The Wavering Scourge (HIV-AIDS)

When cases of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus-Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV-AIDS) were first reported more than 3 decades ago, they sent the world into hysteria, with people fearing just about any contact with those who had been found positive with the disease. Spreading rapidly, and with no known cure for it, HIV/AIDS was a dreaded condition. And now taking a theatrical turn on its unending saga, protesters claim that the epidemic has reached its tipping point.

According to avert.org, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, shortened AIDS, is caused by HIV. Some people may refer to AIDS as advanced HIV infection. HIV is a virus that gradually attacks immune system cells. As HIV progressively damages these cells, the body becomes more vulnerable to infections, which it will have difficulty in fighting off. It is at the point of very advanced HIV infection that a person is said to have AIDS. A person is diagnosed with AIDS when they have developed an AIDS related condition or symptom, called an opportunistic infection, or an AIDS related cancer which takes advantage of the weakened immune system. Moreover, AIDS can be diagnosed when the number of immune system cells in the blood of an HIV positive person drops below a certain level.

Worryingly, there is still no cure for HIV. Even so, the infection can be prevented, and those living with HIV can take antiretroviral drugs to prevent or delay the onset of AIDS. However, in many countries across the world access to prevention and treatment services is limited. Global leaders have pledged to work towards universal access to HIV prevention and care, so that millions of deaths can be averted.

How, exactly?

Last December 1, 2014, HIV/AIDS awareness and service organizations around the world met for commemoration of the World AIDS Day, a global movement to unite those in the fight against the disease, support those living with HIV/AIDS and remember those the disease took too soon. The event was marked in with educational seminars, public talks and campaigns most revolving around the stigma and discrimination of people having the disease.

 “On this World AIDS Day, I call on world leaders to unite in our common cause. We have started to turn the tide. We have set a bold target. Let us end AIDS together by 2030,” said UNAIDS secretary-general Ban Ki-moon.

But the Philippines, a country still shackled in the grip of the Catholic hang-ups about sex, cannot even discuss condom use and other broad issues concerning sexual and reproductive health without having denunciations from the Church and other conservative private sectors. We can’t accept the mere fact that the country is facing the risk of a full-blown epidemic with the rapid and unabated rise of the infection. Although there is still a low prevalence of HIV in the Philippines, with just under 24,000 cases reported in 2012, transmission is now growing rapidly with the average ballooned into 15 cases per day as of 2014.

There’s no way to put it: The Philippines is winning the gold medal in Asia for the fastest rising epidemic in those populations. Moreover, the country is nowhere along the finish line as for this distant dream of the United Nations. Doubtless, a whip of greater shame and stigma is along the way.

The implications are clear. Unprotected sex, whether done by straight or gay persons, is the deadliest form of transmission. Discrimination and stigma are still barriers to spreading the word about testing and new treatments among gay and bisexual men. These facts should therefore ideally receive the most attention in terms of public education and awareness. Furthermore, Filipinos, belonging in the vulnerable groups should be open with their sexuality and be transparent as getting them to be tested and to be truthful about their selves is a very important way to combat the spread of HIV.

Certainly, it is only through the concerted efforts of government and citizens, young and old, infected and uninfected, that we will be able to stop HIV/AIDS in its tracks, and bequeath to our children and their children a future beyond the shadow of this terrible illness-nay, a wavering scourge.

It is a well-known fact that humans are naturally curious. Human beings just seem to have a natural desire to learn more, to figure out things we don't understand.

Well guess what?

The human desire to discover the unknown has taken curiosity to a whole new level. Much like the way gamers often perform repetitive tasks to improve their character’s skill set, or grinding as they call it, people have now taken the term upgrade literally, as they try to gain some of those same superskills seen in games and movies, in real life by hacking their bodies.

Body hacking is one of those buzzy blanket terms used to describe a whole spectrum of ways that people modify or improve their bodies, from fairly tame experiments to more intense modifications like growing extra ears out of their arms.

The upgrade or body hacking can seem like a reckless and narcissistic pursuit. After all, treating your body like a home science kit can have serious consequences. Yet, even with possible consequences, today’s transhumanists take it further. They seek to extend the senses and co-mingle them, allowing themselves to do things like detect Wi-Fi, hear colors, sense magnetic north, and see in the dark. Technology is driving the trend. Check out these 6 crazy body hacks that give you a set of superhuman upgrades.

1.    Touch Electromagnetic Fields

Touching electromagnetic fields may seem impossible, but not for today’s grinders. Magnets are easy to install and this is among the first hacks grinders try. Become a walking magnet by implanting a barrel-shaped neodymium variety, the size of a grain of rice, beneath the skin of a finger. These magnets are coated with bio-proof materials such as titanium nitride (used to coat replacement hips), silicone, and Teflon to avoid injury and infection. When a person with this body hack encounters an electromagnetic field, it vibrates against the nerves, enabling the user to feel things from large power transformers to tiny paperclips.

2.     Install a Sonar

Want to sense distances like a dolphin? You’re in luck because hacker collective Grindhouse Wetware Bottlenose creates a sonar perception much like a dolphin. Its dolphin-like range finder locates an object in a dark room using an ultrasonic distance sensor, then sends electromagnetic pulses to a magnet in the user’s finger, providing a sense of things like an object’s size and distance. As a user moves closer to the object, the sensations grow stronger. Bottlenose can also detect radiation or the presence of ethanol, and it can pick up Bluetooth signals. A thermal infrared sensor spots warm objects—such as a stove or a clothes dryer—from up to several feet away. There are also add-on sensors for detecting things like ultraviolet light and for sensing compass headings. For people without magnet implants, a wearable magnet works just as well, delivering the same sensory vibrations outside the skin, as long as the magnet is worn within the range of the Bottlenose device.

3.    Hear Wi-Fi

Imagine walking down the street, and instead of looking for that little Wi-Fi sticker on the doors of coffee shops, you could hear a hotspot’s presence. London journalist Frank Swain is partially deaf. He wears hearing aids that link via Bluetooth to his smartphone. Last year, a sound-engineer friend hacked his phone’s software, so now it sends melodies and Geiger-counter-like clicks to his hearing aids when it detects Wi-Fi zones. “I pick up a lot more data than you might think,” Swain says. “Routers give away a lot through the pitch of their digital signals, including the brand, the type of router, the Inter­net Service Provider, whether high security or low security. I can even home in on their location using stereo.”

4.    Get Superhuman Night Vision

A chlorophyll derivative in eyes of the deepsea dragonfish, found in oceans of the Southern Hemisphere helps it see in the dark—or rather in a red light cast by a bioluminescent organ. In March 2015, California biohackers Gabriel Licina and Jeffrey Tibbetts wanted to try a similar derivative, Chlorin e6. They bought 100 milligrams from a medical supplier. A heavy dose would have burned the eyes, so they diluted half in insulin and saline, adding the organic solvent dimethyl sulfoxide. Tibbetts pinned Licina’s eyelids with specula and dosed the eyes. After two hours, Licina was able to identify people 50 feet away in a darkened area 100 percent of the time, while four control subjects had a 33 percent success rate. So far, there have been no bad side effects.

5.    Implant Headphones

Rich Lee, a salesman and grinder wanted true wireless headphones. So he implanted a magnet in the small prominence (known as the tragus) in front of each ear. He then hacked his smartphone to send audio into a signal amplifier that relays it to a wired “antenna” necklace around his neck. The necklace creates an electromagnetic field around Lee’s head. And the field induces vibrations in the ear magnets that Lee hears as music.

6.    Hear Colors

Colorblind artist and musician Neil Harbisson saw the world in monochrome most of his life. However, in 2013, in a Barcelona clinic, a surgeon  drilled four holes into the occipital bone at the base of his skull and anchored a camera. Its flexible lens arcs over Harbisson’s head to just above his brow, where it captures the color of any object he is looking at; a chip inside his skull transposes the color into a frequency; and then turns each frequency into a vibration picked up by Harbisson’s inner ear. A yellow sock sounds like the G note above middle C; the blue of the ocean (who he once met) sounds like B. Volume relies on color saturation. Fused to his body, the camera stalk feels like a long tooth, Harbisson says. Every few months, he has to charge a small battery to power the processor, camera, actuator, and wireless systems. 

The Moon Becomes a New Wi-Fi Hotspot

by: Sofia Riñon

Aside from air, water and fresh vegetables, what would you need to survive on the moon? One thing that would likely feature high on the list is a decent, reliable wireless internet. And thanks to a group of researchers from MIT and NASA this kind of connectivity could be within the realms of possibility.

When our brave explorers arrive on the dusty plains of the moon, they’ll be able to live tweet the experience, and even take a selfie for Instagram.

Complimentary Wi-Fi is so common that a business advertising its “hotspot” in the window seems somewhat outdated. But a new hotspot location should impress even the most jaded among us: For the first time, scientists have demonstrated it’s possible to beam a wireless Internet signal across the 238,900 miles separating Earth from the moon.

They have successfully used lasers to send a broadband wireless signal to the moon—with a connection fast enough to stream high-definition video. Admittedly, there’s a sparse lunar audience for YouTube – but this is big news for those interested in pushing the limits of data communication technology to enable deep-space exploration.

Getting the signal through the Earth's atmosphere is difficult, so scientists used four separate telescopes based in New Mexico. Each telescope is about 6 inches in diameter and is fed by a laser transmitter that beams information in coded pulses of infrared light.

Since our atmosphere bends the signal as it travels to the moon, the four telescopes transmit the light through different columns of air, each with different bending effects.

This improves the chances that at least one of the signals will hit the intended satellite. It's kind of like the space version of those Wi-Fi routers with multiple antennas, and the way they can improve the quality of your connection.

The destination here is not the Moon itself, but a satellite currently orbiting the moon, equipped with a telescope, which will collect the laser beams and will focus it into an optical fiber. Then, a photo detector turns the pulses of light into electrical pulses and from there they are converted to data through conventional techniques.

The team has transmitted data across the 384,633km distance between Earth and the moon at a rate of 19.44mbps and has also managed to download data at a rate of 622mbps.

"Communicating at high data rates from Earth to the moon with laser beams is challenging because of the 400,000-kilometre distance spreading out the light beam," Mark Stevens of MIT Lincoln Laboratory stated. "It's doubly difficult going through the atmosphere, because turbulence can bend light-causing rapid fading or dropouts of the signal at the receiver."

Just why the Moon needs Internet isn't really clear, especially as there haven't been any humans on the lunar surface since 1972. Perhaps if the link had been established a few months earlier, China's Jade Rabbit lunar rover could have posted a few lunar selfies and its sad dying message on its Facebook page via Wi-Fi.

So, in light of all that, there’s really only question that remains… “What’s the password?”

Send Your Name to Mars

There might not be any free flights to space yet, but it looks like we might get to travel there – at least in spirit. Well, since NASA hasn’t gotten around to offering Mars vacations yet, we’re all pretty much stuck here on Earth for the time being. But never fear, NASA is aware of the human desire to mark our names on the stars, so it’s giving the public a chance to shoot their names into space on the first Orion mission, scheduled to launch on December 4.

Pack lightly because your name’s astronomical journey will begin, flying in comfort on a dime sized microchip when NASA’s Orion spacecraft launches on its first test flight, the Exploration Flight Test-1. It will take off from Cape Canaveral in Florida and will circle the Earth a few times before whizzing back through the atmosphere and landing in the Pacific Ocean.

But if you thought that was the end of your name’s interstellar voyage, apparently not. NASA has bigger plans. After returning to Earth, all the names collected will continue to hitch a ride on future NASA exploration flights and missions to Mars. With each flight, selected individuals will collect more and more "frequent flyer miles," just for fun, giving space fanatics a taste of what it's like to be on one of NASA's missions.

There is a deadline for getting your name on Orion’s first flight. To get a "boarding pass" for the first test flight, you should have submitted your name by October 31. If you miss Orion this time, NASA will still give newcomers an opportunity to sign up for name fly-alongs on future missions.

To sign up, you just go to NASA’s name collecting site, fill out some basic information and submit. The site then created a digital “boarding pass.” Then, you’ll get the simple message “Success! Your name will fly on Orion’s flight test.”

"NASA is pushing the boundaries of exploration and working hard to send people to Mars in the future. When we set foot on the Red Planet, we'll be exploring for all of humanity. Flying these names will enable people to be part of our journey," says Mark Geyer, Orion Program manager, in a news release.

For those even more daring, an alternative mission has been set up by a Dutch company called Mars One. The corporation announced last year that it was looking for volunteer astronauts to fly to the Red Planet on a spacecraft scheduled to depart in 2022 and land on Mars in 2023.

Unfortunately, there is no technology available for a return mission. And yet, tens of thousands of people have volunteered for the program. However, the organization plans to send only four people to Mars, with the hopes of establishing the first human settlement there.

It sounds like a tale from pulp science fiction: volunteers signing up to take a one-way trip to another planet. But that's just what's in the works in the Mars One program.

Will it happen? No one knows for sure. The company says it needs $6 billion to fund the project.

In the meantime, hedge your bets and send your name into space instead.

Who knows, maybe it will get you on the Martian guest list early.

This is not the first time in recent years that man has tried to leave his mark in space. One company has promised to send your dead pet's remains to the Moon, a haiku-carrying robot has entered Mars' orbit and the Japanese government has transmitted Hello Kitty messages into space. So although the general public still only gets to travel to space on a name-only basis this time round, who knows what the future holds.

Human beings just seem to have a natural desire to learn more, to figure out things we don't understand, and to explore the unknown. We humans thrive on new experiences. Space is probably the ultimate "new experience," and one of the best places for humanity to turn to keep learning. It is part of our nature as human beings that we want to explore and try to better understand the world in which we live. Space exploration is the logical extension of that need.