Ron Magill/ Zoo Miami
Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even see a baby tortoise.
Goliath, the 135-year-old tortoise, became a father. Electricity was still a novel invention when Goliath was born, and it took until the age of AI for him to find a mate he was willing to breed with. Earlier this month, Zoo Miami welcomed the first Galápagos tortoise hatchling ever born there, a win for the species and for handlers who had been unsuccessfully introducing Goliath to female tortoises for years. With Sweet Pea, the hatchling’s near-centenarian mother, Goliath finally found his match. The zoo submitted the pair to the Guinness Book of World Records to officially make them “The Oldest First-Time Parents in History.”
Breakthrough HIV prevention drug gets FDA approval. This week, US regulators greenlit Lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injection that was at least 96% effective at protecting against HIV infection in clinical trials. The current leading HIV prevention drug is a daily pill known as PrEP that’s 99% effective when taken on time every day, but its efficacy plummets if you skip doses. The convenience of Lenacapavir—which was Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year” in 2024—could, in practice, make it more effective than PrEP if the manufacturer, Gilead Sciences, broadens access. The drug is now available in the US…but right now it costs $28,000 per year.
Blood test could detect cancer three years earlier. Tumors shed genetic material that can show up in a person’s bloodstream months to years before they’re diagnosed with cancer, according to a new Johns Hopkins study. When analyzing the blood samples of 26 patients who were diagnosed with cancer within six months of blood collection, the researchers detected tumor DNA in eight people (or 31% of the time). The team also had three-year-old blood samples on hand for six of those eight people, and microscopic cancer mutations were detected in four of them. The discovery paves the way for early intervention at a time when tumors are “more likely to be curable,” one of the study’s authors said.—ML
No comments:
Post a Comment