Things Are Good

HIV Vaccine Showing Promising Results

There are lots of teams trying to create a vaccine for HIV and they are all making valuable progress. HIV is the virus that turns into AIDS which is a life altering diagnosis. Treatments for people with HIV/AIDS have improved greatly over the decades but a vaccine would be the greatest step forward. This new vaccine works at the cellular level to help the body fight off HIV by boosting B cells. Modern science truly is impressive!

The new vaccine works by intervening in a process called B cell maturation. B cells make antibodies. Like many immune cells, B cells have an early “naive” stage before they are ready to make antibodies. B cells start to mature once they get the signal that a pathogen, such as a virus, is trying to attack. B cells see pieces of that pathogen’s molecular structure and start producing antibodies that can bind to that structure and halt infection.

It can take a little while for B cells to find the right “bullseye” on a pathogen. But B cells keep trying. As they mature, B cells tweak their antibody production, refining antibody structures to bind to a pathogen in just the right, vulnerable spots.

Scientists describe B cell development as a training process or bootcamp. In most cases, the body is left with a well-honed B cell army.

HIV is hard to beat because it doesn’t give B cells a chance to develop effective antibodies. The first problem is that HIV disguises itself from the immune system. The virus is wrapped in an ever-shifting cloak of sugar molecules, called glycans. This lets HIV sneak undetected past human cells, which are also covered in glycans.

Ditching Gas Stoves as Good as Using Drugs for Asthmatics

cooking prep

Having asthma is tough as you may too often feel short of breath, and the solution to many asthma symptoms are prescription drugs. The drugs generally help the body open airways and allow the asthmatic person to breathe normally agin.
It’s been proven that air pollutants increase the stress put on asthmatic individuals and lead to increase asthma rates in the population at large. It’s also known that gas stoves produce a ton of indoor pollution. Put those two things together and now you get a good question: if gas stoves are removed from homes with people with asthma then will their condition improve? The answer is yes!

Indeed, if you get rid of gas stoves then you could see improvements as good as, or exceeding, certain drugs used to treat asthma.

Sehgal said: “We were surprised when we analysed the results and found a very large effect size. The improvements in asthma symptoms following stove change were similar to – or even greater than – those reported in clinical trials of commonly used asthma medications.”

Each person was assessed for four weeks before the gas cooking replacement, and for four weeks afterwards, including scoring their asthma using an internationally recognised scale of zero to six.

The average asthma score improved from 2.6 to 1.5, on a scale where a change of 0.5 is considered to be clinically significant. This included fewer hospital visits and fewer days off school or work for asthma flare-ups. They also found less wheezing, less use of reliver inhalers and fewer people saying that their asthma had woken them during the night.

Air pollution was measured in 44 of the homes. On average, nitrogen dioxide dropped 70%.

You Want to Live in a Dense Neighbourhood

View of downtown Toronto from a drone shot above U of T

Living densely is a good thing, more specifically being surrounded by density is a good thing. Where we live can have a huge impact on our collective well being and the planetary ecosystem. Low density housing like suburbs are really bad for one’s mental health and for your communities health. When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions it’s clear that we can drastically reduce by just increasing the density of our neighbourhoods, a simple solution with wide ranging and positive consequences.

Having homes close to one another is not only good for emissions from your house, it’s good a reducing other emission sources too. Dense neighbourhoods means you don’t need to drive to get a coffee, you can walk. The network impacts of density are quiet apparent when you live in a good place.

The results show that attached homes and MURBs are 45–62 % less GHG intensive per capita than detached homes. Considering results at the neighborhood level, GHG emissions per capita decrease with higher density. We also find negative associations between GHG emissions per capita and household characteristics including household size, tenancy, and household income. The findings of this study highlight the need to integrate built forms, mobility, and transport infrastructure when assessing the potential greenhouse gas emissions of housing and neighborhoods. Besides aiming for density, the provision of walkable neighborhoods, low-emission modes of transport, and high-density housing forms (e.g., multi-unit residential buildings) can lead to low-GHG neighborhoods.

New Buildings in England Require Solar Power

Solar Panel School

In certain areas, like Ontario, homes are legally required to damage the environment by being connected to private fossil fuel companies (yes, policy like this count as subsidies to fossil fuel companies). In England that’s set to change with new building codes, no longer will people be forced to use fossil fuels to warm their houses. Moving forward new homes will require solar panels to supplement their energy usage while also including heat pumps. Hopefully this will encourage other places around the world to start incorporating renewable power directly into new buildings instead of relying on retrofits.

“The Iran war has once again shown our drive for clean power is essential for our energy security so we can escape the grip of fossil fuel markets we don’t control,” said Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.
The announced changes have been welcomed by the energy industry and those working in green technology for providing certainty that heat pumps and solar panels are worth investing in.
“It’s going to give clarity to the UK market, installers, builders, manufacturers, that there’s a significant market that’s there,” said Garry Felgate, CEO of MCS Foundation, which certifies installers of low carbon heating systems.

Phytoplankton Can Save the Planet

ocean shore

When it comes to absorbing carbon you can do a lot worse than plankton. Yes, those tiny specks of flora that float around the ocean can take on a lot of carbon to thrive and grow, which means that we could use them as a reservoir of excess of carbon in the atmosphere. As we know, fossil fuels come from old plants and animals that died out millions of years ago and now we’re burning them for power, which is the biggest geoengineering project in history. A simple proposition is to reverse the process: supercharge the feeding of the phytoplankton to get them to grab the carbon and sequester it away.

To be clear the best way to deal with rising temperatures is to stop burning fossil fuels in the first place!

So we’re not talking about some wild new speculative hypothesis or an odd-ball observation from a single contested study. We’re talking about the accumulated output of hydrothermal cruises, dust-tracking satellites, floating ocean robots, sediment cores that reach back through ice ages, shipboard chemistry experiments, and decades of chlorophyll imagery. The core relationship — feed iron-starved water, and it grows more phytoplankton, in proportion to how much you feed it, and then stops when the nutrient addition stops — is about as well-established as anything in ocean science gets.

That last point deserves notice. Reversability is a key criterion for ecological safety. You want to be sure that if the intervention you’re pursuing turns out to have a negative effect, you can stop it. You wouldn’t want to risk shifting an ecosystem into a new permanent state. Here the evidence is especially clear. Phytoplankton grows as long as you keep feeding it. When you stop feeding it, it stops growing.