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Does an injection hurt less if we don?t look while we’re getting it? New research from the U.K. says it does.

Marisa Taylor-Clarke poked volunteers’ forearms with a two-pronged device and asked them if they could tell whether they had been touched in one place or two. They were not able to see the device touching their skin. The first time, they could look at their arms immediately before and afterwards. Other times, they looked at another object or were in total darkness.
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Believe it or not, scientists are using the AIDS virus to treat people who have Parkinsons disease. The AIDS virus can penetrate a cell’s nucleus, which is what makes it so dangerous. Now researchers want to remove the dangerous parts of the virus and use this system to deliver genetic material that can relieve Parkinsons symptoms. “It can deliver a large amount of genetic material,” says Peter Working, “which means that you can deliver big genes to fix big problems.”

In its natural state, the AIDs virus takes control of an immune cell’s genes, and forces it to make copies of the HIV’s genes, and then sends those copies out to attack other cells. This shuts down the body’s ability to defend itself.
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A giant, prehistoric-looking bird has been sighted in Southwest Alaska. Pilot John Bouker says the bird?s wingspan is as big as the wing on his Cessna 207, which is 14 feet. He’d heard rumors about the bird, but says, “I didn’t put any thought into it.” That was before he looked out of the left window of his plane and saw it about 1,000 feet away. “The people in the plane all saw him,” he says. “He’s huge, he’s huge, he’s really, really big. You wouldn’t want to have your children out.”
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Giraffes have always been considered mute, despite their long necks, but now scientists believe they can talk to each other. “We believe that giraffes are forcing large columns of air out their long, long trachea, and out of a small opening, which is actually their larynx,” says researcher Liz von Muggenthaler. “And that is creating a sound.”

Giraffes communicate infrasound, which is far beneath our own hearing, and they produce this by throwing back their heads. “What this is doing is opening up the larynx so that air can pass freely through,” she says. “If you could hear it, it would sound like a great burst of air: PSSH.”
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