Assault on HIV
A drug that stops HIV replicating has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. Merck’s raltegravir is the first in a new class of drugs called integrase inhibitors that work by stopping the virus inserting its genetic material into human DNA, which in turn prevents it creating copies of itself.
Millimetres to the moon
Using a laser rangefinder, a 3.5-metre telescope in New Mexico has measured the distance to the moon to an accuracy of 1 millimetre (www.arxiv.org/abs/0710.0890). APOLLO – the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation – paves the way for tests of…
