Deputy steps up: Manamela's 7-year apprenticeship put to the test
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New York Post
14 hours ago
- New York Post
Shroud of Turin didn't wrap Jesus' crucified body — it was just art, new research claims
This holy linen's origins remain shrouded in mystery. Contrary to popular belief, the sacred Shroud of Turin was not used to cover Jesus' post-crucifixion and was actually a recreation created by artists, per a study published in the journal Archaeometry. 'The Shroud's image is more consistent with an artistic low-relief representation than with the direct imprint of a real human body,' Brazilian 3D digital designer Cicero Moraes, who used modeling software wrote in the paper, per the Daily Mail. Advertisement The legendary linen, which measures 14.5 feet by 3.7 feet, is one of the world's most iconic religious relics. The artifact is emblazoned with the visage of a crucified man, which penitents and religious scholars believe was formed when the shroud was used to wrap the Messiah's bloody body after he was taken off the cross 2,000 years ago. 4 Moraes various 3D simulation tools to digitally drape both bodies, before comparing the virtual fabric to photos of the Shroud snapped in 1931 — a forensic 'wrap' battle of sorts. Cicero Moraes However, skeptics have disputed the theory, citing a carbon dating analysis that placed the shroud's creation between 1260 to 1390 — a time when low-relief sculptures of religious figures were prevalent, especially on tombstones according to PBS. Advertisement But was the shroud Jesus' actual post-crucifixion cloth or a Medieval hoax? Moraes has seemingly settled the longstanding debate after using the aforementioned tech to scientifically prove that the Shroud of Turin couldn't have been used to swaddle JC. 4 'The Shroud's image is more consistent with an artistic low-relief representation than with the direct imprint of a real human body,' said Moraes while discussing the Shroud Of Turin (pictured). Getty Images To determine whether the cloth skewed more form or religious function, the virtual wizard devised two digital models: a 3D human body and a low-relief representation of the human form, Livescience reported. Advertisement He then used various 3D simulation tools to digitally drape both bodies, before comparing the virtual fabric to photos of the Shroud snapped in 1931 — a forensic 'wrap' battle of sorts. The virtual forensicist was reportedly building on a previous experiment where he just virtually covered a 3D body double without the low relief version. 4 The archbishop of Turin Severino Poletto attends the Solemn Exposition Of The Holy Shroud on April 10, 2010 in Turin, Italy. Getty Images Through this digital game of dressup, Moraes discovered that the low-relief recreation was an exact match for the pictures, while the 3D iteration was far from form-fitting. In the latter, the fabric deformed around the body in a phenomenon he analogized to the 'Agammemnon Mask Effect,' named after the preternaturally wide gold death face covering that was exhumed from a tomb in Greece. Advertisement 4 An archive negative image of the Shroud of Turin (L) is shown next to one recreated by an Italian scientist and released in Pavia October 5, 2009. REUTERS One can think of the phenomenon like painting one's face and pressing it into a piece of cloth. The resultant imprint is distorted and warped and looks almost nothing like a person's real countenance, making it unlikely that the immaculate Jesus image on the Shroud was his actual face print. Therefore, Moraes theorized that the shroud was not the genuine artifact used to clothe Jesus but was rather approximated via a shallow carving. 'The image on the Shroud of Turin is more consistent with a low-relief matrix,' he told Livescience. 'Such a matrix could have been made of wood, stone or metal and pigmented — or even heated — only in the areas of contact, producing the observed pattern.' Although he hinted at the remote possibility that the work was an 'imprint of a three-dimensional human body.' Much like the Jesus gravestone reliefs popular in the Middle Ages, Moraes believed that the Shroud was a funerary work, making it 'a masterpiece of Christian art.' Nonetheless, plenty of researchers maintain that the Shroud's image was formed by the actual body, er, face of Christ. Advertisement University of Padua professor Giulio Fanti asserted in a study that the Shroud of Turin offered legitimate proof of Jesus Christ's crucifixion wounds due to the blood stain patterns. Fanti posited that 'the different directions of blood flow from the side wound are discussed, the probable presence of pulmonary fluid,' and 'some bloodstains' point to trauma suffered by the Savior.
WIRED
17 hours ago
- WIRED
The First Widespread Cure for HIV Could Be in Children
Aug 1, 2025 9:19 AM Evidence is growing that some HIV-infected infants, if given antiretroviral drugs early in life, are able to suppress their viral loads to undetectable levels and then come off the medicine. An ARV tablet being held in Kisumu, Kenya, on April 24, 2025. Photograph:For years, Philip Goulder has been obsessed with a particularly captivating idea: In the hunt for an HIV cure, could children hold the answers? Starting in the mid-2010s, the University of Oxford pediatrician and immunologist began working with scientists in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, with the aim of tracking several hundred children who had acquired HIV from their mothers, either during pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding. After putting the children on antiretroviral drugs early in their lives to control the virus, Goulder and his colleagues were keen to monitor their progress and adherence to standard antiretroviral treatment, which stops HIV from replicating. But over the following decade, something unusual happened. Five of the children stopped coming to the clinic to collect their drugs, and when the team eventually tracked them down many months later, they appeared to be in perfect health. 'Instead of their viral loads being through the roof, they were undetectable,' says Goulder. 'And normally HIV rebounds within two or three weeks.' In a study published last year, Goulder described how all five remained in remission, despite having not received regular antiretroviral medication for some time, and in one case, up to 17 months. In the decades-long search for an HIV cure, this offered a tantalizing insight: that the first widespread success in curing HIV might not come in adults, but in children. At the recent International AIDS Society conference held in Kigali, Rwanda, in mid-July, Alfredo Tagarro, a pediatrician at the Infanta Sofia University Hospital in Madrid, presented a new study showing that around 5 percent of HIV-infected children who receive antiretrovirals within the first six months of life ultimately suppress the HIV viral reservoir—the number of cells harboring the virus's genetic material—to negligible levels. 'Children have special immunological features which makes it more likely that we will develop an HIV cure for them before other populations,' says Tagarro. His thoughts were echoed by another doctor, Mark Cotton, who directs the children's infectious diseases clinical research unit at the University of Stellenbosch, Cape Town. 'Kids have a much more dynamic immune system,' says Cotton. 'They also don't have any additional issues like high blood pressure or kidney problems. It makes them a better target, initially, for a cure.' According to Tagarro, children with HIV have long been 'left behind' in the race to find a treatment that can put HIV-positive individuals permanently into remission. Since 2007, 10 adults are thought to have been cured, having received stem cell transplants to treat life-threatening blood cancer, a procedure which ended up eliminating the virus. Yet with such procedures being both complex and highly risky—other patients have died in the aftermath of similar attempts—it is not considered a viable strategy for specifically targeting HIV. Instead, like Goulder, pediatricians have increasingly noticed that after starting antiretroviral treatment early in life, a small subpopulation of children then seem able to suppress HIV for months, years, and perhaps even permanently with their immune system alone. This realization initially began with certain isolated case studies: the 'Mississippi baby' who controlled the virus for more than two years without medication, and a South African child who was considered potentially cured having kept the virus in remission for more than a decade. Cotton says he suspects that between 10 and 20 percent of all HIV-infected children would be capable of controlling the virus for a significant period of time, beyond the typical two to three weeks, after stopping antiretrovirals. Goulder is now launching a new study to try and examine this phenomenon in more detail, taking 19 children in South Africa who have suppressed HIV to negligible levels on antiretrovirals, stopping the drugs, and seeing how many can prevent the virus from rebounding, with the aim of understanding why. To date, he says that six of them have been able to control the virus without any drugs for more than 18 months. Based on what he's seen so far, he has a number of ideas about what could be happening. In particular, it appears that boys are more likely to better control the virus due to a quirk of gender biology to do with the innate immune system, the body's first-line defense against pathogens. 'The female innate immune system both in utero and in childhood is much more aggressive than the male equivalent when it encounters and senses viruses like HIV,' says Goulder. 'Usually that's a good thing, but because HIV infects activated immune cells, it actually seems to make girls more vulnerable to being infected.' In addition, Goulder notes that because female fetuses share the same innate immune system as their mothers, the virus transmitted to them is an HIV strain that has become resistant to the female innate immune response. There could also be other explanations for the long-lasting suppression seen in some children. In some cases, Goulder has observed that the transmitted strain of HIV has been weakened through needing to undergo changes to circumvent the mother's adaptive immune response, the part of the immune system which learns to target specific viruses and other pathogens. He has also noted that male infants experience particularly large surges of testosterone in the first six months of life—a period known as 'mini-puberty'—which can enhance their immune system in various ways that help them fight the virus. Such revelations are particularly tantalizing as HIV researchers are starting to get access to a far more potent toolbox of therapeutics. Leading the way are so-called bNAbs, or broadly neutralizing antibodies, which have the ability to recognize and fight many different strains of HIV, as well as stimulating the immune system to destroy cells where HIV is hiding. There are also a growing number of therapeutic vaccines in development that can train the immune system's T cells to target and destroy HIV reservoirs. Children tend to respond to various vaccines better than adults, and Goulder says that if some children are already proving relatively adept at controlling the virus on the back of standard antiretrovirals, these additional therapeutics could give them the additional assistance they need to eradicate HIV altogether. In the coming years, this is set to be tested in several clinical trials. Cotton is leading the most ambitious attempt, which will see HIV-infected children receive a combination of antiretroviral therapy, three bNAbs, and a vaccine developed by the University of Oxford, while in a separate trial, Goulder is examining the potential of a different bNAb together with antiretrovirals to see whether it can help more children achieve long-term remission. 'We think that adding the effects of these broadly neutralizing antibodies to antiretrovirals will help us chip away at what is needed to achieve a cure,' says Goulder. 'It's a little bit like with leukemia, where treatments have steadily improved, and now the outlook for most children affected is incredibly good. Realistically in most cases, curing HIV probably requires a few hits from different angles, impacting the way that the virus can grow, and tackling it with different immune responses at the same time to essentially force it into a cul-de-sac that it can't escape from.' Children are also being viewed as the ideal target population for an even more ambitious experimental treatment, a one-time gene therapy that delivers instructions directing the body's own muscle cells to produce a continuous stream of bNAbs, without the need for repeated infusions. Maurico Martins, an associate professor at the University of Florida, who is pioneering this new approach, feels that it could represent a particularly practical strategy for low-income countries where HIV transmission to children is particularly rife, and mothers often struggle to keep their children on repeated medication. 'In regions like Uganda or parts of South Africa where this is very prevalent, you could also give this therapy to a baby right after birth as a preventative measure, protecting the newborn child against acquisition of HIV through breastfeeding and maybe even through sexual intercourse later in life,' says Martins. While Martins also hopes that gene therapy could benefit HIV-infected adults in future, he feels it has more of a chance of initially succeeding in children because their nascent immune systems are less likely to launch what he calls an anti-drug response that can destroy the therapeutic bNAbs. 'It's very difficult for most antibodies to recognize the HIV envelope protein because it's buried deep within a sugar coat,' says Martins. 'To overcome that, these bNAbs carry a lot of mutations and extensions to their arms which allow them to penetrate that sugar coat. But the problem then is that they're often viewed by your own immune system as foreign, and it starts making these anti-bNAb antibodies.' But when Martins tested the therapy in newborn rhesus macaques, it was far more effective. 'We found that the first few days or two weeks after birth comprised a sort of sweet spot for this gene therapy,' he says. 'And that's why this could really work very well in treating and preventing pediatric HIV infections.' Like many HIV scientists, Martins has run into recent funding challenges, with a previous commitment from the National Institutes of Health to support a clinical trial of the novel therapy in HIV-infected children being withdrawn. However, he is hoping that the trial will still go ahead. 'We're now talking with the Gates Foundation to see whether they can sponsor it,' he says. While children still comprise the minority of overall HIV infections, being able to cure them may yield further insights that help with the wider goal of an overall curative therapy. 'We can learn a lot from them because they are different,' says Goulder. 'I think we can learn how to achieve a cure in kids if we continue along this pathway, and from there, that will have applications in adults as well.'
Yahoo
20 hours ago
- Yahoo
Rhino horns turned radioactive to fight poachers in South Africa
South African scientists have launched an anti-poaching campaign in which rhino's horns will be injected with a radioactive material. The group, from the University of the Witwatersrand, said the process is harmless to rhinos but will allow customs officers to detect smuggled horns as they're transported across the world. South Africa has the largest rhino population in the world, and hundreds of the animals are poached there every year. The university's venture, called the Rhisotope Project, was launched on Friday after six years of research and testing. "Our goal is to deploy the Rhisotope technology at scale to help protect one of Africa's most iconic and threatened species," said Jessica Babich, head of the Rhisotope Project. "By doing so, we safeguard not just rhinos but a vital part of our natural heritage." Tests conducted in the pilot study, which involved 20 rhinos, confirmed that the radioactive material was not harmful to the animals. "We have demonstrated, beyond scientific doubt, that the process is completely safe for the animal and effective in making the horn detectable through international customs nuclear security systems," said James Larkin a professor at Wits University who is also part of the project. The horns of African rhinos are often exported to Asian markets were they are used in traditional medicine and also seen as a status symbol. White rhinos are considered threatened, while black rhinos are critically endangered. You may also be interested in: World's first IVF rhino pregnancy 'could save species' Illegal trade booms in South Africa's 'super-strange looking' plants PODCAST: Women in South Africa and Zambia protect wildlife from poachers Go to for more news from the African continent. Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica BBC Africa podcasts Africa Daily Focus on Africa
