News – Carlo Curino

AIDS: a first cure

From slashdot news http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/09/1558241

A very interesting step forward in AIDS cure… the news says:

“HIV is the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Until now, HIV has no cure and has led to the deaths of over 25 million people. However, a possible cure has appeared. Dr. Gero Hutter, a brilliant physician in Germany, replaced the bone marrow of an HIV patient with the bone marrow of a donor who has natural immunity to HIV. The new bone marrow in the patient then produced immune-system cells that are immune to HIV. Being unable to hijack any immune cell, the HIV has simply disappeared. The patient has been free of HIV for about 2 years. Some physicians at UCLA have developed a similar therapy and plan to commercialize it.”

In the news: Confidential US Air Force e-mails sent to tourism website

Confidential US Air Force (USAF) e-mails, some including flight plans for a presidential visit, have been mistakenly sent to a tourism website.

The e-mails were meant to go to the US airbase at RAF Mildenhall, Suffolk, via its website.

But instead they went to a town tourism website which had a similar address.

Among the information “wrongly” released there are Air Force One flight plans, military procedures and tactics marked as “‘Destroy by any means to prevent capture“, etc..

It looks to me that some security has been compromised, but…

The USAF said there had been no “verified security breach” and it had advised airmen and other staff to use the correct e-mail address.

Well now we can be sure we are safe, the military secrets have been protecting just by saying to the people “use the right address dude!“, i definitely feel safer now!! So we really have military confidential information running around the web via e-mails…

check the full story on BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/suffolk/7277392.stm

Semantic Web: getting real

On slashdot recently appeared an interesting news for researcher and fun of Semantic Web:

http://slashdot.org/articles/08/02/10/2041235.shtml

Reuters just opened access to their corporate semantic technology crown jewels. For free. For anyone. Their Calais API lets you turn unstructured text into a formal RDF graph in about one second .

People testing it report to be impressively effective. I haven’t tested myself yet, but i plan to do it. And i will keep you posted on this.

Dirt Bisquits: a sad reality…

This news article covers a very bad situation in Haiti:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau…. (Read More)