 Cytoplasmic transfer was pioneered in the late 1990s by a clinical embryologist Dr Jacques Cohen and his team at the St Barnabus Institute in New Jersey, US.

 "We felt that there was a chance that there was some element, some structure in the cytoplasm that didn't function optimally. One of the major candidates that could have been involved here are structures called mitochondria," he says.

 Cohen transferred a bit of a donor woman's cytoplasm, containing mitochondria, to Sharon Saarinen's egg. It was then fertilised with her husband's sperm. As a little bit of mitochondria was transferred, some DNA from the donor was in the embryo.

 Image copyright Science Photo Library

 Seventeen babies were born at Cohen's clinic, as a result of cytoplasmic transfer, who could have had DNA from three people.

 But there was concern about some of the babies.

 "There was one early miscarriage, considering there were twelve pregnancies that is an expected number," says Cohen.

 He and his team believed that miscarriage occurred because the foetus was missing an X chromosome.

 "Then there was another twin pregnancy, where one [of the twins] was considered entirely normal and the other had a missing X chromosome.

 Find out more Listen to Mum and Dad... and Mum? on BBC Radio 4 at 21:00 BST or on the World Service at 18:30 on Monday 1 September, or watch the film on BBC Newsnight at 22:30 on the same date Or catch up on iPlayer

 "So that's two out of the small group of foetuses that was obtained from this procedure. This did worry us and we reported that in the literature and in our ethical and review board that oversees these procedures," he says.

 At the time of birth, the other babies were all fine. A year or two later, another of the children was found to have "early signs of pervasive early developmental disorder which is a range of cognitive diseases which also includes autism." Cohen told me.

 He says it's difficult to know if the abnormalities happened by chance or because of the procedure.

 Other clinics copied the technique and Cohen estimates that around 30 to 50 children worldwide were born who could have DNA from three people as a result.

 But in 2002 the American regulator, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) asked clinics to stop doing cytoplasmic transfer due to safety and ethical concerns. All of them did.

 "There was a reaction from scientists, ethicists, the public at large, I think most of it was supportive, some of it was critical - I think this is normal, every time an experiment is done in medicine there is a reaction - what are the risks here?" says Cohen.

 At the time, some were concerned because they felt this was germ line genetic modification. What "germ line" means is that a child like Alana would pass her unusual genetic code down to her children. And their children, would pass it to their children and so on.

 Because we inherit our mitochondria only from our mothers, only female children would pass their unusual genetic code on. Crossing the germ line as it is known has never been done before so very little is known about what the outcome could be.

 Due to a lack of funding, Cohen says, it hasn't been possible to find out about how any of the children like Alana who were born from cytoplasmic transfer are doing. But the St Barnabus Institute is now starting a follow up study to check their progress.

 Sharon Saarinen says her daughter Alana is a healthy, typical teenager

 "I couldn't ask for a better child. She is an intelligent, beautiful girl inside and out, she loves math and science … she does really well in school. She helps me around the house… when she's not texting!"

 "She has always been healthy. Never anything more than a basic cold, or a flu every now and then. No health problems at all."

 The health of the children, like Alana, born from cytoplasmic transfer is under scrutiny now because of the UK's decision to consider legalising mitochondrial replacement, where the mitochondria of a donor woman will be used to create a child.

 It would not be available for people with fertility problems but for those who carry diseases of the mitochondria and would otherwise pass down these genetic abnormalities to their children.

 Exactly how it is done still needs to be determined as there are two ways of doing the procedure, depending on when the eggs are fertilised.

 Eggs from a mother with unhealthy mitochondria and a donor with healthy mitochondria are collected

 The nucleus, containing the majority of the genetic material, is removed from both eggs. The donor nucleus is destroyed

 The mother's nucleus is inserted into the donor egg - it now has healthy mitochondria. The egg is then fertilised by the father's sperm

 Both the mother's and donor's eggs are fertilised with the father's sperm to create two embryos

 The pronuclei, the nuclei during the process of fertilisation, contain the majority of the genetic material. They are removed from both embryos. The donor's is destroyed

 A healthy embryo is created by putting the parents' pronuclei into the donor embryo

 "Mitochondrial diseases tend to involve tissues or organs which are heavily dependent on energy," says Prof Doug Turnbull from The University of Newcastle. He has treated people with mitochondrial disease for decades and is one of those who has developed these new techniques to try to cure these debilitating diseases.

 "The conditions can therefore involve the heart, the brain or sometimes the skeletal muscle," he says.

 "People can have very bad heart problems which can cause the heart to fail eventually, they can be very weak and require respirators or be in a wheelchair. With the brain, they can get epilepsy, strokes and eventually severe dementia."

 Turnbull estimates that around 1 in 3000-5000 people in the UK have a mitochondrial disease. "We can treat the symptoms. We can improve the quality and length of peoples' lives but we can't cure them."

 The mitochondria carry some DNA, around 13 "important genes" says Turnbull.

 That compares to the "23,000 important genes" in the nucleus where most of our DNA is held. This is the DNA that determines our traits and personality.

 "We're not trying to create some characteristic that makes this person a stronger person or [someone who] will have blonde hair. We're trying to prevent disease and I think that is the only justification for doing this," he says.

 Sharon Bernardi, from Sunderland in the North of England, is someone who mitochondrial replacement could have helped.

 Image copyright other

 Bernardi has lost seven children to mitochondrial disease.

 "I have babies in three different cemeteries," she told us in her sitting room, surrounded by photographs of all her children.

 "That is not the way you plan your life when you're trying to have a family. I have lovely photos and lovely memories but obviously that's all I have got now."

 I have to slip back into reality and think don't be silly, Edward's not there. He's not in his room Sharon Bernardi

 The doctors didn't know why Bernardi's babies kept passing away only hours after they were born. So that's why she kept trying, hoping she would have a healthy child.

 With her fourth child, Edward, at first everything seemed different. He was healthy until he was about four and a half. But it was then that he was diagnosed with Leigh's disease, a type of mitochondrial disease, and his health deteriorated throughout the years.

 "From the age of 20 Edward [found] getting around more difficult. He started to get new symptoms - spasms. He'd start screaming... four, five, six hours at a time. His muscles used to tense up, his hands, his face. It was like dystonic spasms - a really bad spasm. [For] eight hours he'd be in pain, screaming. His face would twist up and his hands would get really stiff. It was hard to see."

 Edward Bernardi passed away three years ago, when he was 21.

 "My life was totally for Edward. Even now sometimes if I have gone to sleep, I still wake up, and think, 'It's very quiet.' I have to slip back into reality and think, 'Don't be silly, Edward's not there. He's not in his room'."

 "Without a heartbeat I would have gone for this [mitochondrial replacement]. I hope this is a new option. I hope people take it seriously and it's approved.

 "I don't want my son to have just died for nothing. I want him to have made a difference."

 "His life was robbed at 21. We're trying to stop this. People have to understand this is a life disease. We're trying not to pass it on to children and make it better for future families."

 Image copyright other

 But some people believe this technique could set us on a slippery slope towards genetically modified humans.

 "These regulations would authorise the crossing of a rubicon for the first time. It would authorise germ line therapy... to alter the genes of an individual. This is something defined by the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as effectively constituting eugenics," says British MP Fiona Bruce who chairs the All Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group.

 "We will have approved a technique and what that technique could be used for in the future who knows. We're opening a Pandora's box."

 The regulator in the UK, the HFEA or Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, has held three independent reviews to scrutinise the safety of this technique. The conclusions were that mitochondrial replacement is "not unsafe".

 There have been few episodes I'm aware of in the history of assisted reproduction that have had to be stopped because of hazard Professor Braude, Kings College London

 That means "it would be reasonable, with some additional experiments, to take it into clinical practice if all circumstances are fulfilled" says Peter Braude, emeritus professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Kings College London. He sat on all three HFEA scientific reviews.

 "In any move from science to clinical practice there is a leap of faith - it has to be done," he says.

 He adds that many of the concerns being raised now about this are the same as the ones cited in the early days of IVF. The UK has for decades been a leader in assisted reproduction science and is where the world's first test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978.

 "The headlines then were 'playing God' and 'genetically modified humans'," says Braude.

 "There have been few episodes I'm aware of in the history of assisted reproduction that have had to be stopped because of hazard. It's all gone pretty swimmingly as far as I'm aware."

 Braude says that mitochondrial replacement has gone through much more scrutiny than previous, now well established, assisted reproduction techniques did, such as IVF.

 "Whereas the original techniques were used with only [experiments from] mice, rabbits, lab animals... the big difference here is we also have issue of human embryos and this work has been tested in macaque monkeys in primates. All those were very useful, reassuring… hence why we came to the conclusion that this is not unsafe."

 The experiments done on macaque monkeys were done in Oregon, US and the monkeys are now five years old and seem to be healthy.

 Braude also points out that having a third person's DNA in your system is "nothing particularly new".

 "Think about bone marrow transplants, let's say unfortunately you have leukaemia and you have to have your bone marrow radiated for the cancer to be killed and then it is replaced by bone marrow from someone else - say me. Effectively from that time onwards, you will have circulating in your body DNA from me. You won't be related to me, you may be grateful to me, but you will have DNA from a third person circulating in your body."

 What is different, say critics, about mitochondrial replacement, is that DNA from the donor will be passed down future generations.

 Image copyright Science Photo Library

 Dr Ted Morrow, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Sussex, and colleagues have carried out mitochondrial replacement experiments on other animals. He raised safety concerns about mitochondrial replacement to the scientific reviews.

 "For mice, there were changes in cognitive ability... to learn and do things using their brain. In fruit flies and seed beetles there were changes in male fertility, changes in ageing, a range of different traits were effected in various experiments," he says.

 The HFEA's scientific reviews dismissed Morrow's findings as not relevant to humans because they were done on inbred animals.

 Morrow stands by his research and says the scientific panels should not have dismissed his findings so quickly.

 I'm a scientist but I'm not a pro-lifer. I think this is a genuine safety concern - that's it Ted Morrow, University of Sussex

 It is Morrow's evidence that critics such as Fiona Bruce cite when saying this technique is not safe enough.

 She has called a debate in the House of Commons today to discuss mitochondrial replacement. She does not believe there has been enough debate about what the UK is proposing to do. "The technique itself could allow the child to inherit untried untested medical complications," she says.

 Morrow says that all the coverage of his research has been "a rather odd experience".

 "In the press it's sometimes portrayed that the scientists think this, and the pro-life group this. I'm a scientist but I'm not a pro-lifer. I think this is a genuine safety concern - that's it."

 Alana and Sharon Saarinen have been watching the debate in the UK with interest.

 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Watch the Newsnight film in full

 "I wish I could meet her, the donor, to tell her I am so grateful for what she did for us. How can you thank someone for giving you a life? That's impossible," says Sharon.

 Alana agrees with her mum. "I think it would be nice to thank her. But I wouldn't want to have a relationship or connection with her. The DNA I have of her is just so small."

 "I know she might have another person's mitochondria, [but] look what a great person she turned out to be, and healthy. Just because she'll pass it on to her children it won't bother me in the least. I know it was the right thing to do. I have the living proof every day to see how great it turned out."

 Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox. |||||

– A 5-month-old born using a "revolutionary" genetic technique is said to be the world's first baby created using DNA from three parents since the technique was banned about two decades ago, New Scientist reports. The boy, IDed by the International Business Times as Abrahim Hassan, was born in Mexico to Jordanian parents, and embryologists are hoping his successful birth will hasten using the procedure elsewhere. Abrahim's mother, Shaban, carries the gene for Leigh syndrome—a severe neurological condition that decimates mental and physical capabilities and often results in a child's death before kindergarten. Although Hassan herself is healthy, her first two children died from the disease. That's when she and her husband looked for assistance from NYC's New Hope Fertility Center, where a team led by Dr. John Zhang started them off on an alternative way to parenthood. There are a couple of different ways to pull off the three-parent technique, but the one they chose to go with is called spindle nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus from the mother's egg is placed in a donor egg whose own nucleus has been taken out; that egg, which then contains nuclear DNA from the mom and mitochondrial DNA from the donor, is fertilized with the father's sperm. Five embryos were created in this case, and when just one "took," it was implanted into Hassan, who delivered Abrahim nine months later. This all had to be done in Mexico, where Zhang says "there are no rules" (the Times labels it "relatively flexible legislation"; the procedure isn't approved in the US). One concern scientists are keeping an eye on: faulty mitochondria that could replicate, a problem that may have occurred when the technique was last tried in the '90s. (The UK has OKed a controversial gene-editing method.)


Article:

Lying five feet below the surface, the tunnel stretched for 32 feet from one of the barracks and under the barbwire fences surrounding the camp.

 Its discovery provides the first physical evidence of prisoners trying to dig their way out of a Nazi death camp.

 The length of the tunnel gives an indication of the ingenuity of prisoners desperate to escape a camp that claimed the lives of an estimated 250,000 in the 17 months of its operations in German-occupied Poland .

 "We were excavating near where the sonderkommando barrack was and we came across two rows of buried barbed wire," said Wojciech Mazurek, from the archaeological team. "Digging down we found the traces of the tunnel.

 "It was about as wide as a human, and we are 99 per cent certain that it was an escape tunnel."

 The sonderkommando was comprised of prisoners tasked with herding victims to the gas chambers and disposing of the bodies. Their function at Sobibor would have spared them the death on arrival that awaited so many of the camp's victims, and given them the time to excavate the tunnel.

 The tunnel's discoverers believe it is unlikely that anybody ever used it to escape the camp. There were no reports of successful escape attempts from Sobibor until 600 prisoners broke out during an armed uprising in October 1943.

 Experts said that the tunnel was probably discovered, and everybody who might have been connected with it executed. The excavation was apparently then filled in.

 Its discovery has shed new light on the history of a camp of which little is known in comparison to other German extermination sites.

 Few people survived Sobibor. Not long after the uprising, Himmler ordered the camp to be razed to the ground and trees planted in an attempt to erase all traces of the facility. ||||| Traces of an escape tunnel have been uncovered at the site of an infamous Nazi death camp in Poland, according to news reports.

 Archaeologists say the passageway, found 5 feet (1.5 meters) below the surface, spanned 32 feet (10 m) and reached beyond the barbed-wire border surrounding the extermination camp at Sobibor, The Telegraph reported.

 "We were excavating near where the sonderkommando barrack was and we came across two rows of buried barbed wire," Polish archaeologist Wojciech Mazurek was quoted as saying by The Telegraph. "Digging down we found the traces of the tunnel. It was about as wide as a human, and we are 99 percent certain that it was an escape tunnel." [8 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries]

 Sobibor was operated in German-occupied eastern Poland between 1942 and 1943. Estimates for the number of people killed there range from 167,000 to upwards of 250,000. Virtually all of the victims were Jews and most were gassed upon arrival. Some prisoners were spared immediate death and kept in the work units known as the sonderkommando, forced to help in the gas chamber operations and the disposal of bodies.

 The researchers digging at the site reportedly don't have any evidence that the newly discovered escape tunnel was ever actually used. Prisoners at Sobibor did, however, stage an uprising in October 1943. Six-hundred prisoners revolted and managed to kill nearly a dozen of their guards. Many of the 300 laborers who broke out of the extermination camp were eventually captured and killed, and only 50 escapees are believed to have survived the war.

 After the uprising, Nazi officials leveled the camp and covered its traces. That makes work difficult for archaeologists trying to understand the site.

 "The area we were excavating has been disturbed and plundered many times over the years since the war," Yoram Haimi, an Israeli archaeologist who is also investigating the camp, was quoted as saying by Haaretz. "It's a mess containing human bones, human ash, glass, pieces of metal and a lot of waste."

 Excavations have been underway at Sobibor for more than a decade. In addition to the escape tunnel, the team has reportedly found a crematorium, human skeletal remains, and dozens of artifacts including eye glasses, jewelry and sobering personal items, like a Mickey Mouse pin, that seem to have belonged to children.

 Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com. |||||
What is a summary?

– Archaeologists think they've found the first evidence of prisoners trying to dig their way out of a Nazi death camp. The find comes after more than a decade of excavations at the Sobibor camp in Poland; Nazis leveled the place after its prisoners revolted in 1943, LiveScience explains. In the course of their work, the team last month "came across two rows of barbed wire," one archaeologist tells the Telegraph. "Digging down we found the traces of the tunnel. It was about as wide as a human, and we were 99% certain that it was an escape tunnel." The tunnel, found 5 feet below ground, runs an astonishing 32 feet, from under where one of the barracks once stood to the other side of the barbed wire. The Telegraph explains that the barracks in question would have housed the sonderkommando: prisoners tasked with bringing victims to—and bodies out of—the gas chambers. Having avoided an immediate death, archaeologists speculate they would have had time to work on the tunnel. There's no evidence of whether it was actually used.


Summarize this article:

Thirty-two years after the AIDS virus was first discovered, the findings of a new study done by Kaiser Permanente prove HIV is 100 percent preventable.More than 600 patients have been on the drug Truvada for about three years and none has tested positive for HIV.The results of those clinical trials showed that Truvada was effective in more than 90 percent of patients. Since then, Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco has been giving the drug to its patients for more than two years with even better results.Doctor Jonathan Volk put Kaiser Permanente patients, at risk for HIV, on the medication. Patients like Paul Marcelin were put on a daily regimen of the drug Truvada, which has proved in clinical trials to protect a vast majority of people from HIV infection."It's wonderful to have less worries about HIV. It's something that is always lurking in the back of one's mind," Marcelin said.Instead of protecting most people, Kaiser Researchers found the drug has been 100 percent effective. Their patients have been taking it since the drug was approved in 2012. Their findings appear online in the Clinical Infectious Diseases Advance Access."We now have over 600 patients using this medication and no new HIV infections," Volk said.Patients are tested every three months for HIV and monitored for any possible side effects. Those include gay and bisexual men, as well as heterosexuals and injection drug users."What's really exciting about HIV prevention in 2015 is that we have options, we have several tools that we can use," Volk said.The study suggests that HIV is very close to being managed like any other chronic disease, such as diabetes or asthma. ||||| HIV-preventing drug holds up under study

 Truvada, a daily pill that holds the hope of eliminating the risk of contracting HIV, appears to be living up to its promise.

 In the first real-world study of the prescription drug, Kaiser researchers found no new HIV infections among the more than 650 people they followed over nearly three years, beginning just after the drug was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2012.

 A clinical trial leading up to the FDA approval had shown that Truvada, made by Foster City’s Gilead Sciences, nearly eliminated the risk of getting infected by the AIDS virus. But no evaluations of the drug, also known as PrEP, for pre-exposure prophylaxis, had been published outside the tightly regulated clinical trial setting.

 LATEST NEWS VIDEOS Now Playing: Now Playing Defense Secretary Mattis Issues Clear Warning To North Korea Buzz60

 John Legend Casting Out of Shape Actors To Play Trump Supporters In His New Music Video Buzz60

 Blind USC player makes snap during USC game KTVU

 Special moment at Piner High School vs. Novato High School football game KTVU

 California's 20th Independent Film Festival starts this week KTVU

 Trump On Attacking North Korea: 'We'll See' GeoBeats

 Trump Threatens To Stop Trading 'With Any Country Doing Business With North Korea' GeoBeats

 Bay Area company offers to recover Harvey victims' data for free. KTVU

 George Clooney's New Movie Depicts 'Angry America' Inspired By 2016 Campaign Buzz60

 Bay Bridge pier implosions KTVU

 In the new study, participants were sexually active. Many did not use condoms for prevention, and half of them were diagnosed with other sexually transmitted diseases within a year of starting the study. But no new HIV infections turned up, researchers said.

 “This is really compelling data that shows that PrEP works in a real-world setting,” said Dr. Jonathan Volk, a San Francisco Kaiser physician and epidemiologist and lead author of the study, which was published Wednesday in the medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

 Truvada, which contains the antiviral drugs emtricitabine and tenofovir, was originally created as an anti-retroviral drug used to treat HIV, but it has been shown to reduce the risk of HIV infection in people who are at high risk by up to 92 percent when taken consistently, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 Drug has its critics

 Still, the drug, which costs Kaiser patients about $50 a month, is not without controversy. PrEP was criticized early on by health providers and other advocates over concerns that the drug would encourage unsafe sex because of a false sense of security. In fact, the Kaiser study did find a significant decrease in condom use among the participants.

 One of the loudest critics has been Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in Los Angeles, who has publicly called Truvada a “party drug.” While PrEP may be an option for high-risk individuals who don’t use condoms, he said last month, it should not be used as community-wide public health intervention strategy.

 But the CDC and public health advocates disagree.

 The CDC last summer recommended the drug as a prophylactic for those at highest risk of becoming infected — sex workers, men with HIV-positive partners or those who engage in high-risk behaviors, such as IV drug use — and under careful watch by their doctors. San Francisco health advocates have also recognized Truvada as an important tool for the city’s Getting to Zero program, which aims to make the city the first in the country to have no new HIV infections, deaths or stigma.

 “We have a fantastic new tool we can be using to help our patients protect themselves from HIV,” Kaiser’s Volk said. “I don’t think PrEP is right for everybody. But for the folks who need it, it works.”

 No new infections seen

 To test the effectiveness of the drug, Kaiser researchers identified 657 Kaiser San Francisco patients and followed them over 32 months without requiring anything after their initial screening other than regular testing for sexually transmitted diseases and completing an occasional questionnaire. The average age was 37, and 99 percent were men who have sex with men.

 The study did not have a control group for the sake of comparison, but the participants clearly weren’t abstinent. After six months, about 30 percent of the PrEP users had been diagnosed with at least one sexually transmitted infection, with that number rising to 50 percent after a year. But there were no HIV infections, the study found.

 When the participants were asked about any changes in behavior, 74 percent reported no change in their number of sexual partners, while 15 percent reported a decrease and 11 percent said the number increased. Condom use was unchanged in 51 percent of the participants, while 41 percent said they had decreased their condom use and 3 percent had increased the use of condoms.

 “We know adherence to the medication is a really importance piece,” Volk said. “The fact we had no new HIV infections is very encouraging, but we still have more to learn about how people are using this medication.”

 ‘At high-risk phases’

 For study participant Paul Marcelin, a San Francisco Kaiser patient who lives in Alameda, the drug allows him to protect himself while maintaining his relationship with his HIV-positive boyfriend. “I felt very comfortable that we don’t worry the same way that some couples might,” he said.

 Marcelin, 40, a database expert, participated in a separate PrEP study conducted in 2013 by the San Francisco Department of Public Health and stayed on the drug for the Kaiser study. He said he thinks any hesitancy about Truvada is starting to dissipate, and people are accepting it as another prevention option.

 “PrEP is something you can choose to use when at high-risk phases in your life,” he said. “I’m in a phase of my life I need to use it, but I won’t always be.”

 Victoria Colliver is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: vcolliver@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @vcolliver |||||

– Big news in the fight against HIV: Kaiser Permanente, San Francisco's biggest private insurer, says that over a 32-month period, not a single one of its clients taking Truvada contracted HIV. Truvada is the name of the daily pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, pill that the CDC recommended for use in at-risk populations earlier this year. The new study followed 657 San Franciscans (all but four of them gay men) who asked their doctors for Truvada, and found that while condom use did decline—a major fear of PrEP critics—no one contracted HIV between mid-2012 and February of this year, the New York Times reports. More than 40% of the subjects said they used fewer condoms after starting Truvada, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, and while half of the subjects got syphilis, gonorrhea, or chlamydia within a year of starting PrEP, the Times notes most sexual infections other than HIV can be cured with antibiotics. And rates of those infections were already climbing among gay men before PrEP came on the market, a doctor notes. This was an observational study of the $50-a-month drug; a clinical trial last year actually gave some participants a placebo instead of Truvada. That study, however, was stopped early—because it became so obvious that Truvada worked that it was unethical to keep some of the subjects on a placebo. This new study "takes it out of the realm of clinical trials and into the real world," one doctor and infectious disease expert says. An AIDS activist echoes that, noting the study "fills in a critical gap by showing that PrEP can prevent infections in a real-world public health program." "This is very reassuring data," adds the lead author of the new study. "It tells us that PrEP works even in a high-risk population." According to ABC 7, the study population also included "injection drug users."


After several days of intense international discussion about its new policy against working remotely, Yahoo is trying to distance itself from the controversy.

 The company issued a statement to the New York Times in which it drew a line between the situation at Yahoo and flexible work policies in the rest of the economy:

 “This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home," the statement said. "This is about what is right for Yahoo right now.”

 Yahoo issued its new ban on remote work last week. The company's goal, which many insiders support, was to foster more camaraderie, intensity, and creativity from physical interaction while also eliminating some workers who had effectively retired on the job.

 The ban understandably caused some grumbling from Yahoos who had joined the company precisely because they were allowed to work remotely. And then it spawned a world-wide debate in which everyone from Richard Branson to mommy bloggers weighed in.

 Outside Yahoo, most observers felt that CEO Marissa Mayer's decision had set back the cause of flexible work policies and work-life balance, especially for women. Inside Yahoo, meanwhile, many applauded the move. If Yahoo is to get its mojo back, these folks argued, it needs a renewed sense of commitment from everyone on the team.

 In any event, now, several days later, Yahoo has weighed in on the remote-work ban again, presumably seeking to dampen the criticism it has received. But, to her credit, Yahoo's new CEO, Marissa Mayer, is not backing down.

 If nothing else, the controversy once again demonstrates Mayer's leadership abilities. For the past decade, Yahoo has been in desperate need of a CEO who is willing to set a high bar and make the tough, unpopular decisions necessary to whip the company back into shape.

 In her short tenure at Yahoo, Mayer has demonstrated that she is more than capable of doing that.

 SEE ALSO: Yahoos Actually Support Marissa Mayer's Ban On Remote Work

 Disclosure: I work for Yahoo, as a part-time host of a Yahoo Finance show called Daily Ticker. I like working for Yahoo, and I would prefer to keep working for Yahoo, so if I felt like grumbling about a decision Yahoo made, I probably wouldn't do it here. I am also a Yahoo shareholder (a relic of my Internet exuberance in the late 1990s). ||||| Photo

 In a front-page article in The New York Times on Tuesday morning, Catherine Rampell and I wrote about Yahoo ’s new policy banning employees from working remotely. The company declined to comment for that article, but on Tuesday afternoon, it issued a statement about the ban against work-at-home arrangements.

 “This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home,” the statement said. “This is about what is right for Yahoo right now.”

 A company spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the statement, saying, “We don’t discuss internal matters.”

 But based on information from several Yahoo employees, what that statement means is that Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s new chief executive, is in crisis mode, and she believes the policy is necessary to get Yahoo back into shape.

 The employees spoke anonymously because they are not allowed to discuss internal matters.

 The company also seems to be trying to distance itself from the broader national debate over workplace flexibility, and from criticism that the new policy is disruptive for employees who have family responsibilities outside work.

 The work ethic at Yahoo among some workers has deteriorated over time, the Yahoo employees said, and requiring people to show up is a way to keep an eye on them and re-energize the troops. If some of the least productive workers leave as a result, the thinking goes, all the better.

 Some employees have abused the former policy permitting work at home to the point of founding start-ups while being on salary at Yahoo, said the Yahoo employees and others who have worked at the company.

 Several business analysts said that if work-at-home arrangements don’t work, it is generally a management problem.

 Yahoo’s culture and employee morale have dissolved as it has fallen behind hotter tech companies. And, business analysts say, those are two things that are difficult to repair without having employees present in the same place.

 Still, Ms. Mayer has said many times that one of her top priorities for the company is to recruit the most talented engineers and other employees. Even if requiring people to show up is the only way to repair Yahoo’s culture, it could result in losing valuable employees.

 And even if Yahoo’s broader work-at-home policy needed revision, the internal memo announcing the new policy struck some as tone-deaf by implying that employees should avoid staying at home even once in a while when there are extenuating circumstances.

 “For the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration,” it said. |||||

Write a summary.

– Marissa Mayer's recently announced ban on telecommuting at Yahoo has caused quite a brouhaha; now, the company is responding. "This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home," the firm says in a statement issued yesterday, per the New York Times. "This is about what is right for Yahoo right now." That was essentially the extent of its comments, but the Times also spoke with Yahoo workers who say a number of employees are slacking. (Earlier reports noted that Mayer had grown frustrated with employees who trickled in and left right at 5pm.) Requiring them to show up at the office could restore some enthusiasm—and allow the company to monitor the situation. Indeed, some telecommuters have even started their own companies while working from home on Yahoo's dime, the workers say. Some employees might quit, but the company would prefer to lose the dead wood. Meanwhile, at Business Insider, Henry Blodget—who works part-time for Yahoo—comes to Mayer's defense. "For the past decade, Yahoo has been in desperate need of a CEO who is willing to set a high bar and make the tough, unpopular decisions necessary to whip the company back into shape," he writes. "Mayer has demonstrated that she is more than capable of doing that."


Write an article based on this summary:

– Apple is about to get more than a billion new potential customers for the iPhone 4s—but many of them may find it tricky communicating with Siri just yet. The smartphone will be launched in China and 21 other countries next week, and while its voice-activated virtual assistant currently only speaks English, French, and German, Apple says it plans to add Mandarin later this year, the Los Angeles Times reports. "Customer response to our products in China has been off the charts, " Apple CEO Tim Cook said, noting that the iPhone 4S will soon be available in more than 90 countries and regions, making it the fastest-ever iPhone rollout. Apple currently partners with the carrier China Unicom, but insiders tell Computer World that it is close to forging a deal with the country's behemoth carrier, China Mobile, which boasts a whopping 630 million subscribers.

Siri, how do you say profit in Chinese?

 One answer Apple's digital assistant might consider giving is: start selling the iPhone 4S in China. And starting on Jan. 13th, Apple will do just that.

 The company said Wednesday that China will be among 22 countries that soon will get the newest iPhone, one of Apple's hottest-selling yet. The iPhone now accounts for nearly half of Apple's annual revenue, and some analysts believe it earns the company more than 60% of its profits.

 China is one of the world's largest mobile device markets, with close to a billion cellphone users by some estimates. Apple currently partners with China Unicom, one of the larger carriers with close to 200 million cellular subscribers.

 Apple said Wednesday it had no current plans to announce a partnership with China Mobile, the country's largest carrier with more than 630 million subscribers (a user base that, somewhat amazingly, is more than twice the size of the U.S. population). But for months now Apple has been rumored to be nailing down a deal with China Mobile, and millions of the carriers' customers are already using the iPhone by modifying the device to work on their network.

 Will Siri actually be able to speak and understand Mandarin? Eventually, yes. An Apple spokesman said the company plans to add official language support in 2012 — and that will include Chinese. But Siri won't yet be multilingual when the phone hits Chinese stores this month.

 RELATED:

 Orangutans go ape for iPads, gorillas not so much

 Apple design master awarded British knighthood

 Apple fined in Italy, accused of misleading warranties

 — David Sarno

 Photo: A couple look at an iPhone in Beijing in November. Credit: Diego Azubel / EPA ||||| Computerworld - Apple today announced it would start selling the iPhone 4S in mainland China a week from this Friday -- Jan. 13.

 The iPhone 4S was expected to eventually make it to the People's Republic of China (PRC) -- it debuted in Hong Kong on Nov. 11 -- but some analysts had forecast that Apple would move faster.

 Two months ago, Brian White of Ticonderoga Securities said he expected the iPhone 4S to reach China before the end of the calendar year.

 Today, White noted the Chinese iPhone 4S launch, but maintained that his projection of a faster iPhone 4S rollout had come true.

 "As we expected, this represents the fastest iPhone launch in Apple's history with availability in over 90 countries," White told clients in a short research note today.

 By comparison, Apple had placed the iPhone 4 in 105 countries by the end of September 2011, more than a year after its introduction.

 Apple launched the iPhone 4S on Oct. 14.

 Siri, the voice-activated assistant -- and the most-lauded feature of the iPhone 4S -- won't be able to understand Mandarin when the smartphone launches next week, White said. Apple today stuck to its previous commitment to bring Mandarin comprehension to Siri some time this year.

 China Unicom, the only Apple-sanctioned carrier on the mainland, will start selling the iPhone 4S on Jan. 13 as well.

 Talk of other Chinese mobile carriers, including the country's largest, China Mobile, remain just that for now. "We expect China Telecom to be added this year and we believe China Mobile will eventually become part of the Apple ecosystem," White said today.

 Based on the quick sell-out of the iPhone 4S in Hong Kong -- supplies were exhausted within minutes at its one Apple store on launch day -- White also anticipates a run on the iPhone 4S in the PRC. "We believe the demand for the iPhone 4S in Mainland China to be unprecedented," White said.

 China has increasingly been a major factor in Apple's massive revenues. In the quarter that ended Sept. 30, 2011, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong generated 16% of the company's total income.

 And China, White reminded clients today, is the largest smartphone market in the world.

 "The total mobile phone subscriber base in China was 963.7 million in November, and [the] high-end mobile phone market in China is estimated at 100-125 million subscribers or ~$70 billion," said White.

 Apple has not revealed prices for the iPhone 4S in China, but most experts believe it will carry the same tag as the iPhone 4 did in 2010: 4,999 yuan ($793) for the 16GB model and 5,999 yuan ($952) for the 32GB model. Those prices are sans a long-term carrier contract.

 The 8GB iPhone 4, which sells for $99 in the U.S. with a two-year contract, goes for 3,880 yuan ($633) in China without a contract.

 More than 20 other countries -- including Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Senegal -- will also see the iPhone 4S selling on Jan. 13.

 Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

 See more articles by Gregg Keizer.

 Read more about Smartphones in Computerworld's Smartphones Topic Center. |||||


Article:
The most adorable little octopus in the world looks like a cross between a Pac-Man ghost and a Pokemon creature.

 Just don't ask for its name because it doesn't have one yet. But the octopus is so cute that "adorable" might become part of its scientific identity.

 "As someone that's describing the species you get to pick what the specific name is," Stephanie Bush, postdoctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, who is working to describe the octopus, told Science Friday. "One of the thoughts I had was making it Opisthoteuthis Adorabilis -- because they're really cute."

 As the possible name indicates, this rare cephalopod belongs to the Opisthoteuthis genus. That's the same genus as Pearl, the pink flapjack octopus (Opisthoteuthis californiana) in "Finding Nemo."

 Specimens of this new octopus have been collected since 1990, but until now they have not yet been scientifically described. The wee octopus is known for the distinctive webbing between its tentacles, which allows it to float like a parachute while using the fins on its mantle to steer.

 "These animals are part of the greater ocean ecosystem," Bush said. "And in order to have a healthy functioning ocean ecosystem we need to understand the ecology and behavior of the individual species."

 Learn more in the video above, from Science Friday.

 (h/t Digg) ||||| With big round eyes, a pretty pink color and a small, squishy body, an octopus never looked cuter.

 In fact, the California researcher who’s faced with naming this unclassified species living in the depths of Monterey Bay is considering a title that conveys its adorableness.

 “As someone that’s describing the species you get to pick what the specific name is,” Stephanie Bush, postdoctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), told Science Friday this week. “One of the thoughts I had was making it Opisthoteuthis adorabilis — because they’re really cute.”

 The naming process for a newly discovered species is long and complex and can take several years. “It involves publishing papers, collecting specimens and distributing them to museums around the country,” explains MBARI spokesperson Kim Fulton-Bennett.

 Bush clearly has years of work ahead of her, but thankfully she’s working with a fascinating specimen.

 This rare cephalopod belongs to the Opisthoteuthis genus and might look familiar as it’s the same genus as Pearl, the pink flapjack octopus (Opisthoteuthis californiana) in the Pixar film Finding Nemo.

 Scientists originally thought Opisthoteuthis californian and this unclassified mollusk were the same species but when Bush began working on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Tentacles exhibit (still on display) last year, she noticed key distinctions and realized she was working with two species.

 Opisthoteuthis specimens have been collected as far back as 1990 and inhabit the deep sea along the California coast at depths of up to 1,476 feet. The species’ gelatinous body measures about seven inches in diameter and its tentacles are webbed, giving it the appearance of an umbrella when it spreads them.

 These octopus swim by moving their fins, pulsing their webbed arms, pushing water through their funnel for jet propulsion, or all three at once.

 “They’ll spread that web and parachute along and steer themselves with the fins on their mantle,” says Bush, describing their movement.

 The octopus often swim up off the bottom and hover a bit just above the seafloor, looking for small crustaceans, worms, and other food.

 The thing that makes this octopus especially unique—and cute—is its puppy dog eyes, which Bush says, are unusually large for the size of its small body.

 Here’s a look at seven more species discovered in the past 10 years by MBARI researchers in Monterey Bay. ||||| What do you call a tiny octopus with big eyes and gelatinous skin, and that's cute as a button? Nobody knows quite yet! Stephanie Bush of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute aims to classify and name this presently undescribed deep-sea cephalopod using preserved specimens and a clutch of eggs housed at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. **DISCLAIMER** from Dr. Stephanie Bush: The Opisthoteuthis eggs depicted in this video are preserved specimens, not the eggs laid at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (which are still being lovingly incubated at MBARI's Cold Storage Facility!)

 This video is part of our annual cephalopod celebration coming June 19th to June 26th, 2015.

 Produced by Christian Baker

 Additional footage courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium & MBARI

 Music by Audio Network |||||Summary:

– The Huffington Post thinks it looks like "a cross between a Pac-Man ghost and a Pokemon creature." But it will be a researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institution who will get the honor of bestowing a name on the little octopus with huge eyes. (Or "puppy dog eyes" as the San Francisco Chronicle puts it.) And don't underestimate the cuteness factor: “As someone that’s describing the species, you get to pick what the specific name is,” Stephanie Bush tells Science Friday. “One of the thoughts I had was making it Opisthoteuthis adorabilis because they’re really cute.” (A newly discovered frog looks very, very familiar.)


News article:

Scientists have found a new virus that can be transmitted by blood transfusions and other blood-based products.

 It looks a little like the hepatitis C virus, which can cause permanent liver damage, and a little like the human pegivirus, which appears to be harmless, the team reports in the journal mBio.

 They’ve named it human hepegivirus-1 (HHpgV-1).

 “We have been able to find a new virus. It’s clearly transmitted as a result of human (blood) transfusion,” said infectious disease expert Dr. Ian Lipkin, who oversaw the study team at Columbia University.

 “It is the first transfusion-associated virus that’s been described in a long time. We don’t know if it is going to be a significant cause of human hepatitis,” Lipkin told NBC News.

 “It is the first transfusion-associated virus that’s been described in a long time."

 But probably not, the researchers said.

 “So far there is no need to be concerned,” said Amit Kapoor, an assistant professor at Columbia University who led the study.

 “We really don’t know if there is ongoing transmission of this virus. It may be good for you.”

 Lipkin agreed.

 “I’m not really worried about this particular virus,” he said. “This is not SARS. This is not MERS. This is not HIV.”

 To find it, the team sampled blood banked at the National Institutes of Health from 46 volunteers between 1974 and 1980. They found it in two samples. Both patients appear to have "cleared" the virus and there is no evidence it caused any disease.

 All the volunteers got blood products to treat hemophilia. The virus only showed up after they got transfusions.

 “This is not SARS. This is not MERS. This is not HIV.”

 Then they looked at samples from 106 people in another study, and found the virus in two more people. One appears to have been infected for as long as five years but both cleared the virus, too.

 "We just don't know how many viruses are transmitted through the blood supply. There are so many viruses out there, and they need to be characterized in order to ensure that transfusions are safe," Kapoor said.

 Hemophilia was once only treated with blood products taken from people. Now it's often treated with genetically engineered products, which do not carry infectious agents.

 Now that the genetic sequence of this new virus is published, Lipkin said, other scientists can start looking for it.

 “More than 30 million blood components are transfused annually in the United States alone. Surveillance for infectious agents in the blood supply is key to ensuring the safety of this critical resource for medicine and public health,” the researchers wrote.

 In the same issue of mBio, another team led by Lipkin reports they found a new virus related to hepatitis A virus in seals. It doesn’t seem to make the seals sick but it’s a possible ancestor of hepatitis A, they wrote.

 “This finding suggests that the diversity and evolutionary history of these viruses might be far greater than previously thought and may provide insight into the origin and pathogenicity of hepatitis A virus,” they wrote.

 They’ve named it phopivirus. ||||| Don’t panic. That’s the emphatic message coming from researchers who have discovered a new virus in human blood. Though it’s unclear how common the pathogen is, there’s no evidence that it has caused anyone harm, and half of those infected appear to have cleared it.

 The newfound virus’s genetic sequence shows that it has similarities to hepatitis C, which can cause serious liver damage, and to the harmless—and even helpful—human pegivirus (formerly dubbed hepatitis G). Amit Kapoor, a virologist at Columbia University led the team that identified the new virus—and which has named it human hepegivirus 1, or HHpgV-1—notes that many people understand that humans coexist with myriad bacteria that are not dangerous, but they don’t realize the same holds true for some viruses.

 The team made the discovery thanks to new, sophisticated techniques for sequencing fragments of RNA and DNA. As part of a search for novel human viruses, the group scoured blood samples from a cohort of 46 people that were collected before and after they received a blood transfusion between 1974 and 1980. Today, stricter policies determine who can donate blood and the blood itself is screened more rigorously. “I thought if I want to know whatever is circulating and unknown these are the best samples,” Kapoor says.

 Using what’s known as “deep sequencing” techniques, Kapoor’s team fished for nucleic acid sequences (the building blocks of DNA) of known viruses, and found two people who posttransfusion had what looked like a novel flavivirus, the family that includes hepatitis C and human pegivirus. Based on later blood samples that were analyzed, both of these people subsequently cleared the virus, the team reports online today in mBio. Kapoor and his colleagues then looked at 70 more people from that cohort but did not find the HHpgV-1 sequence again.

 An analysis of a different batch of stored blood samples, from 106 people who had received many blood products because they had hemophilia, found two more people who harbored HHpgV-1 sequences. These people had persistent infections, one of which lasted at least 5.4 years, but no evidence of a related disease.

 The researchers have yet to isolate the virus itself or produce it in cell cultures, but viral hunters are convinced it exists. Although contamination frequently upends the supposed discovery of a new virus, HHpgV-1 looks real, says Michael Houghton, a virologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton who helped identify the viral cause of hepatitis C. Yet Houghton stresses that many unknowns remain. “While this elegant and valuable work serves to emphasize the power of modern deep sequencing technology in identifying new viruses, the role of this new virus in liver and other diseases remains to be elucidated,” he wrote in an email.

 Still, it is far too early for blood banks to take any action against HHpgV-1, says Michael Busch, an experimental pathologist who co-directs the Blood Systems Research Institute in San Francisco (an arm of nonprofit blood banks) and former member of a U.S. government advisory group about blood safety. “Does it cause trouble that would justify any response with blood safety? I don’t think we’re at that level.” Many blood products today, such as plasma, go through filtering and inactivation procedures that likely eliminate HHpgV-1, he notes. Moreover, there’s a chance the virus could even be helpful. Busch co-authored studies that show that HIV-infected people benefit from co-infection with hepegivirus, which makes up a portion of HHpgV-1’s genetic sequence. “There was clear evidence that it reduced the pathogenesis of HIV,” he says.

 Kapoor says the main challenge now is to develop an antibody test to determine who is or was infected with HHpgV-1 in a larger population. Researchers then can compare the health of people with HHpgV-1 antibodies with control groups and assess whether any links to disease exist.

 Almost every year, scientists identify a new virus in humans, Busch says, and some undoubtedly were spread through transfusions. In the same study that found HHpgV-1, Kapoor’s team found 10-fold more anelloviruses, unknown until 1997, in posttransfusion blood samples. Yet no studies have convincingly linked these viruses to disease. “Anelloviruses are probably the most common human virus,” notes virologist Eric Delwart of the University of California, San Francisco, who was a postdoctoral adviser to Kapoor. “They’re very understudied.”

 Delwart, who says his lab has already discovered a sequence that looks like one from HHpgV-1 in a stored blood sample, predicts that as researchers find more diverse variants of the virus, they can begin to address the intriguing questions of its origin. “Where are these viruses coming from?” Delwart asks. “Are they recently in the human population or have they been around for a long time?” |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– Scientists have discovered a new virus apparently transmitted through blood transfusions. Little else is known about human hepegivirus-1, or HHpgV-1, besides that it looks a bit like hepatitis C and the harmless and perhaps beneficial human pegivirus. "It is the first transfusion-associated virus that's been described in a long time," a researcher tells NBC News. He adds "we don't know if it is going to be a significant cause of human hepatitis," but scientists say it's unlikely. In fact, "it may be good for you." They first found the virus in blood samples from two volunteers, part of a study of 46, who received blood transfusions to treat hemophilia between 1974 and 1980. The virus only appeared after transfusions, but both patients cleared it and showed no sign of disease. Two more cases were found among 106 who'd received plasma, per mBio; both cleared the virus, though one was infected for five years. Even if the virus is harmful, researchers say there's no need to panic. "This is not SARS. This is not MERS. This is not HIV," says an expert. Whereas blood transfusions were once performed solely with human blood products, they now use genetically engineered products. Plus, blood is screened more carefully and stricter policies better control who donates blood compared to 25 years ago. "Does it cause trouble that would justify any response with blood safety? I don’t think we're at that level," a pathologist at the Blood Systems Research Institute tells Science. Scientists have yet to isolate the virus but say the next step is to develop an antibody test to find HHpgV-1 in a larger population. Afterward, experts can determine whether those with HHpgV-1 antibodies appear less healthy than those without the virus and look for links to disease. (A study suggests the seeds of Alzheimer's may pass through blood.)


– During his speech to young Israelis today, President Obama started getting heckled in Hebrew. As the crowd booed, Obama handled it lightly, notes Raw Story. “This is part of the lively debate that we talked about,” he said, which prompted a standing ovation. " I have to say we actually arranged for that because it made me feel at home," Obama added. "I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I didn’t have at least one heckler.” The man apparently shouted something about Jonathan Pollard, currently serving a life sentence in the US for spying on behalf of Israel, reports Talking Points Memo, citing a White House pool report.

Expand this summary.

Obama jokes that Jerusalem heckler makes him feel at home

 By David Ferguson

 Thursday, March 21, 2013 11:59 EDT

 During a speech on Thursday in Jerusalem, President Barack Obama handled a heckler by saying that actually the incident had been planned in advance by his team so that he could feel at home.

 The president was speaking to an audience of university students when a heckler began to shout from somewhere in the room. Talking Points Memo reported that the heckler was demanding the release of former U.S. Navy Intelligence officer Jonathan Pollard, current jailed for leaking military secrets to the Israeli government.

 Obama brushed aside the interruption, saying, “You know, I have to say, we actually arranged for that, because it made me feel at home.”

 He added, “You know, I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I didn’t have at least one heckler.”

 Some within Israel and the U.S. are attempting to bring pressure to bear on the Obama administration to release Pollard. In a March 14 interview for Israeli television, however, President Obama said that Pollard committed “a serious crime” and that there are currently “no plans” to release him.

 Obama has been heckled twice during public speeches in the U.S., once by South Carolina’s Rep. Joe Wilson (R), who bellowed “You lie!” during the 2010 State of the Union Address, and again by DailyCaller.com reporter Neil Munro during a speech in the White House rose garden in June of 2012.

 Watch video about this story, embedded below via Talking Points Memo: ||||| A heckler briefly interrupted President Barack Obama's speech to the Israeli people Thursday at a university in Jerusalem, which drew boos from the crowd.

 "This is part of the lively debate that we talked about. This is good," Obama said, brushing off the interruption and drawing applause.

 "You know, I have to say, we actually arranged for that, because it made me feel at home," Obama added. "You know, I wouldn't feel comfortable if I didn't have at least one heckler."

 According to a White House pool report, the audience member shouted something about convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, who is currently serving a life sentence in prison for spying on the U.S. for Israel.

 Watch:

 (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) |||||


News article:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has climbed the country's highest mountain, state-run media has reported.

 Photos were released of the smiling and windswept 32-year-old standing on snow-covered ground at the top of Mount Paektu, with the sun rising behind him.

 One image shows dozens of troops cheering deliriously as the leader greets them at the peak.

 "Climbing Mount Paektu provides precious mental pabulum more powerful than any kind of nuclear weapon," the Rodong newspaper quoted Mr Kim as saying.

 State-run news service KCNA reported the young ruler of the impoverished but nuclear-armed North scaled the mountain on Saturday morning along with hundreds of fighter pilots, and top army and party officials.

 1 / 29 Gallery: 2014: Kim Jong-Un Inspecting Things North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un makes regular public appearances across the country

 The story is the latest run by state media on the feats of the Kim dynasty, which has ruled for more than six decades with an iron fist and pervasive personality cult.

 Just last week the regime insisted Mr Kim could drive by the time he was three years old.

 Among the claims made about his late father, Kim Jong-Il, was the suggestion he had scored an incredible 11 holes-in-one the first time he ever played golf.

 The 2,750-metre peak of the volcanic mountain, which is on the border with China, is considered a sacred place in Korean folklore and is key to propaganda glorifying the Kim family.

 Pyongyang has always insisted Kim Jong-Il was born on the mountain - although many historians say he was born in Russia - and praised the family for their "Mount Paektu bloodline".

 Mr Kim, like his predecessors, has made frequent "field guidance trips" to industrial plants, army bases, and sacred sites across the country in what analysts say is an attempt at forging an image as an energetic man of the people. ||||| Kim Jong-un has climbed the highest mountain in North Korea, state-run media claims.

 Photos of the country's leader show him standing on a snowy mountaintop, with the sun behind him.

 His father, Kim Jong-il, is said by the state to have been born on the mountain, however many historians say he was actually born in Russia.

 Reports say Kim Jong-un reached the 2,750-metre peak alongside hundreds of fighter pilots and party officials.

 "Climbing Mount Paektu provides precious mental pabulum more powerful than any kind of nuclear weapon," the Rodong newspaper quoted him as saying to troops.

 The purpose of the visit is said to have been to see pilots from the Korean People's Army who have completed a tour of battle sites in the area.

 The Oxford English Dictionary defines "pabulum" as "bland or insipid intellectual matter, entertainment".

 The peak of the volcanic mountain, lying on the border with China, is considered a sacred place in Korean folklore.

 It is also part of the propaganda which glorifies the Kim family, who are said to have a "mount Paektu bloodline".

 Recently it has been claimed that Mr Kim could drive by the time he was three years old.

 The regime also says that Kim Jong-il, who ruled until his death in 2011, scored 11 holes-in-one the first time he ever played golf.

 Like his father before him, Mr Kim makes many "field guidance trips" to army bases, factories and other important sites.

 Analysts say this is his way of showing himself as an energetic man of the people.

 North Korea has a troubled economy, with two-thirds of the population, approximately 16 million people, not knowing where their next meal is coming from, according to the UN.

 It is keen to develop its nuclear weapons with their last test taking place in February 2013.

 North Korea has built up its military arsenal and nuclear programme instead of helping feed its people, according to another United Nations report.

 Earlier this year, Michael Kirby, who led a UN commission of inquiry into North Korean human rights violations, claimed to the BBC World Service that some families were even forced to use the ashes of relatives as fertiliser to help grow crops.

 Meanwhile large amounts of government money is understood to be spent on the "supreme leader" and "the advancement of his personality cult".

 Follow @BBCNewsbeat on Twitter, BBCNewsbeat on Instagram, Radio1Newsbeat on YouTube and you can now follow BBC_Newsbeat on Snapchat |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– Today, being the seventh day, presumably Kim Jong Un is resting. But yesterday, the North Korean despot was busily scaling the snowswept 9,000-foot tallest peak in his kingdom, and state media is reporting everything but that he did it in a single bound, reports the BBC. "Climbing Mount Paektu provides precious mental pabulum more powerful than any kind of nuclear weapon," gushed Rodong; the BBC helpfully notes that "The Oxford English Dictionary defines 'pabulum' as 'bland or insipid intellectual matter, entertainment.' " Kim is pictured with dozens of members of the military atop Paektu. It's the latest heroic exploit for Dear Leader, who last week was reported as having learned to drive by the tender age of three. Mount Paektu is significant to the Kim dynasty, adds Sky News: The regime has long claimed that Kim Jong Il was born on the mountain, giving them a "Mount Paektu bloodline." Others more rooted in things like history and reality say he was born in Russia. The BBC has all the photos here.


Article:

(CNN) -- After days of pleading with drug company executives, Josh Hardy's parents got what they'd been praying for: a chance to get medicine that could help their son survive.

 The Chimerix pharmaceutical company said Tuesday that the ailing 7-year-old will receive medicine that doctors hope will help him when he becomes the first patient in a new trial set to start Wednesday.

 Todd Hardy, Josh's father, said he got the call from Chimerix president Kenneth Moch about a half hour before the public announcement was made.

 "It was wonderful," Hardy said. "Truly wonderful. It was overwhelming."

 In an emotional Facebook post, mother Aimee Hardy praised the company's decision.

 "Glory to GOD!" she wrote. "They are releasing the drug for Josh!!!!!!!!!"

 The company had previously denied calls from the 7-year-old's family to give him the drug, brincidofovir, arguing that spending the time to help Josh and others like him would slow down efforts to get the drug on the market.

 Josh's story drew national attention as his parents and supporters pushed the company to change its mind in online and media campaigns.

 CNN told Josh's story Sunday night, describing his parents' desperate pleas for help from Chimerix.

 Josh's journey began when he was diagnosed with a rare form of kidney cancer at 9 months old. Over the years, cancer turned up in his thymus, lung, and bone marrow, and each time Josh beat it.

 But a bone marrow transplant left Josh without much of an immune system, and in February doctors diagnosed him with an adenovirus that spread through his body.

 Now he's in critical condition in an intensive care unit as the virus ravages his body. Josh is in heart and kidney failure. He vomits blood several times an hour as his family gathers in vigil.

 His doctors at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis had also been pushing for the company to provide the drug.

 In a statement Tuesday, the hospital said it expected to receive the medication within 48 hours, but noted that its safety and effectiveness has not yet been established for use in children.

 "It is also important to understand that this remains a critical and complex medical situation," the hospital said.

 "St. Jude will continue to pursue state-of-the-art treatment for Josh and all of our patients. We are grateful for the efforts of Chimerix, the FDA and many others who worked to achieve this outcome. We ask that you continue to keep Josh and his family in your thoughts."

 An FDA policy known as "compassionate use" allows someone with a serious or life-threatening disease to ask a drug company for an experimental drug.

 Though it's called compassionate use, sometimes it feels anything but compassionate.

 Companies often say yes: The FDA approved 974 compassionate use arrangements in fiscal year 2013.

 But pharmaceutical companies often say no, as Chimerix did at first to Josh Hardy.

 Moch previously told CNN he wouldn't back down from his decision not to give Josh the drug.

 He said Tuesday that he hopes the new FDA-approved study will help other patients as well.

 "I'm happy for Josh and I'm happy for many patients," Moch said. "We've come up with a way of helping not just Josh, but helping other patients in need, and there are many."

 Over the past two years, the company has received more than 80 requests for compassionate use of brincidofovir from patients like Hardy, according to Moch.

 Todd Hardy hailed Moch as a hero.

 "He's a super man. He worked diligently on behalf of everybody," Hardy said. "His integrity was unquestioned. He was utterly professional."

 A Facebook page dedicated to the online campaign to help Josh get the medicine posted a thank-you message to supporters Tuesday night.

 "Thank you to every member of Josh's Army. The world has heard you and because of you Josh and many others will have the opportunity to receive CMX001 (Brincidofovir) the life saving antiviral drug made by Chimerix."

 In cancer drug battle, both sides appeal to ethics

 CNN's Ed Payne, Jennifer Moore and Jennifer Bixler contributed to this report. ||||| Josh Hardy, a first-grader at Hugh Mercer Elementary School in Fredericksburg, is set to receive a potentially lifesaving drug while fighting for his life at St. Jude Children’s Research Center in Memphis, Tenn.

 The drug company, Chimerix, said Tuesday it worked out a deal with the Food and Drug Administration for a clinical trial of the drug, and Josh will be the first recipient.

 After the young cancer victim underwent a recent bone-marrow transplant, there were complications and his health deteriorated. He developed an adenovirus, and the only drug that his family believes would help save his life is not yet widely available.

 It lacks FDA approval and Chimerix was initially unable to supply Josh with the medication.

 But Chimerix worked with the FDA to expedite additional trials.

 “We have been working aggressively and intimately with the FDA for a long period of time,” Kenneth Moch, the president and CEO of Chimerix, said in a telephone interview with The Free Lance–Star on Tuesday night.

 Josh’s family reacted on social media, where Josh’s story spread widely.

 “Glory to GOD. They are releasing the drug to Josh!!!!!” wrote Aimee Hardy, Josh’s mom, on her Facebook page.

 Josh’s story brought public attention to the impact of an adenovirus infection and the need for additional clinical development to assess the drug’s potential.

 “They helped bring forth a discussion” Moch said of the Hardy family.

 The company had been in talks with the FDA, but could not reveal that because it did not want to get hopes up, Moch said.

 “We had to figure out a way to make it available to many people in need,” he said.

 Brincindofovir will be released to 20 patients in an open-label study, beginning today with Josh.

 The FDA has committed to work expeditiously with Chimerix on the design of a pivotal Phase 3 study that would be a continuation of this pilot study, according to a press release from Chimerix.

 The drug was on its way to Memphis on Tuesday night and could be administered to Josh Wednesday morning.

 A campaign through social media had erupted to flood Chimerix with phone calls and emails urging the company to change its mind about giving Josh a dose of the medicine he needs. Josh’s story has attracted national attention.

 Family members have appeared on national television, including shows on CNN and Fox News, throughout the week to plead Josh’s case to Chimerix. Family members were scheduled to appear Wednesday morning on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” It wasn’t clear Tuesday evening whether that appearance was still scheduled.

 Moch said in the interview that social media can be good, like the support that erupted for the Hardy family. But it also can be bad—like death threats to Moch and other employees of Chimerix.

 A Facebook page set up to support Josh, called “Save Josh” attracted more than 15,000 fans. Thousands of tweets were sent to Chimerix’s Twitter handle, with #savejosh. Online petitions were set up on whitehouse.gov and change.org that attracted thousands of signatures in support of Josh.

 On the Facebook page, part of the message posted after the good news came said, “You did it. You Saved Josh. Thanks you Chimerix and Josh’s Army.”

 Local organizations, including Foode, Old Towne Butcher, The Fairy Godmother Project and charities around the country joined to support the Hardy family.

 Foode offered “Joshburgers” Tuesday in exchange for people signing letters to send to Moch. More than 500 people signed letters.

 Earlier this week, two groups of people had organized trips to Chimerix’s headquarters in Durham, N.C., Thursday to peacefully protest outside of the company and support Josh’s family.

 Lindley Estes contributed to this report.

 Robyn Sidersky: 540/374-5413

 rsidersky@freelancestar.com

 Permalink: http://news.fredericksburg.com/newsdesk/2014/03/11/chimerix-approves-drug-for-josh-hardy/ |||||
What is a summary?

– After a social media campaign—and an avalanche of bad publicity—a drug company has done a U-turn and agreed to give a dying 7-year-old boy an experimental drug that could save his life. The FDA allows "compassionate use"of unapproved drugs in such cases, but the Chimerix pharmaceutical company had insisted that giving the drug to Josh Hardy, who developed a bone marrow disorder after cancer treatment, would delay efforts to get it to market, CNN reports. Chimerix president Kenneth Moch says Josh will be the first patient in a pilot trial for the drug. "Being unable to fulfill requests for compassionate use is excruciating, and not a decision any one of us ever wants to have to make," says Moch, who tells the Fredericksburg Lance-Star that he and his employees have received death threats amid a flood of pleas to help the Virginia boy. Josh is expected to receive the drug within 48 hours, though his mother fears he is running out of time. "Even though he is frail, he has a very strong will about him," she tells Fox News. "But things just keep stacking against him, and we just want to do everything we can to give him the opportunity to make a full recovery."