“World Lens” by Quest Visual is an iPhone app that instantly translates printed words from one language to another in real time! PS, it’s also currently free. Get it here.
Update: Turns out the demo is free, but you will have to buy the ‘Spanish to English’ pack or the ‘English to Spanish’ pack ($4.99 each) to truly see it in action.
Anonymous asked: I was using stumble upon for the first time ever last night and "stumbled upon" your blog. I have went back about 20-30 posts and love everything about H&H. Everything that you post is of some interest to me or I can relate to. It's just so crazy to find a blog that I can relate to in many many ways. Anyways, I have one question for now and you may have already answered this but why is it called "Ham and Heroin"? I have enjoyed everything so far and will continue to follow. Keep up the amazing work, I can already tell you have effected many people's daily lives and now mine. God Bless,
A new fan,
Shannon Mills
Welcome new fan! The answer to the question you seek is here.
Song of the day: “Bloodstream” by Stateless
HIV cure a success, but won’t work for everyone
Does one man’s apparent recovery from HIV herald the dawn of a cure for the disease?
The internet is abuzz with press reports claiming that a new cure for HIV is on the horizon. This flurry began last week with a paper in the journal Blood, followed by an interview with the patient himself in the German magazine Stern, and has since spread around the web like wildfire, including reports in CNN and Associated Press.
The research itself isn’t new - the paper in Blood is a follow-up analysis of a treatment performed in 2007 and first published in 2008.
The trial involved Timothy Ray Brown, an AIDS sufferer who had developed myeloid leukemia (a cancer of the immune system). Brown’s doctors, Gero Hütter and his colleagues at the Charité University of Medicine, Berlin, treated him with heavy doses of chemotherapy to suppress the cancer. They then followed this with a bone marrow transplant containing stem cells from a matched donor - a routine treatment for this sort of cancer.
However, crucially, the stem cells had an extra potency. Hütter knew that about 1 per cent of Europeans have a natural resistance to HIV conferred by a mutation in a gene called CCR5, so he searched for a donor from within this population.
The transplant was a success and the donor’s immunity seems to have been passed to Brown via the transplant. All this was known in 2008.
In their latest paper in Blood, the researchers confirmed that Brown seems to have maintained his resistance to HIV for three years, confounding their expectation that he would become reinfected. They concluded that a “cure of HIV has been achieved in this patient.”
Note the crucial words “in this patient”. For the transplant to succeed, the bone marrow had to be specifically matched to Brown so that his immune system would not reject them. He was lucky that a match was found. Furtherore, as Michael Saag, director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham AIDS Center, told CNN, Brown had to have his own immune system practically wiped out to avoid a rejection of the transplant, a risky procedure in itself.
Though some press reports have suggested this could herald a treatment for AIDS, in reality this is unlikely to be the case. As New Scientist pointed out in a thorough analysis of the trial at the time, while being fantastic news for Brown, for all the above reasons and more, it is still a far cry from a treatment that can scale to the millions of AIDS sufferers worldwide. [via.]
I myself, also posted the article citing this guy’s recovery here. Kinda sad there’s a big exception to what it could mean for other people—still, I suppose it’s progress.
Shi Yuan has created a way to turn normally passive things into something with a life of its own. Like this wallpaper that reacts to heat, the painting that react when you touch it, or the daily calendar that fades away during the day. It is made using heat sensitive paint - and it is incredible. [via.]
Anonymous asked: I was using stumble upon for the first time ever last night and "stumbled upon" your blog. I have went back about 20-30 posts and love everything about H&H. Everything that you post is of some interest to me or I can relate to. It's just so crazy to find a blog that I can relate to in many many ways. Anyways, I have one question for now and you may have already answered this but why is it called "Ham and Heroin"? I have enjoyed everything so far and will continue to follow. Keep up the amazing work, I can already tell you have effected many people's daily lives and now mine. God Bless,
A new fan,
Shannon Mills
Welcome new fan! The answer to the question you seek is here.
David Foster Wallace
To the lovely Capricorn (who poured her heart out to me),
Send me your email—H&H is no place for me to write all that I want to for you.
Sincerely,
N.
British artist Keira Rathbone uses typewriters, instead of brushes and pencils, to create amazing portraits and drawings. Check out her website here.
Hey, why do you like movies Natasha?
“Well, I think this video sums it up rather nicely”.
Patient Cured of HIV with Stem Cell Transplant
Doctors who carried out a stem cell transplant on an HIV-infected man with leukaemia in 2007 say they now believe the man to have been cured of HIV infection as a result of the treatment, which introduced stem cells which happened to be resistant to HIV infection.
The man received bone marrow from a donor who had natural resistance to HIV infection; this was due to a genetic profile which led to the CCR5 co-receptor being absent from his cells. The most common variety of HIV uses CCR5 as its ‘docking station’, attaching to it in order to enter and infect CD4 cells, and people with this mutation are almost completely protected against infection.
The case was first reported at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston, and Berlin doctors subsequently published a detailed case history in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2009.
They have now published a follow-up report in the journal Blood, arguing that based on the results of extensive tests, “It is reasonable to conclude that cure of HIV infection has been achieved in this patient.”
Continue reading here.
Can we finally all agree now that stem cell research is worth it?
George Eliot
Two Clowns, One Box
Contortion at its finest. I’ve never seen anything like it.
