HIV Treatment as HIV Prevention: This was the biggest and most hopeful AIDS news in some time. Check out our interview on what the new study results could mean for Africa. And here’s a story we ran last year, from South Africa, that also explores the strategy of treating HIV to prevent the virus’s spread.

Obama’s Global Health Initiative: Early in his presidency, Barack Obama announced a new Global Health Initiative to combat disease in the developing world. Two years later, the effort appears disorganized, ill-defined, and lacking clear progress, according to this in-depth and welcome investigation by reporter John Donnelly for GlobalPost.

Conflict in Cote d’Ivoire Disrupts Polio Eradication Drive: Yet more bad news from a country in turmoil. Read this news report from IRIN, the UN’s source of humanitarian news.

WHO Considers Fate of Smallpox: And you thought that smallpox had been eradicated. Not quite. Nature looks at the debate over what to do with stored virus samples.

Angela Merkel Champions Green Energy: An unexpected political turn by the German chancellor is cheered by environmentalists. Read this fascinating story by Christian Schwägerl at Yale Environment 360.

UK Fungi Redraw Evolutionary Tree: It’s amazing how much work taxonomists have yet to do. As reported in Nature, a discovery in a British pond could upset scientists’ understanding of fungal evolution.

Bedbugs and Drug-resistant Bacteria: Two of my least favorite things team up against us. As reported by AP.

Ambassador for Clean Cookstoves: In case you were wondering why Julia Roberts graces this week-in-review post, the Hollywood star has been named global ambassador by the Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, according to this U.S. State Department news release. Why appoint an Academy Award-winning actress to teach about the dangers of dirty cook stoves in the developing world? Because stars draw media attention, of course. and in my case the ploy worked! Her appointment also gives me an excuse to point you to Rhitu Chatterjee’s excellent story last year about efforts to clean up cook stoves in India. (The story was also featured on Science Podcast #80.)

Enjoy the weekend!

David Baron is the health & science editor at The World.

(Photo: flickr image by David Shankbone.)

This week: Plato’s writings contain hidden meanings and musical structures.  Big news about AIDS prevention efforts in Africa.  Colombian scientists mount an attack on a nasty mealybug that’s devouring Thailand’s cassava crop.  (Their weapon – a wasp that feasts on the pest.)  Also in today’s show: finch songs in cities, the Planck telescope, and leaf-cutter ants. And don’t forget to stop by our online conversation about the origins of kindness with Israeli science historian Oren Harman.

Epiphany on Plato and Music: The writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato are cryptic and often end in riddles. Few Plato scholars claim to know precisely what the philosopher thought, but now a professor at Britain’s University of Manchester believes he has cracked a code hidden in Plato’s writings. Jay Kennedy is an expert on Greek mathematics and music theory. He talks about the epiphany he had as he was poring over his volumes of Plato one day.
Guest: Jay Kennedy
More on Plato’s writings

Hopeful News for AIDS Prevention: A new AIDS study suggests that there’s a way to encourage people to avoid the risky behavior that helps spread HIV. It involves paying them. A second study reports the development of a vaginal gel that offers protection against the virus.
Guest: David Wilson
More on the payment study by the World Bank.
The New York Times on the new AIDS studies.

Cassava Sting Operation: A team of Colombia-based scientists is mobilizing to stop a mealybug infestation from destroying the cassava crop in Thailand. To counter the pests, scientists are releasing hundreds of thousands of wasps.
Guest: Tony Bellotti, International Center for Tropical Agriculture
National Geographic’s take on the story (nice pictures here).

Elsa’s Favorite Science Stories:

• Finches Songs in Cities: City noise isn’t a bother for human ears only. Birds seem to be bothered by it too. A new study shows that house finches change the frequency of their songs to adjust to noises in urban environments.
  The Study.
  More about birdsong and city noise
  Check out pictures of Darwin’s finches on our Facebook page.
• Leaf-cutter Ants Weed Out Leaf Fungi: Leaf-cutter ants are famous for their farming prowess. These ants, which live in Central and South America, grow crops of fungi in their nests by feeding the fungi leaves harvested from plants. (See photo of ants returning to their nest with fungi food.) It turns out that these six-legged farmers are more sophisticated than scientists had realized. When the ants go looking for leaves to cut, they avoid harvesting leaves that already harbor fungi, which might compete with the fungi in their nest.
• The Study.
  Video and background about leaf-cutter ants and their fungus gardens, from PBS.

• The Planck Telescope Is Up and Running: And it has sent its first image of background microwave radiation. (That’s all the radiation left over from the Big Bang.) Scientists hope to learn more about the beginnings of the universe from future images.
  More about the Planck Mission from the European Space Agency
  Another version of the map with some landmarks labeled
  Further explanation of the image, from the Bad Astronomy blog
  Pick your own wavelength with Chromoscope

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I’ve been doing this podcast for a long time now (four and half years, give or take an episode), and it never fails. The best, most original parts of the show are always suggested by you, the listeners. So, hats off to long-time WTP fan Gabor Kovacs, who not only sends along great story ideas from time to time, but also hosts Electrical Language, his own indie music podcast. Gabor sent me an email earlier this week, and told me to look into Embrace, a low-cost incubator made from phase change materials. The idea, as you can see, is to create a kind of sleeping bag for a low-birth-weight or premature baby. The bag is designed to hold a constant, warm temperature for four hour stretches. This can greatly improve the chances for the baby’s survival. Twenty million low-birth-weight babies are born each year, mostly in rural areas in the developing world that don’t have access to high-end incubators. Hence, the hope that the Embrace could help. We catch up with Linus Liang, one of the co-founders of the non-profit. Listen in to find out how the technology works, and how the field testing is going in India.

Our other big story this week also overlaps the boundaries of tech, science and public health. Researchers in Thailand have reported an AIDS vaccine trial which seems to show, for the first time ever, the prevention of infection. The results are modest, but it is spurring hope for a more effective vaccine to combat HIV/AIDS. I would be remiss if I didn’t include news like this in the podcast, in my humble opinion.

Then, on to worms…Scottish worms to be precise. Scientists are, wait for it, doing a worm census in Scotland. Why? Well, it turns out that those little earth engineers just might be able to tell us the effects of climate change on our environment. We speak with one of the Roy Neilson, one of the scientists involved in The Great Scottish Worm Count.

And we end with a cell phone symphony in Mumbai that was “conducted” by German soundartist Hans Koch and “performed” by, well, the audience. We couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried, could we?

Remember, we’re on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed.

DDT Controversy in Uganda: The U.S. government and the World Health Organization are encouraging African countries to spray DDT to kill malarial mosquitoes. But in some countries, this plan to protect the public has caused a public backlash.
Report: By Alison Hawkes in northern Uganda.

DDT: Poison or Protector? How toxic is DDT for humans? And how effective is it at killing mosquitoes? Is it possible to balance concern for the environment with the desire to fight malaria?
Guest: Entomologist May Berenbaum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Berenbaum is also our guest in The World’s interactive science forum. Join us for an online conversation about DDT, malaria, and the delicate balance between competing risks. Ask questions, and share your views and ideas.

Traditional Healing in Senegal: Throughout Africa, many people rely on traditional healers. Western medical care is often unavailable or too expensive, and many Africans don’t believe that Western medicine works.
Report: By Jori Lewis in Senegal.

Reforesting Ghana: Over the past century, Ghana has lost 80 percent of its forest. Now, a British firm is launching a project to plant 24 million trees in that West African nation. The idea: to get big polluters to pay for the forests as part of a carbon trading scheme.
Report: By BBC environment correspondent David Shukman, in Ghana.

Elsa’s weekly favorites:

• A new HIV strain jumps from gorillas to humans. (The study.)
• Malaria came to us from the great apes, too– from chimpanzees, to be precise. (The study.)
• Four-thousand-year-old gourds bear traces of a prehistoric Peruvian feast. (The study.) (Here’s a recipe for modern algarrobina cocktails– but you might have to make your own carob syrup.)
• Orchids imitate bees to dupe wasps. (The study.)
  Photo by Song Xi-qiang

Music:
Africa Must Be Free By 1983, by Hugh Mundell
Gossando, Star Band de Dakar