200-year-old fish caught!

A 40-pound shortraker fish, after minding its business for the past two centuries, was recently caught 10 miles off the coast of Alaska by a Seattle fisherman. But just looking at this thing we kinda wish he just left it where he found it.

Shortrakers, also known as rockfish, are actually quite common in the Pacific and are a prize among deep sea fisherman. They're colored in hues of orange, pink, and red, and can live at depths of nearly 4,000 feet.

The record-breaking shortraker was hauled in near Sitka during the week of June 24. But what's even more impressive than its weight is its remarkable age.

Troy Tidingco, Sitka area manager for the state Department of Fish and Game, said the fish is still being analyzed but he believes it is at least 200 years old. Tidingco said that would beat the current record of 175 years. Researchers are able to determine the age of a shortraker by the number of growth rings along its ear bone.

However, a previously caught rougheye rockfish, similar to the shortraker, was believed to have been 205 years old. Still, Tydingco said that record-setting fish “was quite a bit smaller” than the 41-inch specimen Liebman caught.

The fisherman who caught the shortraker, Henry Liebman, says he wants to mount it back home in Seattle, but he did provide the Alaska Department of Fish and Game with a tissue sample so its exact age could be confirmed. 

The purple frog

The purple frog was originally thought to belong to a unique family called Nasikabatrachidae, but was incorporated as a subfamily into the larger Sooglossidae family in 2006. Its closest relatives are the Seychelles frogs, the ancestors of which were present on the Indo-Madagascan land mass with the purple frog’s predecessors when it broke away from the supercontinent of Gondwana 120 million years ago. Formally discovered in 2003, the purple frog spends most of the year underground, surfacing only to breed during the monsoon. This species is threatened by ongoing forest loss for coffee, cardamom and ginger plantations.

Stem-cell transplants may purge HIV

Two men with HIV may have been cured after they received stem-cell transplants to treat the blood cancer lymphoma, their doctors announced today at the International AIDS Society Conference in Kuala Lumpur.
One of the men received stem-cell transplants to replace his blood-cell-producing bone marrow about three years ago, and the other five years ago. Their regimens were similar to one used on Timothy Ray Brown, the 'Berlin patient' who has been living HIV-free for six years and is the only adult to have been declared cured of HIV. Last July, doctors announced that the two men — the ‘Boston patients’ — appeared to be living without detectable levels of HIV in their blood, but they were still taking antiretroviral medications at that time.
Timothy Henrich, an HIV specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, who helped to treat the men, says that they have now stopped their antiretroviral treatments with no ill effects. One has been off medication for 15 weeks and the other for seven. Neither has any trace of HIV DNA or RNA in his blood.If the men stay healthy, they would be the third and fourth patients ever to be cured of HIV.
But Henrich and Daniel Kuritzkes, a colleague at Brigham who also worked with the men, caution that it is still too early know whether or not the Boston patients have been cured. For that, doctors will need to follow the men closely for at least a year, because the virus may be hiding out in 'reservoirs' — parts of the men’s bodies, such as their brain or gut, that can harbour the virus for decades.
“We’re being very careful not to say that these patients are cured,” Kuritzkes says. “But the findings to date are very encouraging.”
HIV researcher Steven Deeks of the University of California, San Francisco, says that doctors might need to wait at least two years before declaring that a cure has been achieved. “Any evidence that we might be able to cure HIV infection remains a major advance,” Deeks says. But, he adds, “there have been cases of patients who took many weeks off therapy before the virus took off”.