HIV Successes and Space Launch Failures

HIV Successes and Space Launch Failures May 3, 2015

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Here’s what I’ve been covering at FiveThirtyEight this past week (and, coming up this week, I’ve got a piece in the works that gives me the chance to mention rinderpest!)

 

The U.K.’s New At-Home HIV Test Is Better Than Anything We Have In The U.S.

In the U.K., checking your HIV status is now nearly as easy as taking a pregnancy test. BioSure UK has begun selling a $45 take-home HIV test that lets customers prick their fingers, smear the blood on a testing stick, and get their HIV results within 15 minutes.

BioSure’s test goes beyond any of the at-home tests available on the U.S. market, which are either not as fast or not as accurate.

Read more at FiveThirtyEight….

My favorite part of covering this story was reading up on how the US and the UK try to estimate the number of undiagnosed HIV positive people.  It’s hard to figure out a reliable way of counting the undercounted, and the studies I found used two different methods.

 

The Failed Space Station Supply Mission Comes As Space Transport Changes

This will be the first year that the majority of space station cargo flights are launched by private companies. Four of the remaining seven cargo supply missions scheduled for 2015 are slotted for privately owned ships. The other flights will be made by two Russian Progress ships and one Japanese HVT.

Read more at FiveThirtyEight…

This is one of the kinds of pieces I researched and wrote to answer a question that was puzzling me: is it weird that there were two failed ISS cargo launches within a year?


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