Are We Winning The Battle Against HIV?

Although HIV is still at large on the loose, its infection rates have reduced around the world according to figures released by the United Nations AIDS agency. The report shows that the annual number of new HIV infections in children has more than halved since 2001, from 550,000 to 260,000.

New infections overall have tumbled by a third over the same period. Death rates are falling too, from a peak of 2.3 million in 2005 to 1.6 million last year.

It is believed that many of the reductions are related to increases in the availability of antiretroviral therapy. Of everyone eligible for treatment globally, 61 per cent are now receiving ART – almost 10 million people in total.

Other key factors that may have helped reduce infection rates include scaled-up programmes to prevent mothers with HIV passing the virus to their babies, and the increase of male circumcision programmes in Africa.

Recent changes to eligibility rules mean an additional 10 million can now receive ART, raising hopes of further success.

Source: NewScientist

Picture of the Day: World’s Ugliest Animal

Give it up for the ugliest animal in the world – the blobfish.

The blobfish (Psychrolutes marcidus), a species that lives at great depths and is rarely seen has been voted the world's ugliest animal.

The Ugly Animal Preservation Society hoped to raise awareness about endangered animals by electing a new, aesthetically-challenged mascot. With 200 species becoming extinct every day, the aesthetically challenged animals needed more help because of their unappealing appearance. 

More than 3000 ballots were cast in an online competition out of which the blobfish earned 795 votes.

The blobfish lives off the coast of south-eastern Australia and Tasmania. Fishers often accidentally capture it in their nets, diminishing the size of the blobfish population.  Scientists now fear the blobfish could become an endangered species.

The kakapo, the axolotl, the Titicaca water frog and the proboscis monkey were also in contention for the world's ugliest animal.

In my opinion, the best or should I say the ugliest animal won!

People Who Lie Take Longer to Respond While Texting

Have you ever been in that awkward situation where you’re busy exchanging a flurry of

messages on one of the social media platform and suddenly you dropped a question and the conversation seems to slow down because the person on the other end is taking longer than normal to respond to your last message? There could be a number of reasons for such a thing to happen.

A new research however is suggesting we should be suspicious when such an incident occurs. Why?  The reason is because when people lie in digital messages – texting, social media or instant messaging – they take longer to respond according to a Brigham Young University study. Besides taking longer to respond, they also make more edits and write shorter responses than usual.

According to one of the researchers, digital conversations are a fertile ground for deception because people can easily conceal their identity and their messages may appear credible. In addition, humans are not very good at detecting lies and it's even harder to tell when someone is lying through a digital message because you can't hear a voice or see an expression.

With the many financial, security and personal safety implications of digital deception, the researchers set up an experimental instrument that tracked possible cues of online lying. They created a computer program that carried out online conversations with participants – similar to the experience consumers have with online customer service questions.

More than 100 students from two large universities, had conversations with the computer, which asked them 30 questions each. The participants were told to lie in about half of their responses. The researchers found responses filled with lies took 10 percent longer to create and were edited more than truthful messages.
The researchers hope to identify signs given off by people that are not easily tracked by individuals. The findings appeared online in the academic information systems journal ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems.


The authors of the study however warned that we shouldn't automatically assume someone is lying if they take longer to respond, but the study does provide some general patterns. The researchers are furthering this line of research by using a variety of other sensors to track human behavior and see how it connects with deception.