Bone marrow ‘frees men of HIV drugs’; Self-cleaning seabird eggs; New tests for liver disease

Bone marrow ‘frees men of HIV drugs’
Doctors in the United States say two patients have been taken off their HIV drugs after they were given bone marrow transplants for blood cancers. Dr Daniel Kuritzkes is part of the medical team behind the research and says “we've learnt something very important about the mechanisms by which HIV infected cells could be eliminated”.

Self-cleaning seabird eggs
Guillemots – highly social, cliff-nesting seabirds – lay eggs that are self-cleaning. Scientists studying guillemot eggs accidentally spilled water on a batch. When the accident happened, the researchers noticed that the water stood in droplets on the eggs’ surface, similar to the droplets that are seen on lotus leaves or other hydrophobic, water-repellent, self-cleaning surfaces. BBC Science reporter Victoria Gill heard the scientists’ story at the Society for Experimental Biology Conference in Valencia, Spain.

Scarred Liver
Liver disease is on the increase worldwide, due to the rise in hepatitis C in some countries and increasing alcohol use in others. Researchers from the University of Nottingham are exhibiting how new tests, including a technique borrowed from the cheese industry and the use of unique MRI protocols, are being used to diagnose liver disease at an earlier stage. Dr Neil Guha, a liver specialist, and Dr Susan Francis, a physicist, are from the NIHR Nottingham Digestive Diseases Biomedical Research Unit in the UK.